Collaboration between PMM and PM

Hi Stefan,

the collaboration between PMM and PM is indeed a special and interesting one. The way how our PMM person is working with productboard is basically driven by the roadmap and the tasks. We use different tasks that outline the product lifecycle and help us to structure the prep work for each feature.

Our PMM colleague is using a dedicated view that filters everything where the “Marketing” involvement tasks is being filled to pro-actively approach the individual product managers in case there is something planned that wasn’t discussed yet. Apart from that they’re having regular 1o1 session to plan the activities for feature rollouts or even EOL campaigns that we’re planning.

Additionally to this view our PMM person is using the roadmap simply to gain an overview what is planned over the next couple of weeks and months. If there would be something can is missing then capabilities to outline which concrete campaigns are planned and what is there current state.

If this would be in place we could draw a much better picture of the product lifecycle in particular during the rollout phase.

Best, Steven

Hi @Hannah ODonnell curious, what is your PMM hoping to get from Productboard? That would make it easier to provide ideas or suggestions. Given PMM is responsible for creating demand for products via positioning, messaging and marketing programs, some thoughts:

• You mentioned in part that they are interested in knowing what’s being released, maybe that’s something your product team could provide as a roadmap view for them when product feels they can commit to a date or more firm timeline? For example, our PMM team has a view like that but also uses Productboard to manage some of their GTM activities and the launch plan.
• Our PMMs leverage the feature description where our PMs capture the problem they are looking to solve and details on the solution and how it will address those problems.
• Our PMMs also can see which customers wanted these capabilities and their associated insights attached so they can use that to reach out to those who provided feedback and some of our early beta testers (when we have these) to capture insights from pre-release adopters to shape content and positioning understanding.
• Our PMMs also feed into Productboard ongoing insights and learnings from their market discovery work and share with our product team.

We don’t have an Asana integration today, but there have been folks here in our community that have built their own integrations using our API. You can also leave feedback on your needs here in our Portal card: https://portal.productboard.com/pb/1-productboard-portal/c/179-asana-integration

We had a similar issue and working to resolve it. The main issue was around Product availability. Our Product teams prefer a team-based hierarchy. So the top level is our product teams. However, the PMM team wants to see which of our products will be available at what time and in which conditions. The challenge was ensuring we have products available in each team and at the feature level. Some teams prefer to keep products at the component level, and some at the feature level. We standardised them and populated the columns that the PMM team requires. 

@Hannah ODonnell if you’re looking for notification options, your PMMs could follow features and you can use this approach to notify people via Slack when mentioned. Alternatively, you may be able to use our API and create something customized that feeds into Slack.

Hi @Stefan,

From the PMM and PM relation, I will say that all depends of how close you want that the PMM be part of your product lifecycle. In my experience, I have been working very close with the PMM since the Product Strategy Phase and then through the rest of the releases, growing strategies, etc. 

I think the only way to have a great GTM strategies and a continuous releases is by having your Product team very close (Product Manager, Team, Product Data Managers and Product Marketing Managers).

Let me know if you want to have a chat to go deeper into this analysis.

I would LOVE to have dedicated PMM in my team! We don’t currently have a dedicated one, however, I do use Productboard to plan communications with clients for all releases.

We have a special view for ‘plan to launch’ and it has fields that have our various comms channels (marketing email, social post, help centre etc.) and we decide whether something is needed or not and what status it is at (released, planned, not needed etc.). We then group our features by ‘doneness’ (in progress, ready to release, released etc.).