Ting Ting Luo

I want to start with this question because I think it will be the most comprehensive in answering how I think about this area of PMM work. To me, there are two different pieces of driving insights - gathering the fact-base, and synthesizing the insights into recommendations. I’ll break down each: Fact-base I like to think about insights that drive roadmap decision in four buckets: market, competitive, and Sales/ CS, and direct from customer. Depending on the company and the type of product, thes ...Read More

The great thing about the PMM role is that it's exposed to both the product, the commercial teams, and the customers. I find that powerful synthesis of what you're hearing from teams to be the most impactful way to communicate customer need, and drive the roadmap. Formal channels: 1-1 sync with your PM, where ideally customer needs and market reception is a topic that gets discussed Roadmap planning meetings, where repeated patterns of customer need, competitive pressure, and market reception ca ...Read More

To get involved in the early stages of Product development, I recommend PMMs bring a POV from the market that can shape the product. Some questions at the early stages of development might be: What is the segment of customers this product is built for? What are some alternatives available for customers for this product? What are some dynamics of the market (e.g. are there many players? or is the market very consolidated) What are some gaps from current alternatives in the market? What do their c ...Read More

To influence the roadmap, PMMs should bring valuable insights about the market, competition and customer to the table. With a more technical product, it is possible that a deeper technical expertise is needed to have a valuable perspective on moving the roadmap forward. In my experience, user and customer input (sometimes it’s a technical persona) can be just powerful to drive the product roadmap decision. Some examples of this could be: Sales call clips that mention a specific problem, which ca ...Read More

I love this question. I think the answer depends on the broader business context of your company. Are you working on a product that has strong market share and is extracting value from the market? Or are you at a startup disrupting an existing market? At the latter, I'd expect that there is a lot more appetite, and cultural momentum to define innovation opportunities. Companies always have to balance satisfying existing customers and making new bets to win the market. The business, from the foun ...Read More

It's hard to give a very specific answer without more context on the company. I’d first observe the types of perspectives are often represented in roadmap mapping conversations. For example: is your company often relying on recent lost deals to drive the roadmap, it’s likely too myopic in the way it’s thinking about the roadmap. At the same time, if your product team is only looking at larger industry trends, there isn’t enough concreteness in the insights that corresponds to why your company sh ...Read More