AMA: ManyChat Former Sr. Director Product Marketing and Content, Anna Wiggins on Influencing the Product Roadmap

It’s really important to understand your product’s team development process. How is the Product team structured and why? What and when are their sprint cycles. How do new tasks get on the backlog and how is the backlog prioritized. If possible, attend backlog prioritization meetings so you can understand what information PMs look at when making decisions. This will help you be much more strategic in how, when, and why you add on the backlog. Also it’s key to develop a close relationship with a few PMs so they can champion for you during the prioritization process.

This will depend on the type of business you are in. Hardware? Enterprise? These have longer development and sales cycles so the teams have to plan much further ahead vs. a self service model where products tend to ship faster. Also the maturity of the company will make a difference because Product teams at younger companies tend to have shorter foresight themselves because they are potentially still experimenting with product market fit. Taking into account the context of your world, apply a tiering system to the roadmap and estimate how long it takes for you to flawlessly execute a T1 launch - including localization if you are a global company. At a bare minimum, you need that much time. However ideally, you are meeting with your Product team each planning cycle to go over their plans, make your contributions and identify and align on key moments where you’ll really go big on marketing.

This goes back to your goals for running the alpha/beta and what kind of information you want to gather. In general I look for honest feedback on some of the following themes, but you’ll want to work closely with your PM partners to define specifics. 1. Does the product solve the right problem or in other words is this a problem the customer actually has? 2. Does the product actually solve the problem? If not, what would need to change. 3. Does the product meet customer’s expectations. If not, what did they expect and how should it be adjusted to meet them? 4. Does the customer enjoy using the product -- what are the pain points, what’s missing, what do they really like. 5. How would they describe what the product does and why they are using it. You can gather this feedback through qualitative interviews or ideally through a UX study so you can work out any kinks in usability. Usually participating in the alpha/beta tends to be a good incentive in itself since customers enjoy getting early access to tech. However you can also thank them with gift cards. If funds are an issue, you can get creative by offering access to a gated feature/plan, an hour with somebody from the leadership team, or free tickets to one of your events.

I answer a similar question further on, but at a high level a great way to preview the roadmap is part of annual or quarterly account health checks. In the past I’ve had a section in the sales deck. We’ve also recorded videos with our PMs covering high level plans because customers tend to really like hearing from the team that’s actually building the products they use and this gives the PMs an opportunity to celebrate their work. Some PMs also enjoy going on sales calls to directly experience customer reactions and this can be powerful in driving excitement. And of course, if your company hosts events/conferences this is also a great place to preview what’s coming for you in the coming year.

The first thing I would recommend is to understand your company’s definition and expectations for Product Marketing. Be prepared that it may be a narrow definition and as a result you may be seen as a service/support function vs. a strategic partner. It’s common for the first PMM to either become a jack of all trades or to just focus on the tactics of carrying out GTM instead of on the strategy behind it. I give a few pieces of advice on earlier questions for how to show value so that you are viewed as a thought partner. Another area you should focus is having a repeatable and scalable GTM process with playbooks and messaging frameworks - since in the beginning this will likely be a big portion of your day-to-day. Having this structure early on will prevent last minute scrambles so you have more time to take on more of the work that positions you as a partner.

I would start by understanding why it’s not seen as a priority - does this feature align with your overall product strategy? Perhaps this is an area that the company has made a conscious choice not to enter. However if this is simply a prioritization issue for the Product team, I suggest you quantify the impact. How many customers are asking for this and how many accounts or how much revenue are you losing by not having this option for your customers. Also, can you estimate if a customer adopting this feature would increase LTV? Once you have this information I recommend getting your Leadership team involved so you can have extra support in the prioritization conversation.

I’m going to assume that by data you mean customer research. In general, it’s difficult to drive a roadmap or any type of strategy without insights. However you don’t always have to do formal research to understand your customers and to make recommendations advocating for their needs. Some areas you can look at are your own data on user behavior and adoption patterns, popular customer support questions and trends, NPS software comments, feedback from your sales team, website interaction, engagement with your content, and finally ad performance so you can get a sense if a particular product/feature is resonating. It also helps to look at these things in concert so you see patterns that reinforce each other.

This would depend on your goals. Do you want to share the roadmap to get feedback or do you want to share the roadmap to give customers insight into your vision and upcoming plans. Also, think about what kind of expectations your customers have from you and what kind of expectations do you want them to have? In general, if you are in a sales based business, your customers will most likely expect to have regular access to this information. A great way to preview the roadmap is part of annual or quarterly account health checks. In the past I’ve had a section in the sales deck and we’ve also recorded videos with our PMs covering high level plans. If your company has a self-service model you probably have a group of vocal power users who have submitted feature requests and feedback. In this case, I recommend establishing some sort of a community space where you can share roadmap updates so they know you are taking their input seriously. And of course, if your company hosts events/conferences this is also a great place to preview what’s coming for you in the coming year.

I’m glad you are asking this question because this is exactly the right mindset you should have in a young Product Marketing org to avoid becoming solely a GTM service function. The path to this is through a mixture of education and showing value to the Product team. Something you should find out is why the Product Marketing team was created and who was the driver behind the creation. If the momentum came from outside of the Product team, the PMs likely won’t know how to work with Product Marketing and this will be an opportunity for you to educate and bring the full scope of what you can do to the table. If the momentum came from the Product team, you need to understand their definition and expectations for Product Marketing. If it doesn’t align with yours, understand where the gaps are and how you can work to close them over time. One other thing to keep in mind - I hear a lot that the path to showing value to Product Managers is through customer insights. However keep in mind that most PMs are already gathering customer insights. Usually it’s on a much smaller and perhaps disjointed scale. For example, they’ll talk to five customers in-depth about a particular feature and the notes live somewhere in their drive vs. available for other PMs to consume. So a quick way to add value is to gather, centralize, and make searchable customer findings PMs have collected over time as well as to conduct customer research at scale that can eventually be benchmarked.

This question becomes more about how you can influence your PM vs. the roadmap yourself. Without knowing your history or the nature of your relationship I would advise for you to focus on building trust with this person. Start by understanding his or her definition of product marketing and expectations from you. They may not have one because they haven’t worked with Product Marketing before and you’ll need to start by educating them on what PMK actually is in the context of your company. Find out what they need help with and deliver on that, consistently. Research? Competitive intelligence? A growth plan? First get into the groove with this person and then you’ll be able to influence.

As a rule, I like to work with existing tools the Product team uses to avoid adding overhead to their day. To communicate and collaborate we use the usual suspects: Slack, Notion, Asana, Google Slides, and live meetings. However a big focus for me was to establish a Research Hub - a centralized and searchable repository for customer insights so that PMs and Marketers could quickly make decisions because they had easy access to this information. Today this lives on Notion, but I could see us moving to a more specialized solution as we grow.

I think this question is relevant for all of us across all teams right now. And to be honest, I don’t have a good answer because in a lot of ways we are all still figuring out this new world. However here are some things that worked for our team: - Schedule 15 min Zoom coffee chats with PMs you don’t normally work with to stay connected. - Be present and active in PM slack channels. Goof around and show your personality when appropriate because when you are remote you lose the ability to get to know people through casual non-work related conversations - Get access to the roadmap in Airtable, Product Board or whatever tool the team uses, keep track of changes and ask questions. - Attend prioritization meetings -- even if you are a fly on the wall -- so that you have context for what was discussed.

Great question and tough but interesting situation. Ideally this research is not coming in right before launch and you have time to adjust. I would want to understand if as a result of the research we know what a compelling MVP would look like - ideally a few versions - and work with the PM team to scope out what it would take to implement different variants. Hopefully you can find a solution that is not materially different than the original scope and timelines for the project. The key way to position your conversation with the PM team is that you are advocating for the most meaningful experience for your customers and come to the conversation with options for the team to explore along with a recommendation that shows you’ve done the work in assessing impact to changing course.

ManyChat’s Marketing team is composed of Product Marketing, Content, Channel, and Events & Community teams. Product Marketing sits within the Marketing org and we all roll up to the CMO. We also have a cross-functional Growth task force composed of reps from Channel, Content and Product Marketing teams. I lead the Product Marketing and Content Teams.

Based on this question, I’m going to assume that your company doesn’t have a research function and that the account team holds the key to contacting customers. My first piece of advice would be to work on establishing a research function within the Product Marketing team so that you have constant and direct access to customers. If there is resistance from the Account Team, work to understand their concerns and show them tangible deliverables you’ll provide like battlecards. Second, automate as much data collection as possible so you have a steady stream of quantitative insights that you can benchmark against over time. This can be done through NPS programs that also collect comments or through simple trigger based surveys. However don’t forget to regularly collect qualitative feedback to bring color to the quantitative work - you can use major launches or sales cycle moments to anchor your calendar. Also, allocate budget so you can experiment with incentives to increase response rates. If funds aren’t available, get creative in finding what your customers would find valuable -- perhaps in exchange for their feedback they can have access to a gated feature, an hour with somebody from the leadership team, or free tickets to one of your events.

Since ManyChat is a younger company, we don’t yet have a lot of product lines that merit the traditional squad PM <> PMM structure. Today the Product Marketing team is structured based on target customer personas with each PMM also responsible for a functional area like research or competitive intelligence. As we grow, I could see us moving to the squad model. Also we are a global company with diverse english language proficiencies and as a result product marketers ended up acting as copy editors for the team. The most strategic hires I’ve made so far is a roster of copywriters who have taken on the editing so the PMMs can maximize the value they bring to our customers and PMs.

This depends on the nature of the conversation but in general our Product team expects us to come to the table with an educated, data based POV on how to approach a strategy or a problem. However, I would reframe the second part of your question. We are not delivering to our Product team, instead together with our Product team we are delivering to our customers. With this mindset we develop shared KPIs that help our customers find the value in our product -- eg drive X lift in adoption of Y -- and both teams have strategies that ladder up to achieving this goal.