Monty Wolper

A strong VOC program has the potential to illuminate customer priorities before they become challenges, so consistency and accessibility are key. A few suggestions: * Dedicate a certain amount of your team’s time to this program, even if it’s as simple as committing to 1 customer interview or call a week. * Provide opportunities for stakeholders to hear from customers directly, whether that means listening in on support calls, monitoring chats, participating in interviews and focus groups, or joining sales calls. * Develop case studies, featuring them in materking materials but also distributing them internally, to humanize your customers for those who aren’t in a position to hear from them directly. * Create a centralized knowledge hub for customer insights, collating interviews, NPS or CSAT scores, feature requests, social listening trends, website behaviors, product usage, etc. * Turn these insights into an action plan: identify trends and common themes, visualize those, and develop scalable personas that allow your teams to rally around who it is that you’re building for and selling to. * Identify other customer champions throughout the organization who can help you ingrain a customer-centric mindset into the company culture. A big part of PMMs role is storytelling, which you can (and should!) be doing internally as well as externally. Think about ways in which you can surface the latest VOC insights, whether it’s via an internal newsletter or spotlights during company-wide meetings, plugging them in where relevant, sharing broadly, and often.

The first step here is often the most easily overlooked: understand the product team’s goals, so you can figure out how to position and prioritize your projects in a mutually beneficial way. Secondly, you’ll want to level set on the company strategy before honing in on the product roadmap in a particular area. Once you’ve done that, you can start outlining the market opportunity, identifying the target audience, developing solution-level GTM strategies, and helping partner teams understand how to uniquely position the company to meet market demands in a differentiated way. This empowers you with a clear framework you can reference when making a business case for new product initiatives. Just like you, your PMs will be more motivated when they understand how their work drives broader company goals. From a more tactical standpoint, you’ll be able to influence much more effectively if you lean on both quantitative and qualitative data. Without this, you’re just advocating for subjective beliefs as opposed to objective facts. Represent the voice of the customer by leveraging sales feedback, support requests, and interviews. Paint a picture of the market, mapping out the competitive landscape to highlight trends and identify user needs. Product Managers are problem solvers — demonstrate that there is a real problem to be solved by tapping into the vast amounts of user data at your disposal. Even if you do all of the above to make a strong business case, you never know how your hypothesis will play out once you go to market. I always recommend working with PMs to outline a validation plan, implementing milestones that present learning opportunities along the way, so you can adjust the trajectory accordingly. In doing so, you’ll build strong habits around influencing the roadmap regularly, rather than viewing it as a one off event.

When evaluating what products to prioritize, you’ll want to consider several factors: 1. Mission Alignment: Does this addition to the product portfolio support the company’s mission, and what you’re trying to accomplish? 2. Opportunity Size: What’s the TAM? Will this product expand the addressable market by solving customer needs in adjacent or new markets? Does it expand your value proposition for existing customers, driving upsell and/or retention? Or does it close a competitive gap? 3. Business Impact: What’s the primary objective of this product initiative? Which topline KPIs will this move the needle on for the business? 4. Customer Impact: Will this addition to the existing product portfolio address a distinct customer need, pain point, or expectation? Is it something they’ve been asking for? Does it increase the perceived value of your product and/or make it stickier? 5. T-Shirt Size: Is this an XS or XL effort? How much time do you estimate the build will take, and does the team have the capacity for it? Matrix the value against the complexity — less complex efforts that provide greater value are your sweet spot. Whether you’re part of the product organization or not, try to approach prioritization as a partnership versus a transactional request process. This will allow you to evaluate the proposals potential more holistically, and bring your product stakeholders along on the decision making journey.

Ideally, any roadmap shared with your sales team would be owned and presented by PMM. The sales team doesn’t just need to understand when a product will be released, but when they’ll be enabled to sell it effectively. PMMs can leverage release timelines to craft a market-ready roadmap based on the GTM strategy. Here are some ways in which a market-ready roadmap may differ from a product one: * Bundled releases that deliver greater customer value, when most relevant (i.e. factoring in seasonality) * Solution or persona based sales plays, that tag each release by target segment * Sufficient lead time for GTM enablement and support requirements * Marketing campaigns/activities that will be leveraged to boost the launch, making more noise in market around tentpole moments

I’m so glad to have been asked this question, because I’ve been fortunate enough to lead teams through acquisitions at almost every company I’ve worked at. In order to effectively integrate the newly acquired company into yours, you’ll need to understand what drove the acquisition: was it a strategic, product or acqui-hire? It sounds like your question is referring to a product buy. In that case, you’ll need to develop a deep understanding of the new product itself, as well as the audience, so you can identify overlaps with your current portfolio. Once you’ve understood the target buyer, you can figure out where in your segmentation strategy and messaging this new addition fits in, so that it becomes part of a holistic solution. There’s of course a human element to this, and in my experience, the integration of company cultures can either make or break the acquisition. Making your newest team members feel as though they are part of your company is critical. Invest time in getting to know each other as individuals so you can build these new relationships on a strong foundation, which will pay dividends in the long-run. While it takes significant effort and time, embedding these new employees into existing teams, processes and workflows goes a long way. It also ensures that the two product teams can identify synergies between their areas. Once they’re bought into how their products can work together to better meet the needs of customers, and differentiate the company in market, they’ll be motivated to unblock cross-team dependencies that arise. This is an exciting time because it presents both teams with opportunities to drive more entry points to their products, and tap into a larger addressable market. One team, one dream.

While the impact of shifts in company strategy and product roadmaps can materialize in similar ways day-to-day, the altitude at which they need to be addressed differs. In both cases, however, you’ll need to understand what’s at the root of the change. Most companies I’ve worked at set long-term goals (think 10+ year vision) and short term goals (think focus for the next 1-3 years). Things can shift more regularly on that shorter time horizon, as teams take a flexible approach to tactics used to deliver on their goals. As long as the company vision remains as a north star, I’d expect the daily/weekly/monthly changes to be adjustments as opposed to a complete shift in direction. However, if the company's long-term strategy has yet to be solidified, there are bigger questions that need to be addressed at a leadership level before individual product teams can be set up for success. You’d be surprised by how much less volatile the product roadmap will be if there’s a steady, and clearly communicated company strategy in place. OKRs are a great way to ensure company-wide alignment and hold teams accountable for making progress towards that north star. While objectives remain constant longer, KRs can be adapted on a quarterly basis to refine the approach. Helping your PMs understand GTM dependencies, and working with them to set shared KRs can help avoid some of that back and forth it sounds like you’re experiencing. If your roadmap is still constantly shifting despite having this type of structure in place, it may be due to poor processes, unrealistic scoping, or inappropriate resourcing to deliver on the plan. If you have a project manager who can help with this, you’ll want to work with them on resetting that. If you’re part of a leaner team, you’ll want to partner directly with your PM.

Positioning and messaging are different, but tightly intertwined. There hasn’t been a time where I’ve done one without the other. Positioning statements are an internal framework used to identify what’s unique about a product. As the name suggests, this informs how a product is positioned and therefore perceived. Messaging is the words used to convey that unique value to customers. It's the mechanism by which the positioning statement comes to life in a compelling way. It’s important to start by crafting a positioning statement because there is no basis for a messaging strategy without it. First, it’s helpful to establish what sets your product apart before you can clearly articulate to customers why it’s uniquely positioned to benefit them. A positioning statement should cover: what you’re selling (the product), who it’s for (the target audience), what problem it’s solving (the need or opportunity), why they should care (key benefits), and how it’s better than alternatives (the competition). Once these positioning statements are established, you can begin translating them into clear and concise messaging that compels customers to take action.

Feedback loops across various sources allow PMMs to learn what works, what doesn’t, and where we need to improve our message so it “hits home.” Continue leveraging the aforementioned qualitative and quantitative methods for message testing as channels for ongoing feedback collection as well. I’d recommend supplementing the learnings gathered through these channels with sentiment monitoring across social media, review sites and press coverage. Another often underutilized resource is the customer-facing teams within your organization. Customer support agents and sellers hear directly from dozens if not thousands of customers on a daily basis. Use this immense wealth of knowledge they build up over time to your advantage by finding ways to incorporate their insights and reporting into any feedback loop systems you establish. Once you’ve compiled feedback across all of these sources, look for patterns and trends in your findings and map out an action plan accordingly. Implement those new plans, test, and measure again. It’s called a feedback loop for a reason.

Message testing should take place during strategy development, and again when going to market. You can leverage qualitative methods to gather open ended feedback on messaging directions, and quantitative methods to make statistically significant decisions between your options. I often start with a qualitative approach, conducting interviews or focus groups to understand what sort of messaging appeals to my target audience. What I’m assessing at this stage is clarity, value, relevance, appeal, differentiation, timeliness, and urgency. I’ll use those findings to write messaging that simultaneously leads with emotion and is built on logic. Once I’ve narrowed down the options, I’ll run a survey or experiment to confirm the messaging hypothesis at scale. You can also take the opposite approach, depending on the resources you have at your disposal, starting with a survey or poll to customers asking about their experience with your messaging and then follow up with more in-depth interviews, focus groups and user tests to get at the why behind some of the trends that emerged in the survey results. Other useful quantitative testing methods for when you go to market include on-site behavior analysis and A/B testing across channels, including web, email, and paid, which can be continually optimized for the most performant variant. Don’t forget to revisit your messaging framework and update it according to the learnings you collected in-market.

Lead with the why. Your messaging framework should be rooted in the positioning statement, which speaks to the problem you’re trying to solve, who you’re solving it for, how you’re solving it, and why you’re uniquely positioned to do so. Once you’re clear on that, you can summarize it in customer friendly language. What’s the most important thing you want customers to take away from your message? This is your key message, around which the rest of the framework can be built. Your key message should be rooted in benefit to the customer, and supported by benefit oriented messaging pillars that further substantiate your key message. I’ve personally found that harnessing the power of three messaging pillars works best, because it gives you enough room to address the breadth of benefits your product offers, but is still simple enough for customers to remember. After nailing your messaging, you can figure out which benefit each product feature ladder up to, making it true. Often, a single feature will support multiple benefits, in which case you can either choose to align that feature to the benefit it’s most closely associated with, or include it more than once. It’s also helpful to think beyond features when considering proof points that back up the claims being made in your messaging. Proof points can take the form of customer testimonials, case studies, data points, and more.