How Data Enhances Product Strategy Collaboration
Product, engineering, marketing, sales, and support all play pivotal roles in shaping product strategy. But coordination gaps can leave these teams without the vital information needed to support market research, product design, and development cycles.
Information needs to transcend departmental lines to inform an effective product roadmap and shape customer interactions for lasting loyalty. In this post, we’ll discuss how organizations are embracing interdepartmental collaboration to overcome data silos and align your product strategy with customers’ expectations.
Enable More Dynamic Product Development
Product roadmaps are the result of careful strategizing by product and engineering teams, shaped by customer needs and feedback. But to understand what those needs are, product teams may have to sift through distributed data across applications and platforms used by sales, marketing, and other departments across the organization.
Technical staff don’t have the time to dig into multiple customer relationship management (CRM) platforms or account-based marketing (ABM) tools. Instead, they often need to wait for cross-departmental check-ins to get insights into market trends and customer feedback. Without self-serve access to customer data, engineering will miss timely opportunities to address customer needs in regular development cycles.
Product development teams can lean on real-time data connectivity solutions to access marketing, sales, and support data within their own preferred analytics tools. This allows them to tap into vital customer information to inform product strategy without having to dig for disparate information across departmental silos.
For instance, product teams can build real-time Power BI reports that consolidate interdepartmental data across Salesforce, Marketo, and Freshdesk to understand customer requests, user demographics, and market trends. With this holistic view of organizational data, product can develop a relevant, timely, and competitive product roadmap that will help inform the future of the business.
Access to democratized data allows product and engineering teams to develop strategic initiatives, make tactical decisions, and build product features that meet and exceed customer expectations.
Develop More Personalized Customer Interactions
Tangentially, customer-facing teams like sales and marketing are tasked with promoting a vision to customers of what the future looks like with the product they sell. Sales, marketing, and support teams need access to product roadmaps to communicate product news to the market and keep customers informed of upcoming features that might be relevant to their needs.
Unfortunately, details around product roadmaps typically bottleneck at management before trickling across teams through top-down emails and meetings. As product plans change, customer-facing departments become out of sync with the most current product strategy — and bottlenecked internal communication leads to inefficient customer communications.
To attract and retain customers at critical decision-making moments in their buying journey, customer-facing staff need accurate, current details about the organization’s product strategy going forward. Sales, marketing, and support employees can’t afford to wait on their leaders to receive and distribute stale product plans — they need a self-service, centralized view of up-to-date product plans directly from the source.
With access to product strategies and plans, marketing can build tailored campaigns that promote the future vision of the company. Sales reps can then prepare finely-tuned selling points around upcoming releases in the roadmap, tailor proposals based on their unique needs, and quickly convert prospects to eager buyers.
Customers often find that their needs change or grow over time. Fortunately, with access to up-to-date product information, support teams can reassure customers with an estimated timeline for relevant product updates. They can also pass along feedback about any gaps that the product roadmap has yet to cover by giving product development teams direct access to compile and analyze trends in customer requests.
Enabling Product Lifecycle Collaboration with CData
For a product or platform to stay competitive in today’s market, it must address users’ needs and solve their challenges. Product and engineering teams, therefore, need access to vital interdepartmental data to inform product strategy and development cycles. CData supplies the self-service data connectivity solutions every organization needs to develop a competitive product roadmap based on valuable customer feedback.
Reach out to one of our data experts today to learn more about how CData enables your organization to connect data silos and enhance interdepartmental collaboration.
