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 joinin ...Read More

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 t ...Read More

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 y ...Read More

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) ...Read More

When evaluating what products to prioritize, you’ll want to consider several factors: Mission Alignment: Does this addition to the product portfolio support the company’s mission, and what you’re trying to accomplish? 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? Business Impact ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 b ...Read More

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, di ...Read More

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- ...Read More

As someone who didn’t start her career in product marketing and has since supported several internal transfers into PMM for perspective sharing and career growth, this question is near and dear to my heart. I can honestly say that some of the best PMMs I’ve hired and worked with have had very diverse backgrounds across sales, product, analytics, research, and marketing. PMM is an amalgamation of so many aspects of these roles, that experience in them often translates directly. It also helps you ...Read More