How do you influence the product roadmap so that features and/or fixes stemming from VOC/customer feedback make it into the priority?

I view the role of PMM as a strategic partners to product management, and it's important to have this frame of mine when approaching product teams with learnings. Product Marketers are the voice and champion of the customer throughout the product development process. The best way I've found to do this throughout my career is owning customer and market insights. I've done this in a few different ways:

• Build a sales or customer feedback channel: Whether you purchase a feedback tool or create your own workflow via existing tools, it's important that product feedback from customers is captured. My advice to PMMs would be to identify if this channel exists, and if not, create this system within your organization. Feedback from sales or customers directly can then be used as an input into product planning and roadmap prioritization.
• Conduct customer insights research: Set a research and learning roadmap for each customer segment you have throughout the year and continuously share learnings with cross-functional product partners.
• Market Requirements Docs (MRDs): As mentioned in another question, MRDs provide product teams with market and customer insights to inform product development, resulting in higher quality products and programs that meet customer and market needs. This helps gain alignment on audience, value prop and market/customer needs before product projects even begin.
• Invest in analyst relationships and reports: Keeping up with the latest market trends and insights is part of the role of a strategic PMM. I recommend advocating for budget to stay up-to-date with analyst reports in your segments.

There are a few aspects to this. The first involves being proactive and enabling your team with insights ahead of time. The second involves bringing in other data/business rationale to round out your case as to why these user needs should be prioritized.

Enabling your team ahead of time

Think about ongoing customer feedback mechanisms you can set up. For example, weekly customer churn surveys, customer calls, sales feedback loops, VOC programs in conjunction with customer success, design and sales, etc. If you collect customer feedback as part of your normal BAU work and consistently share that back with the product team, then those insights become common knowledge and can more naturally influence the roadmap. It's much easier to influence proactively rather than trying to justify a project retroactively after it's already been added to the roadmap or make the case for a new initiative if the roadmap is already baked.

Making your case

Customer needs are important but their not the only thing you should use to influence getting projects into the roadmap. In addition to solving a customer need/addressing a gap in the product or market, projects also need to drive business impact. I like to think of this as finding the gap in the market and finding the market in the gap (the latter being the business opportunity/size). In addition you should consider level of effort/resources because that will be another important consideration for product.

If after constructing a great case grounded in customer feedback and strong business rationale you still can't influence the roadmap, then you can also try suggesting adding a project as an "experiment" or MVP to see if you can get additional signal beyond the existing customer feedback to help influence prioritization.

Customer needs and feedback are fundamental drivers of product strategy, prioritization, and roadmapping. It’s also important to align on goals for the business to ensure all teams are working toward the same outcomes. If product management is seeking to expand the addressable market while product marketing wants to increase penetration in an existing market - it will of course be more difficult to align on which feedback matters most! Once goals are aligned, framing specific customer feedback in terms of impact to the business can really help with influencing stakeholders and aligning priorities. Here are a few tactics that can assist:

• CSAT - Is the feedback significantly impacting customer satisfaction scores and can you demonstrate a trend of degrading CSAT based on specific features (or lack thereof) or bugs?
• NPS - Who are your top detractors in your net promoter surveys and what do they cite as top reasons for low scores? Can you tie detractors back to features / fixes? These top detractor drivers can also have brand and reputational implications.
• Churn - Is a lack of a feature or fix actually driving churn? It’s so helpful to survey customers who are churning - even with one open-ended question about why they are choosing to leave so you can start to identify patterns.
• Conversion - Are you trying to break into a new segment, for example, a new merchant category or size of business? If yes, try getting some quant intel on how important certain features are for driving incremental conversion within your target segments. If you can quantifiably tie key features to increased conversion, it will help teams coalesce around the importance of the work.

I saw this work really well at Asana with a VoC program, which was conducted on a quarterly basis and involved representatives across all “listening channels” at the company: Sales, CS, support, and PMM (which represented new market opportunities and competitors). The final deliverable was a consolidated list of feature requests ranked by pain level and frequency.

If that kind of large-scale program isn’t possible (Asana had a dedicated program manager who ran it), then I’d lean into data as much as possible here.

Conduct your own mini VOC and consolidate your findings. Ask Sales and CS to stack rank a list of their top customer requests, use tools like Productboard or Gong to quantify the volume of requests, leverage competitive research to surface gaps and opportunities.

When working with product, I’ve found that presenting requests as pain points, and preferably through actual customer quotes, is more effective than feature requests.