Get answers from product marketing leaders
Kevin Zentmeyer
Jobber Senior Director, Product Marketing • April 26
To showcase your work without actually showing your work, you can instead show your process. Any messaging work will have a before and after, even if the prior state was an unlaunched product. 1. Describe what you were given. What was the new product/feature or existing messaging? 2. What was your process for determining the new messaging? 3. Were there any disagreements or misalignments about your new messaging? How did you get alignment to launch your new messaging through sales and marketing assets? 4. What was the result? How did you measure results to know whether it worked? Spend most of your time on describing your process. The hiring manager isn't hiring you for the specific messaging or results that you produced in your past role. They're hiring you because you have a repeatable, but flexible process or playbook to create effective messaging. Use the messaging you created as an example of that process and spend your time on that instead.
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Lauren Hakim
Zendesk Group Product Marketing Manager, AI • January 19
This can certainly vary depending on the company! Here are some examples of areas that would be owned by different product marketing levels based on my experience: Messaging & Positioning * PMM: Crafts messaging and positioning at capability/feature level with some coaching * Sr. PMM: Drives messaging and positioning at the product/feature level and coaches others on product/feature level positioning * Director: Drives messaging and positioning at the category level and ensures alignment across teams Sales enablement * PMM: Creates materials and conducts enablement sessions on sales fundamentals (e.g. first call deck, demos) * Sr. PMM: Orchestrates enablement initiatives and programs at the product level or across multiple features. Identifies opportunities to increase pipeline by collaborating directly with reps and sales leadership. * Director: A mix of strategic/tactical partner to sales leadership for their functional area. Ensures execution of sales-facing content and training. GTM strategy & execution * PMM: Plays a specific role in building GTM strategy and execution for area of focus (e.g. buyer, competitors) * Sr. PMM: Drives GTM strategy work across multiple products, features, or initiatives (e.g. pricing, narrative). Makes recommendations to optimize methodologies and processes. * Director: Ensures the success of the development of GTM strategy and responsible for their teams’ execution of GTM programs. Considers the portfolio strategy (e.g. where a particular launch strategy fits in amongst other launches). Makes recommendations to optimize methodologies and processes.
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Jameelah Calhoun
Eventbrite VP, Global Head of Product Marketing | Formerly Amazon, Ex-Amex • February 10
Organization structures for the PMM team vary depending on your companies’ stage, customer base, and product suite. There are 4 basic approaches for designing PMM teams: 1) functional (i.e. sales enablement, monetization, GTM, product strategy), 2) product lines (i.e. subscriptions, retail), 3) customer segments (i.e. enterprise, small business, consumer), or 4) Lifecycle (i.e. acquisition, engagement, retention.) When determining a new PMM team org structure, I think about these 3 questions: 1) What drives distinction in the sales/conversion cycle? For some companies that will be customer-based, such as selling to enterprise clients versus small business or business versus consumer for marketplaces. For others, the product drives the most distinction, such as a consumer subscription service versus consumer a la carte/retail. For other companies with smaller product suites and a less complex client base, it may be best to align against areas of the funnel (i.e. acquisition, engagement, retention). Lastly, depending on the functional areas that PMM teams are responsible for it may make sense to organize against these areas to recruit for specific skill sets. 2) What domain knowledge will be most important to develop and maintain within the team? Which team members will benefit most from collaboration? This again is often tied to the answer in question one. Sometimes deep expertise on one customer segment will be critical relative to deep expertise on one specific product or vice versa. 3) How are your stakeholder teams organized? Aligning closely with product management teams will smooth the team’s ability to become trusted and consistent partners with that team. As PMM organizations become larger and more complex, I have often combined two of the organizational approaches for maximum impact. For example, organizing my PMM teams by product lines, but having dedicated functional PMM roles underneath each product line team.
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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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Claire Drumond
Atlassian Sr. Director, Head of Product Marketing, Jira and Jira suite • August 16
My PMM team is built like a funnel. Our focus is to land new customers, which we only count when those customers start to pay. Therefore, the job of my PMM team ranges from raising awareness of our brand to getting new customers to upgrade to our paid editions. I have three groups focused on the following parts of the funnel: * Buyer Journey: This team focuses on connecting our marketing efforts at the top of the funnel through to the product. This team is goaled on Day1-6 Daily Active Instances to ensure high-quality sign-ups come into our funnel and they are happy when they get there. The teams' activities include running marketing paid campaigns, SEO, website optimizations, messaging & onboarding. * Core product: This team focuses on keeping our customers informed of new product releases, updating our core product messaging, and partnering closely with our product counterparts on product & GTM strategy. * Monetization & Expansion: This team is focused on driving our upsell motions within the product experience, driving customers from free to paid licenses, and cross-sell driving users to try and use other products and apps in our ecosystem. It's important to note that my team is primarily focused on SMB self-serve motions.
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Jesse Lopez
Dandy Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Brex, Klaviyo, Square, Intuit, PepsiCo, Heineken, Mondelez • March 23
Start any GTM strategy by anchoring on the four critical components of any go-to-market initiative. 1. What: What software or offering are you selling? What problems does it help solve? What makes your product unique vs. alternatives? 2. Who: Who is your ideal customer profile, and why? What are their pain points, and how does your product help them solve them? Why should these customers choose your product over alternatives? 3. Where: Where do customers learn about products in your category? What channels are most effective at each stage of the buying journey based on historical data or competitive offerings? 4. How: How do customers typically buy products in your product category? What factors and/or criteria help drive their buying journey? How can you help educate customers on your product along the journey? Net-net: There is no magic formula to starting a GTM strategy, but rather a set of questions you should continually use to guide your GTM decisions. Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach, I encourage you to craft a GTM strategy with your x-functional partners (Sales, Product, Marketing) that anchors on the what, who, where, and how aspects of your GTM iniatitive.
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Daniel Kish
Conveyor VP Product Marketing • November 10
Let's assume that you've got the pricing set, the feature packaging defined, and the product technically built. What happens next? Enablement! My laundry list of things to do includes: * Work with the CPQ/Systems team to build out the commercial workflow of what a SKU looks like, how discount approvals and escalations flow, product special terms, and configuration policies * Build a training deck for different audiences (Sales, CSMs, Implementation, Support, Deal Desk) that describes what the product is, who typically will buyer, details on the ideal customer profile, the pricing, who can sell, discount structure, positioning, and selling "rules of engagement" * Generate assets like price sheets, seller guides, proposal/ROI calculators, and feature-packaging breakdowns * Work with the customer marketing team to push content to the install base * Work with the revenue marketing team to push content to prospects * Set up the measurement apparatus on KPIs like average selling price, average deal size, cumulative ARR, and discretionary discounting all broken down by segment, region, deal type, and competitive-threat * Work with the Documentation teams to incorporate feature differentiation into key help center or customer advice channels Because pricing and packaging will touch almost every area of the business, you'll have to prioritize! My method is to start with where the product is most likely to be sold. For example, are you primarily selling to the install base? TALK TO CSMS! Is it mainly for smaller customers? PRIORITIZE THE SMB SEGMENT!
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Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing | Formerly Apple, Electronic Arts, Digitas • October 13
Great question and I would be very curious to hear how other companies do this! I mentioned in an earlier question that Square is very collaborative, and that means there is a mix of formal, and informal, ways in which we deliver customer feedback. Formal research / customer feedback studies: * PMM often captures customer feedback through conducting surveys, commissioning external research, listening to calls from Sales or Account Management/Customer Success, analyzing dashboards, or conducting interviews ourselves. * When we conduct these more formal studies, we always produce a Google Doc that summarizes the project objectives, goals and approach, and key findings (in addition to a link to all the raw data & feedback). * PMMs can provide immense value by taking the time to distill the insights into an executive summary, and articulate the prevalence of a specific piece/theme of feedback, and the impact it could have if addressed (e.g. will more customers adopt the product, vs. will it help with engagement or retention, etc). * In order to highlight this added strategic perspective, I haven’t found anything more effective than a well-written doc that the product teams can read and comment on. More informal ways of delivering feedback: * We host regular meetings with our Sales, Account Management and Customer Success representatives where they can surface individual customer stories and feedback directly to both PMs and PMMs. * We also utilize slack channels heavily, where PMMs and other functions can share customer feedback directly with our product managers, as we hear it. While many of these ‘one-off’ stories re-inforce feedback that has already been heard before, they provide additional insight into use cases or nuances that may not have been fully understood before. Top Tools used for delivering customer feedback: 1. Google Docs & Sheets - to summarize customer feedback, which can be translated into spreadsheets that Product Managers can use to further assess and prioritize the requests. 2. Salesforce is used by our Sales/AM teams to log feature requests, with dashboards we can access to pull top requests. 3. Gong - We also utilize Gong to listen to calls from our Sales/AM teams, and will often include links to the recordings in write-ups. And finally, I’ll mention the importance of repetition in delivering customer feedback. A well-written report may be appreciated and digested, but a PMM will gain even more trust as the voice of the customer if they are also referencing those key insights and speaking knowingly about the customer use cases in live discussions, product design reviews, roadmap planning sessions and more.
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Chad Kimner
Meta Product Marketing Director, AR/VR | Formerly Mozilla, LeapFrog • November 16
I'm going to take this question in a slightly different direction and make a pitch for collaborating with Product (and many other teams) on a comprehensive "Understand Synthesis" as the basis for annual planning/roadmapping. This can be a transformative way for teams to generate better shared understanding and align on market research priorities for the next planning cycle. How it works: 1\ As a kick-off to annual planning, align with Product and other key stakeholders on the biggest questions you need to answer in order to be successful in the coming year-plus. 2\ Scour existing research to figure out what data and insights you can already bring to bear on those questions. In many cases, you might find that you can generate a decent answer to one of your fundamental questions without doing any new research! 3\ Where there are major disputes about existing data and/or gaps in understanding, create a research roadmap to generate new insights that should answer the big questions. Aligning with Product on the research roadmap and more important generating a shared POV on key questions - perhaps without having to invest any more time in answer them - can turbo-charge the roadmapping and annual planning process.
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Kacy Boone
Clockwise Head of Growth Marketing • May 25
This is such a great example about how you can’t necessarily take a standard playbook and apply it to every company. The dynamics of team size, resourcing, stage of company, all factor in to how you approach defining the role of your team. To answer your question, it starts with finding ways to align your quarterly (or ideally bi-annual & annual) goals and getting clear on the unique value each team brings to the table. The last thing you want is to have competing time and resources, so you want both teams to be really proactive about sharing goals, priorities, and roadmaps in order to ensure you’re not duplicating efforts nor have competing priorities. Secondly, I think it’s important that there’s a shared understanding of the unique value each team brings to the table. In growth marketing, you’re going to have experts on channel strategy, performance, and distribution. In product marketing, you’re going to have experts on positioning, voice of customer, competitive differentiation. Get clear on that as a team. One last super tactical idea for you, I love a shared team brainstorm ahead of mapping goals and programs for the quarter. On the product marketing side, you could compile some research on customers, share the product roadmap, or do a competitive deep-dive to inform that brainstorm and help set up your teams to be aligned from the start. Hope this helps!
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