Get answers from product marketing leaders
Quinn Hubbard
Matterport Head of Global Brand & Product Marketing, Director • May 4
As much as I would love to share a one-size-fits-all KPIs, I’ve found that no two launches are the same. Even if you’re launching a product again in a new market, you’ve probably learned something from the first launch that will lead you to optimize your approach the next time. Instead, I break it down into these four categories and choose the most important metric from each category: * Business metrics: How will this launch help the business to meet its goals? Is it revenue, subscriptions, marketplace balance, users? * Product metrics: What action(s) do we want our target audience to take? For example, trial, adoption, retention, increased usage. * Channel metrics: Based on the way that the campaign is set up, what’s the most important way that our audience can engage with the marketing campaign? Do we want them to watch the video, click on the push notification, read the blog, ask a question or something else entirely? * Top of funnel metrics: What do you want your audience to know, think or feel based on the launch? These are your awareness, perception and sentiment metrics. It takes a lot of discipline to pick only the most important metrics and stay laser-focused on those. But I’ve found that when I’m able to do it, it gives the team a clearer mission and strengthens the impact.
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Erica Conti
Asana Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, PepsiCo, Nielsen, Wakefern Food Corp. • August 9
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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Priya Gill
SurveyMonkey Head of Global Marketing • December 9
There are 3 that I primarily look at that PMM influences (not directly drives): * Pipeline / Bookings (Demand gen / monetization efforts) * Win rates (Sales enablement and content) * Product adoption (Growth efforts) There are metrics that we can directly tie to PMM but that I find to be less meaningful, like engagement rates on content that we've created or product launch metrics which are more a moment in time. I think that it's totally fine that we don't directly drive the major metrics I mention above, but showing how PMM involvement / partnership can positively shift and impact each of those metrics is what's key.
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An effective 30-60-90 will help you make progress across 3 pillars: * What is your point of view on the company's current market standing? Where are there future opportunities? * How do you define and establish the PMM function? * How do you create scalable, repeatable processes for GTM success? The first 30 days are all about discovery. It's about deeply understanding the business, marketing fundamentals, and product. 1. What are my company's business priorities? Why? What are some of the KPIs that our company cares about? 2. What market does my company play in? Who else competes in that space? 3. Who are our customers? What are their jobs to be done? Not only should you be reading up on market reports, you should take the time to set up interviews (with both existing customers as well as churned). 4. What does our product do? How does it work? Why does it matter for our customers (i.e. what value does it deliver)? 5. What is our current GTM motion? What has worked well to date? What hasn't worked as well? Take the time to meet with your cross-functional stakeholders in sales, sales enablement, product, and the extended marketing team to understand their challenges and priorities. By the end of the first 60 days, you can use all of that investigative work to codify your roles & responsibilities, cross-functional processes, and methods for communicating with stakeholders. You can draft up a roadmap for key initiatives (launches, campaigns, collateral refreshes, etc.) to address gaps in your GTM, and get started on some of the urgent and important ones. At the end of the first quarter, you should have a comfortable grasp on what you need to do to take your product to market, who you should work with, and how to execute on your key initiatives. You'll also have some learnings from the initiatives you've embarked on in month 2 (for example, let's say you wanted to start the company's first-ever product release blog -- what did you learn from that, how would you do it better for the future?). The exact initiatives that you choose to undertake will totally depend on the priorities of the business and stakeholder input. While I've given some general advice above, the most important thing is to be adaptable! Check in at the end of the month (with yourself and your stakeholders) -- ask if anything should be adjusted, and re/de-prioritized based on what you've learned.
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Rekha Srivatsan
Salesforce Vice President Product Marketing • April 20
I'm a huge fan of shorter, concise resumes. If you can articulate your journey and experience on one page, it will help me to process your resume well. Some red flags I've observed: * Typos/grammatical errors on resumes - Attention to detail is a core skill for a PMM, so it is a big turn-off for me if your resume has these errors. * Lack of customer narrative - Customer conversations are integral to a PMM role, so if it's not mentioned in during the interview that's a red flag for me. * Run-on sentences - As a PMM, you are expected to have clear, concise communication -- verbal and written. * Too much fluff - When stating your experience, be real and practical. Don't exaggerate it too much or make it super jargon-y that its difficult to follow.
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Kacy Boone
Clockwise Head of Growth Marketing • May 26
Growth Product Marketing is an emerging role, especially impactful at companies that have a strong Growth Product arm. As a Growth PMM, you should be mapped to a Growth Product team and support the team in the same ways that a traditional PMM does. As a Growth PMM you’ll be working closely with the Growth Product team on experiments, tests, and research to improve user metrics. As a point of distinction, I wouldn’t expect a Growth PMM to be doing a ton of “big launches” for core products. To demonstrate expertise in Growth PMM, I would lean into your ability to analyze data to understand opportunities for growth and pair that with your deep understanding of the customer. You’ve got to be data-driven, understand the fundamentals of experimentation, and have solid marketing channel performance chops. That's what will set you apart in Growth PMM.
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John Hurley
Notion Head of Product Marketing • December 16
PMM is hard (and awesome) because we are a hub, not a spoke that often controls the final outputs. We’re not growth marketers, or demand gen manager, or brand marketers. However we do influence, inform, manifest, and/or articulate growth strategies and campaigns. Product marketing needs other growth teams to commit and execute. Same goes for traditional demand gen and campaigns – we have a bit more influence there and ability to define demand programs and contribute content, but still heavy reliance on others for execution (campaigns team, ops, etc.). We don’t own channels or many of the teams required for execution. Our role and responsibility are to develop (and coalesce) a GTM (and specifically marketing) plan to propose to cross-functional teams, surface the requirements/dependencies/roles, and coordinate and monitor the cross-functional workstreams. That GTM marketing strategy– along with positioning/messaging, enablement, launches, and research input into product strategy – are our core roles and responsibilities. Product Marketing can bring together all the growth/demand investments into a single view (ex. a Campaign Brief), come to the table with recommendations, and aide in the orchestration of various teams efforts (expose leverage points or conflicts). We can create messaging and content that supports the campaign. But we can not also be the sole execution side (not our expertise, not our area of ownership – literally don't own the distribution channels). This is part of what makes Product Marketing so hard. We’d love to work with Growth to help them refine their programs and tactics, and contribute to areas like messaging (ex. copy for an in-app test, or keywords and copy for SEO/SEM programs).
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Liz Gonzalez
Zendesk Director of Product Marketing - Global Enterprise (previously NYSE: ZEN) • August 24
Ideal customer profile (ICP) is a great way to focus on the most valuable prospects likely to purchase your product and align all areas of the Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy on targeting those accounts. I recommend taking a three-pronged approach when it comes to collecting data for ICP. 1) Do the quantitative analysis 2) Conduct internal interviews from sales and account managers 3) Talk to customers. You’ll then start to see some trends across several attributes like industry; use case; tech stack; regions, growth rate; etc. It’s always good to think about your future ICP as well when designing and implementing and ICP so you’ll have some room for growth. Ask yourself what your most valuable prospects will look like in 6 - 9 months? Is your product changing? Is your company entering a new region? Launching a new product line? All these will have an impact on your future ICP. And always, always, always identify key stakeholders early on in the process as implementing ICPs is a cross-functional project and requires collaboration to get an ICP successfully implemented across many GTM teams.
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Lindsey Weinig
Twilio Director of Product Marketing • November 9
Best case, I partner with the product team to define the core KPI(s) for a product launch. Often product adoption is the goal of the launch, but sometimes a product is launched with other intentions like decreasing churn or increasing revenue through other product/feature adoption. Depending on the nature of the product, KPIs may include new signups for free trials, paid upgrades, add-on purchases/total value, NPS, or active users of the new product that was launched. I also like to measure KPIs across marketing activities associated with the product launch in order to continuously improve. This can include email engagement, advertisement and social impressions, landing page traffic and blog post views etc. It's helpful to gather and benchmark these metrics to determine the most successful activation activities driving the core KPI(s) that should be considered for future launches with the same/similar core KPI(s) and target buyer or user.
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Christina Lhi
Square Head Of Product Marketing • September 15
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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