The CRO, not product marketing, is closest to the customer and knows what they will buy. The product roadmap should be a collaborative effort driven by the CRO, who can directly tie feature delivery to ICP expansion and revenue forecasts. This creates accountability and predictable growth.

Don't just collect feedback from all users equally. Identify and listen closely to the few "visionary users" who intuitively grasp what's next. Their detailed feedback can serve as a powerful validation and even a blueprint for your long-term product strategy.

To keep growth aligned with product, foster a shared culture where everyone loves the product and customer. This isn't about formal meetings, but a baseline agreement that makes collaboration inherent. When this culture exists, the product team actively seeks marketing's input, creating a unified engine.

In early stages, the key to an effective product roadmap is ruthlessly prioritizing based on the severity of customer pain. A feature is only worth building if it solves an acute, costly problem. If customers aren't in enough pain to spend money and time, the idea is irrelevant for near-term revenue generation.

For a product to be inherently "talkable," marketing input is crucial during design. Marketers are often brought in post-launch to sell a finished product. Instead, they should be involved early to help design features that encourage sharing and create organic growth loops, making their job exponentially easier.

Adopt engineering methodologies like sprints, story points, and capacity dashboards for marketing operations. This provides the data needed to manage stakeholder expectations, prioritize requests transparently, and move the team from reactive order-takers to strategic partners with a defensible roadmap.

The "build it and they will come" mindset is a trap. Founders should treat marketing and brand-building not as a later-stage activity to be "turned on," but as a core muscle to be developed in parallel with the product from day one.

To remove yourself as the marketing bottleneck, install systems that generate content automatically. Create processes to screenshot community praise, incentivize testimonials with product upgrades, document client wins, and even turn 1-star reviews into humorous marketing. This creates a content engine that doesn't rely on the founder's face.