How to win friends and influence Product
4 tactical tips for bringing Product Managers and Product Marketers closer together
👋 Heya! It’s Alicia. Welcome to Finding Customer Focus - a newsletter to help you accelerate growth by putting your customers at the heart of your business.
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I was recently chatting with someone on Twitter (what’s up Tom 👋) about how product marketers can build a strong relationship with Product Managers. It wasn’t until late in my career that I realized this can be a common point of tension.
In the spirit of last week’s post on the overlap between Product Managers and Product Marketers, I wanted to expand on this topic a bit more. So without further ado, let’s dive into how you can balance the needs of Product through four key PMM-led feedback loops.
Here are the 4 key feedback loops to bring PMs and PMMS closer together:
1. Create communication channels for close, targeted dialogue
In completing my B Corp certification course last month, a piece of wisdom stuck with me. Adie Kaye, President of Products and Marketing at Ramborn, advised that we must always “lean into limits and use constraints to drive creativity.”
This applies to influencing Product teams, too.
Whether you’re a team of 50 or 5,000, silos happen. They just do. This results in teams often feeling excluded or irrelevant to the direction your product or company are going. To add value to the product planning process, answer one question:
“How can I help everyone to feel represented and considered right now?”
It's easy for people to feel like all the important conversations are happening around you - especially in big companies or remote jobs. This can exacerbate a feeling of distance between teams, or across markets, and push you further away from customers. And yet, these are the same people you often need to successfully launch a product and drive its long term adoption.
How are you going to keep your finger on the pulse of their feedback and sentiment consistently over time? How are you going to keep the needs of your smallest, quietest voices top of mind when you’re feeling the heat to hit commercial targets?
I’ve found a lot of value in creating audience-specific Slack channels for key stakeholders across the business. Instead of creating one centralized space for everyone to communicate, breaking the spaces down into sub-segments can help to open up the lines of communication and make people feel listened to. Regardless of geographic market, global role type, etc, this is a great way to cultivate close relationships with your most important stakeholders-- no matter the distance.
From those channels, you can keep dialogue continuous and request feedback from commercial, marketing, and operations stakeholders.
I also love hosting monthly optional Office Hours sessions for each market or audience that I really care about.
For us at Deliveroo, that means one 45-minute session a month with each of our 12 markets. I started these sessions in 2019 as a way for me to better understand the teams running the show across UK, EU, and APAC geographies. And ultimately, this turned into my product’s Go-To-Market strategy that resulted in 1 million incremental orders after the first 12 months and marked improvement to SMB partner satisfaction.
I built dialogue with these folks, which in turn built trust. When you build trust, that’s when the raw, nuanced feedback comes through - on customer perceptions of value, common objections, and the hard truth about whether or not your product solves real customer problems.
I can almost guarantee that few people in the business are doing this, and fewer people are feeding this back into Product Management.
2. Ye Olde ‘Voice of the Stakeholder’ Report
Every quarter, I run a Voice of Commercial survey where I ask our market POCs to stack rank what they believe to be the most important priorities for the quarter.
The options consist of the shortlisted functionality the Product Manager is considering to build (the short list itself is informed by more long-term customer feedback loops). The aggregated results of this survey help the PM to understand how urgent certain product improvements are beyond the anecdotal opinions picked up along the way.
In my pilot ‘Voice of the Stakeholder’ survey, I had 67 responses in <24 hours just from promoting the survey via my audience-specific Slack channels mentioned above, and one email sent to Heads of Marketing and Heads of Account Management. The results directly informed our PM’s thinking around what to build, and forced conversation on who we were building for. By the next quarter, I had 125 responses. And after that, 190. It really worked!
3. Complete the feedback loop - share the results widely
Aggregating qualitative and quantitative feedback is only half the battle.
The real magic happens when you prove that you, and Product, are listening. Let’s say you successfully change product roadmap priorities or product design thinking based on the voice of your customers or stakeholders. It’s important to let your customers and stakeholders know a) that it happened and b) that we rely on them to make better customer experiences.
One way that you can do that is by sharing the results of the Voice of the Stakeholder in a basic slide deck (does not need to be pretty). Helping our stakeholders to understand and visualise how their feedback aggregates across markets, aligns with or contradicts the feedback from other markets, helps to reduce the friction around feeling out of the loop, and makes explaining the upcoming chosen priorities a bit easier to comprehend.
Share your survey results (along with any noteworthy engagement stats like # of responses) with the original audiences you surveyed.
4. Host Quarterly Priorities & Feedback Sessions
Once you’ve worked with your PM to incorporate your customer and stakeholder insights into the upcoming quarterly roadmap, you can bring it all to life. Host an optional call and invite everyone from sales/marketing associates all the way up to GMs---whoever is most relevant to your respective customers, and on the frontlines of the customer experience.
Share an agenda beforehand. Example:
Purpose: Ensure <Product>’s upcoming priorities are communicated to the X and Y teams. Ensure the priorities are informed by direct feedback from the people who sell <Product> to customers.
60 mins to:
- Share what the product team has prioritised for Q2
- Share results of internal survey on what needs to be prioritised
- Listen to market feedback on these priorities, what should be considered pre-build
- Feedback an Q&A on what's worked well and what needs to be improved
Presentation Deck: XXX
**Important note:**
We want to ensure we are leveraging the voice of our local markets in Q2's work, but if this meeting conflicts with more important work, skip it and listen later. It will be recorded. If you can make the time, please do contribute your honest feedback during the session.
Create a presentation deck that both summarizes your success and failures over the last quarter (transparency is critical), and introduces the upcoming goals for the next quarter. Talk about the tradeoffs that were made to land on the chosen priorities (ex. ‘We know a lot of people ranked X improvement as the highest priority but Y improvement will drive 3x impact for our customers, or fundamentally makes their lives easier’).
By creating these decks every quarter, you create a paper trail of global communication and you have a recorded session where you can point people to moving forward.
Allow at least 15-20 minutes of your session to be spent answering questions and listening to concerns around the chosen priorities. When the session is over, summarise all of the feedback with action items and loop in your PM / engineering leads so again you have a paper trail of the dots connecting between teams. Link the deck, the recording, and ‘Voice of the Stakeholder’ results, and any pertinent docs.
Rinse and repeat
Repeating this process every quarter will not solve the problem of siloed workstreams, but it will help global teams feel valued and heard, and it will ensure you are delivering fresh value to your Product pals with immediate impact. Better together, eh?
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