A thorough go to market (GTM) plan can provide incredible clarity for the many, many stakeholders who are involved in a launch. That’s why it’s so important for the GTM plan to be self-serve when you don’t have the luxury of walking your colleagues through it. The goal is to align your core team, plus answer the top questions for anyone else who needs to be looped in. I suggest using these 9 sections as your core elements: 1. Business context, goals and projected impact → why is this launching? 2. Product experience → what is launching? 3. Audience insights, definition and targeting strategy → who is this launching for and what need(s) are we solving? 4. Marketing brief → what are we saying and how? 5. Channel plan → where are we sharing this? 6. Campaign creative → how does it look, feel and sound? 7. Launch timeline → when is it launching and how is it being rolled out? 8. Measurement plan → how will we know what success looks like? 9. Roles & responsibilities → who owns bringing this to life? There are plenty of times when this list expands or contracts, but as long as you are answering why, what, who, where, when and how, you’ll have a solid starting point to create a successful GTM plan.

One tactical way to get better at interviews is practice using the following method: 1) Search Glassdoor for product marketing interview questions. 2) Google "product marketing interview questions. 3) Copy paste all of them into one document. 4) Scan the document for any questions that you could answer in your sleep and delete them. 5) De-duplicated the remaining questions. 6) Write answers for each of those questions. 7) For repetitions, you can either re-read your answers to these questions or delete your answers and write fresh ones to take yourself through the thought process with a fresh pass at it. This method takes a long time, but getting better at most things requires a significant time investment in deliberate practice. So if you want to get better, this will help.

I am constantly testing messaging. Any customer meeting, event or executive briefing I attend, I'm testing messaging in some way, even if it's not messaging that I'm actively working on. The most critical part of this process is to ensure you're leaving space for feedback and reactions or explicitly asking for it. One mistake I used to make when I first started as a PMM was to go into presentation mode and just barrel through a deck/pitch instead of adding pauses and deliberate questions throughout. As a result, when I build narratives, I think about questions I should be asking about and will bake those into speaker notes. I've also added random dots in presentations that only I can see as a visual cue to take those pauses. We oftentimes find silence is uncomfortable, but it's actually a friend of PMM because it encourages customers to fill that silence. In addition, I also recommend testing messaging directly with your field and customers and looking for methods to test outside of your organization's typical customers/prospects. We will oftentimes do the latter using user research or advertising.

Sharebird and Product Marketing Alliance have some great resources on this topic. Glassdoor is also helpful sometimes when folks share interview questions they were asked. So I’d take full advantage of them if you haven’t already. I’ve also googled phrases like “PMM interview questions” or “preparing for a product marketing interview”. You’d be surprised how helpful some of the Medium articles are.

I agree with this statement. Sometimes when I look at PMM resumes that say something like “Increased sales pipeline by 30%” or “Increased product adoption by 15%”, I’m often skeptical because how much credit can a PMM really take? Did you write all the content? Did you do all the work on campaigns, ads, paid performance, SEO, SEM, digital, video, webinars, and webpages? PMMs operate through influence, not authority. We’re the strategic center of marketing—defining the strategy, personas, messaging, and execution. That being said, let’s at least start with the stuff we can take credit for: * Personas - How well are the personas defined and how well does the marketing and sales org understand these personas? What research has been conducted? Which documents can we point to? * Messaging - Good messaging is highly subjective but the key here is ensuring all messaging has been vetted by sales, customers, and internal experts. Is the messaging easily consumed by other stakeholders like content marketers? * Sales enablement - If you’re B2B, PMMs are directly responsible for enabling the field on the market, competition, product positioning, messaging, pitches, and demos. Of course, this is all influenced pipeline but is the foundation there? If it’s not, you’ve got work to do. * Campaign strategy - PMMs should be shaping and directing the themes of campaigns throughout the year and educating the marketing org on why a certain kind of campaign is needed. Campaign runners are responsible for driving those campaigns in market. * Product launches - PMMs are often the quarterback for launches. How many launches can be accomplished per year? How organized are these launches? Are they reaching their target audience? Was the launch able to drive the expected amount of product adoption? * Analyst briefings & thought leadership - Just keeping analysts informed and up-to-date is critically important for the business. Spearheading a Gartner MQ is a ton of work. Did you develop thought leadership themes with the comms team? * Events - Supporting user conferences, tradeshows, and keynotes. How many field events did you support? There's a lot I missed. Some of the above can be measured quantitatively but most are qualitative. If you take a step back, I would say a PMM can tie themselves to the holistic movement of core KPIs quarter-over-quarter. If you’re doing your job right, you should be able to claim influence on sign-ups, activation, pipeline, and close rates QoQ.

I need to unpack this in therapy but for some not-yet-fully-explored reason, I hate messaging houses and marchitecture like that. Perhaps it feels like it's forcing structure. Perhaps it feels too permanent and untouchable (because it's housed??). Not sure. But I do concede that they can be useful and are helpful for many, many people. So, for me, if I'm trying to get internal buy-in on messaging, I try to keep it as simple, concise, and as contextual as possible. * Target audience, * value prop, * 3 benefit or RTB pillars, * and corresponding proof points (like a product or feature). Then, I take that and set it in context to provide positioning guidance and build a larger, more interesting narrative. * What's happening out there in the market and why are we talking about this? What's the challenge our audience is facing in this market? * Then insert our claim we just worked on. * Include validation (customer quotes, product metrics, analyst reports, etc.). * And articulate your CTA - inspire your audience and give them a call to arms.

You have a very tall order ahead of you! These two motions aren't nuanced differences -- they are completely different playbooks. Most of my AMA questions are about comparing the two, so I'll summarize the key differences here: The buyer * Often a self-serve buyer is a team lead/director level or an end-user, looking to try out the product to see if it could work for themselves or their team. They are rarely thinking about their entire company's needs. These buyers want to validate the product fast and implement it even faster because it promises to solve an issue they are facing right then and there. They care about quick-time-value, self-driven learning & documentation, community support, and ease of setup. * An enterprise buyer is thinking about the opposite. They are looking for solutions to organizational challenges they are facing now and long into the future. They are often willing to: spend more time vetting all the best solutions through RFPs etc.; to pay for someone else to configure and manage the product; and they care deeply about customer service, not just product experience. Their decision has more lasting implications, like dealing with procurement, a task that no one takes lightly ;) The buyer journey * A PMM building a self-serve buyer journey connects the top of the funnel through to product and everything in between. You only have seconds to tell a compelling story and the feedback you get is a mix of data insights and customer responses. * An Enterprise buyer journey has to take into account human interaction as a content delivery vehicle. There are more direct feedback loops and more room for robust and detailed storytelling. The tactics * Self-serve marketing activities will include paid marketing campaigns, website optimizations, SEO content & blogs, Youtube, PR, online community engagement etc. all focused on driving traffic and signs ups. * Enterprise activities are most focused on that human touch through events, analyst relations, sales, channel, webinars etc. all focused on driving pipeline.

This is a great question. Overall, product differentiation is key and one of the roles I really enjoy within PMM is having such a pulse and influence on what differentiates your product in the market - but it's not enough to just be different, it needs to matter to your customer and it needs to come to life in your marketing. This makes me think about my time at Old Navy where denim was our largest product category year over year. (Stick with me, this will translate to tech too, I promise). There are countless options for jeans and within the value fashion category, a few key competitors we had our eyes on. On factors like quality, fashion, value, preference on washes - we were head to head with our competitors. This is why our campaign work was critical to help break through. But in our latest focus groups as part of ad campaigns, we captured insights from customers that they really loved how newer cropped styles made them feel confident "showing off their ankles" as a transition to Fall. We were able to take this insight as key input into our creative brief and overall helped reinforce our positioning as the accessble fashion destination for denim. My point is, you might find that within your competitve set your product might have a large hurdle to differentiate in the category - you should always push 100% to build the best differntiated product for your customers - but equally important, it comes back to your customers and finding the greatest value to them and reinforcing it in your GTM strategy/approach.

One of the key areas of differentiation is the buying group involved with a larger organization which typically lengthens the sales cycle. It’s critical to understand who are the key players in your buying group at an enterprise level organization. You’ll likely need to build business impact messaging and content for executives/c-suite in addition to the economic buyer and end user as enterprise sales motions typically require senior leadership review and input. Enterprises also usually require more steps during the sales process, for example sometimes they require a Proof of Concept (PoC) or they cannot move forward with a vendor unless there is a Master Services Agreement (MSA) in place. Oftentimes, they have some type of legal or procurement step that requires additional time and process. Larger enterprises also must adhere to compliance standards and regulations. Most likely it will involve folks from the IT organization, therefore it’s best to have an understanding on how your product manages data security and privacy, integrates with their existing tech stack, administration, etc.

The best analyst briefing decks that I've either seen or helped build are not filled with marketing messaging. They clearly layout what analysts typically care about, which could include the following: trends you've observed in market you operate in, the challenges your product(s) solves, overview of your growth trajectory, industries you touch plus key use cases for each, unique differentiators, and insight into the product & (high level) GTM strategy and company vision. Other elements I'd suggest: Include customer success stories, lay out the ecosystem that supports your products (ie. partners, integrations, develop engagement), and share how you support your customers. Also, it may seem obvious, but I'd caution against including stats/proof points that were produced by another analyst firm. In general, have a clear agenda that includes space for Q&A and listening to their feedback.