Mike Flouton

The product marketing part of the typical career is pretty straight forward. Generally, you will start as a Product Marketing Manaer. In larger orgs, you may take on a Sr. Product Marketing Manaer or Principal Product Marketing Manager title as you become more of a senior individual contributor. Director is next, which may be an IC or your first management role. In larger orgs, the directors may all roll up to a VP of Product Marketing.    What's maybe less obvious is what comes before and after ...Read More

This is a great question. I've been using some variant of cost-adjusted impact scoring to prioritize roadmaps for over 20 years now. Every market, buyer, product and strategic context is different, so there's no one size fits all methodology. RICE is an example of one popular approach, but I prefer something more tailored for the specific situation. Essentially, as an organization we will pick 3-5 outcome measures according to the needs of the business. Examples might be new business growth, chu ...Read More

This question is impossible to answer in the abstract. It depends entirely on where you are in the technology adoption lifecycle. If you haven't read "Crossing the Chasm" and "Inside the Tornado," go get them immediately and work your way through them. They are relatively short reads and timeless classics you will want to re-read throughout your career. As you will learn, at some points in the lifecycle you might focus 90% on new customers, at others 90% on your existing base (and no, it's not a ...Read More

I might have given you a very different answer to this question a year ago! I used to be paranoid about hiding my roadmap from my competitors, and would share broadly internally and with customers to maximize feedback, yet lock it down for everyone else. GitLab is the most transparent company I've ever worked for, and for the most part our roadmap is on our public website available to anyone. I can't tell you how liberating it is to be talking to a customer who has an obscure question about an a ...Read More

As a general rule, everyone should have input into the product roadmap. In fact, at GitLab our mission is to make it so that everyone can contribute and we apply the same principle here. A good product manager knows that listening to an idea, asking questions, and truly trying to understand it is in no way a commitment to implement it. So they don't shy away from this dialog, and in fact embrace it. Now, when it comes to doing the prioritization, we need to be market driven and not stakeholder d ...Read More

I know it's a cliche, but as PM you are CEO of the product. You shouldn't need guidance from the e-group. Their perspective can be useful, and they will bring knowledge and insights that can help you get to the right market driven insights. But you shouldn't outsource your job to them by relying on their guidance. If you're at a company with a new e-group that doesn't want to provide input into the roadmap, consider yourself lucky! This is your time to shine and show yourself as the market and c ...Read More

I'd first like to call attention to your last sentence - this is an issue with all of marketing, not just PMM. The CMO the the highest turnover spot on the exec team. There are two reasons IME. The bad news.  Marketing is an easy target when times are bad because many of the ways we are supporting the business are indirect. Product delivers stuff or it doesn't. Sales makes their number or they don't. When sales misses their numbers, they blame product and marketing. Product blames sales and mark ...Read More