Uri Kogan

This is an interesting one. In my last company, I joined as the first PMM. In my first meeting with the product team, I spent a fair bit of time explaining the role of PMMs and what we do — how we connect the market to the goals of the organization, and the product back to the market. That helped PMs understand when and how to engage with PMM. In that instance, the company was also undertaking a shift from selling to developers -- an audience PMs knew well -- to business buyers. It was definitely a journey over a period of time to bring back market insight, customer questions and requirements, analyst feedback, competitive intelligence, and so on. And, as with any human relationship, you have to nurture it -- get to know people, try to spend time with them, break bread with them (hard in a virtual world today). If they like you and feel listened to, they will open up.

From my experience, it's usually product that is doing much of this prioritization, rather than PMM. What I've seen that PMM can do to help is two-fold: 1. Themes. Product knows the product so well, it's very easy for them to get lost in the nuances and intricacies of how different features might or might not be easy to implement in a particular order. But this is a constraint, rather than the critical prioritization framework, which should be market-driven. So help product create a market-driven prioritization framework, by thinking about the important themes that will reinforce and improve you company's positioning over time. Be a consistent advocate for putting priorities into those themes, and scrutinizing especially skeptically those items that don't have a theme at all. 2. Take the view of the voiceless customer. Your question asks about customers and prospects, but not future prospects in future segments. Make sure you're think about them, too, because likely no one else in the business is. It's very easy in B2B SaaS to let your feature backlog get wrapped around the finger of your most important customers. But unless these customers are also representative of the customers you need to grow to your next milestones, they could be leading you astray. So don't forget about the customers who don't have a voice at all!

A customer advisory board can be a great way to capture high level roadmap feedback from your most important customers. But to my mind, it's main value lies elsewhere: in giving your most important customers the feeling (and reality) that they are being heard not just by a CSM or a sales rep, but by the executive team; in giving your customers a chance to hear from each other, which validates their individual decision to be your customers and often also cross-pollinates ideas / use cases / product upsell conversations.

I have seen it go both ways. It really depends on the relative strength of the product and product marketing teams. Product marketing, though, is probably the best positioned part of the business to be a voice for segments of the market and the future customers that don't already have a voice in your business. It's the customers who aren't prospects yet, the markets you haven't entered. In my experience there are plenty of voices speaking for bug fixes and feature enhancements for existing products at existing customers -- Customer success is usually the loudest voice for this. The sales team speaks loudly for competitive features that are causing their prospects to turn to competitors. And implementation teams are very vocal about the problems in the product that make it harder to get up and running. Product can get bogged down in triaging these endless requests and demands. Product marketing has a great opportunity to speak for the voiceless "customer of the future". The other area where product marketing can help is in synthesizing competitive features to better understand your product's current competitive position, and the opportunities (or perils) of potential product changes. 

In B2B SaaS, the roadmap is an important sales tool. Buyers aren't just buying a tool, they're buying into your company's strategy for the future, and the roadmap you communicate to prospects and customers is the best way to articulate that. I like to work backwards from this, and ask myself, what do we want to communicate about our company through the roadmap? It might be about specific features that make your product better, or potentially new products you're working on. But the most important thing you want the roadmap to highlight is the themes of your innovation. For example, if you're an AI-centric company, your roadmap should probably have one or more themes that reinforce why your AI will continue to be the best. If "performance at scale" is a key selling point, how does your roadmap reinforce that? If you can identify the themes -- often closely related to the work you're doing on positioning -- and bring those to your discussions about roadmap with product management, you'll be adding a lot of value to their product and feature centric thinking, and they will (hopefully) be very grateful for the help. Just remember...the roadmap is a selling tool, not just for internal alignment.

Based on the question, it sounds to me like your product management team isn't thinking very strategically. Perhaps they're not close enough to customers, or they're too close to a select few, who have taken over the roadmapping process for their own needs. I'd encourage you to try to translate the company's strategy and positioning into themes, and talk to product leadership about what the key areas of innovation are that will make the company successful over time. Product knows as well as any team in the company that sprints are one of the most precious resources in the business. Help them see that they have to strike a deliberate balance between blocking and tackling the basics and investing for the longer term objectives of the business. Make sure they're getting in front of sources of information that they don't usually hear from. Maybe bring them along to a conference, or send them articles or your notes from a talk. If they're aren't typically on sales calls, bring them along or send them recordings of key bits you heard that influenced you thinking. I haven't met a product team that *isn't* interested in doing important work. It's just sometimes hard to see the forest for the trees. Make sure you're pulling your PMs out of the weeds and remind them of the larger picture, and 9 times out of 10, they will thank you.

This is such a great question. It's not easy. The best way, which is not always (rarely?) possible, is to have enough knowledge and market intelligence to identify the ways two segments are different that it becomes evident that serving both isn't practical. For example, let's say your product solves a problem that both medium and enterprise-scale companies could benefit from, but you believe that medium-size companies are the right segment to focus on for now. What makes enterprise not worth going after? Do they have more complex intergration requirements? Security protocols? Customization requirements? If you can figure out the dimensions that make it challenging to serve both segments, you'll have a better shot at showing product that an everything-and-everyone strategic isn't focused enough to drive success.

This can definitely be a challenge, depending on the relationship between PM and PMM. There are a number of approaches that can help. 1. If you have had a prior launch that didn't go as perfectly as everyone hoped, have a conversation with them about some of the challenges that, easy to see in retrospect, limited the success of the effort. Highlight points of disconnection between PM and PMM that led to feature or design choices that didn't hit the nail of the hed because PM lacked the understanding of the target buyer that you had at the time. 2. Make sure PM sees you as a value-added contributor to that process. Do you have industry knowledge or customer data or relationships that shed light on some of the decisions they need to make up front? If you make their job easier, they'll happily invovle you.