Get answers from product marketing leaders
Kevin Zentmeyer
Jobber Senior Director, Product Marketing • April 26
Mock GTM plans are typically done two ways in PMM interviews. One is a live question in the interview and the other is a project typically in the form of a PowerPoint. If it is a project, you should recognize this as an opportunity. If you want this role, and you should if you are applying, then this is a high leverage moment to achieve or obtain what you want at the next stage your career. You should go get it. Consider whatever the recruiter or hiring manager indicates is the amount of time that you "should" spend on the project as a lowball offer. You need to beat all of the other candidates to get this role and many of them will spend the amount of time that they've been told to spend on it - which is great for the hiring manager, but not for you. Hiring managers want a fair way to evaluate candidates. You don't want fair. You want to win! Spend as much time as you need to have insightful answers to their prompts in your presentation and understand their business well enough to make clever and relevant suggestions. I have done three interview projects and have gotten all three jobs. Do the work so you can get what you want. If it's a straight interview format where the interviewer gives you some details about a product or feature and asks you to create a GTM question, then your problem will be limited time. It's important to establish expectations for how much of the interview session will be spent on this prompt and if they have any follow up questions so you know how long to talk - and how long you can take to think, before you start talking - which is absolutely something you should do. This question is a trap that some people fall into by talking before they know what they want to say and then they're brain needs to multi-task and catch up. Take at least a few seconds first! Now that we've mastered the format of the question, the way to handle the meat of it is to 1) ask questions to understand what problems this product solves 2) who the target market is and 3) what is unique about this one. If you know these things, then you can run your standard GTM playbook with modifications to account for how the three questions are answered.
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Good Product Marketing OKRs really depend on the business and what the company is trying to achieve. For example, if there's no unified launch process, you may set an objective to develop a launch program. Or another example: you're starting to lose deals to a specific competitor. You may kick off a competitive program to mitigate losses on competitive deals. It really depends on the business. For product launches: * Did I reach my intended audience for this launch? How many people engaged with our launch materials? Read the blog post? Watched the video? Engaged with the landing page? * How many existing customers adopted the new feature or product within a reasonable amount of time? * Were we expecting a certain amount of leads or pipeline from the launch? * Did we brief the analyst community properly? * Is our sales team enabled on what's new and why customers should care? For campaigns: * Content delivery * Gated content downloads * Webinar registrations and number of viewers * Lead flow For sales enablement: * What % of reps are certified on the pitch and demo? * What % of reps have gone through persona training?
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Nisha Goklaney
HubSpot Senior Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, American Express, Sage • November 9
Brilliant question. If developed correctly, your messaging pillars should be evergreen (i.e. should not change on a dime) from campaign to campaign. Ultimately, your messaging pillars bring to life the core value your product/service delivers to customers and hence should be foundational. As you release new product features, think about how they ladder up to your core messaging pillars (aka the value you deliver to customers) and map them as such. Here are some best practices to ensure you get maximum traction from your messaging and that there is consistency across how channel marketers, PR teams, sales etc. use them. 1. Develop a 'How to guide' - In a how to guide, your role is to essentially breakdown and provide guidance to your key stakeholders on how they should be using your messaging - are there direct copy points they can leverage for the website, social, ad copy? Can your PR team directly leverage speaking points or use your messaging pillars? Can your sales team directly use your pitch with a talk track? Break it down for them with instructions, so it’s easy for your stakeholders to use and re-use your messaging. Good messaging is used on an ongoing and consistent basis across 360 channels - to promote customer recall. 2. Roadshow - Showshow your messaging across your sales, customer success, marketing organization - and explain how each team can effectively utilize your messaging. 3. Centralize where you store your messaging - so its easily findable and referencable by all stakeholders. Encourage folks to bookmark it
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Erica Conti
Asana Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, PepsiCo, Nielsen, Wakefern Food Corp. • August 8
I create my product launch strategy through a six-step process, which is outlined in my attached template. Over the years, I've found that this process ensures a comprehensive approach to product launches, while still maintaining flexibility to accommodate the specific needs of a launch: 1. Plan: This initial stage focuses on setting the strategy and aligning with key stakeholders. I define the: * Target audience * Primary and secondary goals * Success metrics * Value proposition * Marquee products or features * Naming * Overall channel strategy based on my launch goals and brainstorms with channel partners 2. Kickoff: Here, I engage marketing channel and regional teams to determine specific tactics and creative needs. I discuss the: * Customer journey * Required assets and content * New activations to test * Targeting criteria across channels 3. Execute: During this phase, I partner closely with creative and other marketing channel teams to bring the plan to life. Key considerations include: * Ensuring all channel teams understand my requirements and timing * Adapting messaging for different regions * Localizing assets 4. Preview: This stage involves preparing Revenue teams and engaging analysts. I focus on: * Distribution of enablement materials * Conducting analyst inquiries * Building a plan to drive internal momentum (as PMMs, we need to market both externally and internally!) 5. Finalize: As I approach the launch, I obtain final sign-offs and prepare for global release. Key activities include: * Getting assets approved by Legal * Asset handoff for localization 6. Launch: In the final stage, I make last-minute preparations and plan for post-launch activities: * Setting up communication channels for launch day * Planning team celebrations * Scheduling retros to improve our launch processes * Preparing to share results with leadership at 30, 60, and 90 days
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Alex Wagner Lavian
Origin VP of Marketing | Formerly Uber • November 22
When building a tiered product it's important to define the goals of the entire package and each tier. Once you set goals, you'll want to segment your target audience by tier to map benefits to each level. Each tier should have clear benefits and ideally one “hero benefit” to serve as the hook to get customers to sign up for the offering. While the tiers should feel distinct they should also feel connected so that customers feel motivated to earn/pay more to move to higher tiers. A clear example of this approach is building a good/better/best model where the base benefits get increasingly richer as you move to higher tiers. Once benefits/pricing is set a GTM plan that includes varied tactics and messaging will be key with flexibility to market the entire package + targeted campaigns for each tier.
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What companies have product marketing that you really admire, either overall or particular elements?
James Fang
LaunchDarkly Vice President of Product Marketing • December 6
When I was at Okta, I was part of an extremely effective PMM team. It was structured: * Core / Product-line PMMs * Technical product marketers * Solutions PMMs (own "GTM plays" & business value - e.g. ROI calculator) Core / product-line PMMs were given a broad scope, and in some sense they effectively functioned as "outbound product managers", owning GTM strategy (e.g. should this primarily be positioned as a day1 attach for prospects / new deals vs. upsell to existing customers), pricing and packaging, on top of traditional PMM responsibilities of product launches, messaging & positioning, content, enablement. I also think Salesforce does a tremendous job of selling the vision (given their history of pre-launching products and giving PMM the task of marketing vaporware). And they deliver a phenomenal experience at DreamForce - presentations, keynote demo.
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Christina Lhi
Square Head Of Product Marketing • September 14
It is always a good idea to factor in some time for research pre-launch to make sure your messaging is resonating with your target customer. In the past, I've done this both via quant surveys (Pros: more data driven confidence levels but Cons: Finding the right prospect audience can be expensive) and qual (Pros: can learn more of the why and insights, Cons: lower levels of confidence). Another useful tactic is to loop in your GTM teams early on to get their thoughts on concepts/messaging. But ultimately, you shouldn't use these as a crutch, you should invest more energy and time up front to build the right strategy and make sure execution is able to ladder back to that strategy.
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Pratik Gadamasetti
Google Global PMM Lead, Google AI Marketing • April 2
This is probably one of the critical skills for a PMM to have, influencing without formal authority or aligned goals. I wish a had a silver bullet type of answer but the reality is, it depends! Ultimately, I try to build a solid biz case consistent of clear timeline, scope, asks, etc. and then work with xfn peers to get early input and feedback. From there, I'll develop a critical path to getting buy-in and decisions by utilizing a DIN (Decision, Input, Notify) framework, commonly used across YouTube/Google. Identifying the critical decision makers early and your path to getting to them is essential in getting buy-in for your project. Below is a slightly more detailed view on my general approach (used at YouTube, Google, and Spotify) for aligning XFN on the same objective/project: 1. Build a solid biz case and get early feedback: * Do your homework. Before making your ask, you must deeply understand the teams/people you're working with and their respective OKRs or goals. Without this understanding, it's near impossible to convince others to why they should be aligning to your proposed objective. Ultimately, it will be a trade-off decision for other teams. * Timeline and scope: Think through time horizon and scope of your project. Is this a small experiment that you're looking to run and get data back from to inform a larger proposal? Is this an annual objective, quarterly objective, or something else? * Define success metrics: What's the goal and how will we know if we're successful? Do you have the measurement infrastructure in place to quantify your results? How often will you report on progress? * Capture proposal in a brief memo (1-2 pages). Once you have a solid understanding of the details above, you'll need to capture details in a memo (or slides, whichever is preferred at your company). Questions to answer include but not limited to: What is the scope of the proposed project? What involvement / support do you need from other teams? Is there a budget requirement What is the business need and is it time-sensitive? What are the goals and how are you measuring success? * Get feedback early! Identify peers in respective orgs that can provide early feedback. 2. Layout the critical path to getting buy-in and decision. Next step is dependent on company culture, how input is gathered and ultimately how decisions are made. It's critical to deeply understand this process so that you're being as efficient as possible (not wasting people's time), and getting to the decision as soon as possible. A simple DIN (Decide, Input, Notify) framework will come in handy here as you think about all the stakeholders you're working with and what DIN category they fall into. Identify your "critical path" of decision makers, forums, and champions. * Build stakeholder list and assign DIN status for each person. There should be very few D's, likely one leader from each XFN team. * Determine ultimate decision makers and work backwards to identify forums and flesh out workback timeline. * Note: Feedback is a gift, how you respond to feedback has on impact on how stakeholders will feel about working with you in the future. Throughout the process, be sure to listen and make people feel like their feedback has been received. A frustrating thing for partners is when they actually spend time reviewing your doc, adding thoughts and then their ideas are dismissed or disregarded. This is critical because it's likely that you will be working with these people often. What's also important is to be decisive and clear on how feedback is or is not incorporated. You will never be able to please everyone!
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Grant Shirk
Cisco Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Campus Network Experiences | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • April 13
This is a great one! It's also something few people do well in an interview setting. It's a bit challenging to do verbally, but if you think it through in advance, you can be prepared when the opportunity presents itself. The first thing - the success of your positioning in an interview setting is best shown through anecdotes and specific details. Just like in real life, it's very hard to say "my positioning increased our pipeline by 15%." That's a complex calculus, and not easily justifiable. Instead, tie it to a story. For example, "we made this adjustment to the message for this audience, and it really helped these kinds of deals move forward." My favorite example to talk about (related to another answer here) is about the competitive positioning framework we built for a sales boot camp. It lived for years after I left that role and left a lasting impact on the field there. That's impact that resonates in an interview. Back the the interview, though. At the core of every PMM interview, every person you meet with in a PM or PMM function really wants to know how you break down a value prop and translate it into scalable positioning. So, use bridging techniques. One of the most common intro questions you'll get (or you should get, if the interview is well designed) is, "Tell me about your current product or solution." Repeat after me: THIS IS NOT A QUESTION ABOUT YOUR PRODUCT. This is a question about your POSITIONING. Talking about the product, features, capabilities is how you fail this question. Instead: talk about who the product is for, what problem it solves for them, and how you do it uniquely. Then talk through each of the core pillars you created. Bonus points: relate it to a time when you had to dial up or dial down the focus on one of those pillars for an audience or in response to a market shift. If you do that, particularly with a hiring manager, you will ace that conversation. The second chance you have to showcase messaging and positioning is in the launch scenario. "Tell me about your most recent product launch." Again, DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE PRODUCT. Talk about the goal of the launch, who you were trying to reach, how the launch reinforced or changed your messaging... and then bridge to the positioning you put together and why it was effective/different/compelling.
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Kristen Kanka
Morningstar Head of Marketing, Enterprise Solutions | Formerly CaptureX, Medline Industries • January 26
Storytelling is the biggest trait is look for. I want all of my product marketers to be able to tell stories that anyone can follow that inspire action. Everyone I interview is asked to provide a writing sample so I can see if they’ve got “it.” The next trait is problem solving: In every interview I ask the same question: Tell me about a go-to-market that failed. I don’t care so much about the “why” of the failure; I want to know how you determined it was off track, and what you did about it to get back on track. And third is collaboration. How does someone build relationships? How can they earn a seat at the table with a diverse group of stakeholders? If they aren’t able to collaborate, it isn’t a role for them. You have to want to be the glue that holds a team together.
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