Get answers from product marketing leaders
Quinn Hubbard
Matterport Head of Global Brand & Product Marketing, Director • May 3
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.
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Mary Sheehan
Adobe Head of Lightroom Product Marketing | Formerly Google, AdRoll • July 12
Thinking back to the best PMMs I’ve worked with over the years – here are some things that make a stellar PMM: * Super organized with project management experience * Scrappy and able to try new things with a limited budget * Great collaborators * Able to lead and influence without “authority” * Curious and shown that they have learned skills outside of their core role * Nail the job specific tasks: positioning, messaging, content development, go-to market planning
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David Esber
Twilio Senior Director, Product Marketing • October 26
A deep understanding of the product, target audience, job to be done, and the technical solution is essential for our team to be good PMMs. For any product, even those that are less technical, knowing what the job to be done is and how the product offering does that job is a strong starting point. Every product conversation starts with what I call 20ish questions that generally focus on the following categories: * Job to be done (who, what, why) * Product accessibility (how do they use it, what limitations exist) * Market landscape (how does this address a need, what others solutions exist) * Go-to-market (paid/unpaid, roadmap) From there: * We partner with Product to develop a v1 of messaging * Test with internal stakeholders (account execs, solutions engineers, marketing colleagues) * Test with external stakeholders (analysts, friendly customers, painted-door webinars/3rd party events) * Refine positioning and gain signoff from Product and leadership * Activate through web updates, launches, and sales/internal enablement The level of depth we go depends on the launch size/opportunity size (i.e., a feature may be nested within our broader messaging and positioning, whereas a rebrand of a platform would be more extensive).
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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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Vidya Drego
SmithRx VP of Marketing | Formerly HubSpot, LinkedIn, Salesforce • January 19
It's an interesting time to be in product marketing because I think there will be significant shifts in the next few years in how we think about go-to-market. There's a fair amount being written today about how go-to-marketing motions have evolved from inside sales to inbound marketing to product-led growth and are heading towards more community-led growth. Each phase is additive to the one before it (i.e. companies are not going to stop doing one and move to the next but find more success in combining strategies) but I think a lot of the same skills will persist. First, PMMs will ALWAYS have to be exceptional communicators. Specifically, they have to be able to simplify the complex and not only write in their own voice, but typically in the voice of their company or sales team. They have to be able to understand a process or scenario that they're often not a part of and come up with ways of influencing it. And they have to be able to tell a story. Secondly, they have to be able to understand the dynamics of their market. This starts with who their customers are and how these people are changing or being challenged. The means by which a PMM influences or relates to their customers has changed and will continue to change but constantly listening to those customers and periodically picking your head up to evaluate whether the dynamics of the market have changed can often help you partner with experts to execute in the right way. As an example, my team has and will invest much more time with our customers telling their story, helping turn them into acvocates and build and develop their own communities. This is different from where we spent our time five years ago but involves many of the same skills.
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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 7
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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Varun Krovvidi
Google Product Marketing Lead | Formerly Salesforce • February 15
As with any role, growing into "next level" requires two things: 1/ An understanding of what is the value provided to the organization by an individual at the next level 2/ Identifying and developing the right skillsets to provide that value. For example: Next level from a Senior PMM in a startup to mid-size company will require you to influence GTM direction (with deep market understanding), collaborate cross functionally (to drive results across teams), and improve full-funnel expertise (from top-of-funnel awareness to product adoption and retention strategies). Whereas the same next level from a senior PMM in a large organization might be required to manage more products in their portfolio or start to manage people. If we were to generalize, there are couple of skills that are common across these situations in general. For example, if you want to propel your career into a Director of Product Marketing role you need to become: 1/ Strategic thinker: Cultivate the ability to see the big picture. Start to understand deeply your market trends, competition, and company's overall goals. Translate this understanding into building narratives that align with broader company strategy – not just individual product needs. 2/ Data-driven decision maker: The closer you can tie GTM and marketing strategies directly to business and revenue metrics, the better. Back up your vision with the cold, hard numbers. And lastly, learn to tell stories about your strategies with data across leadership in different functions. 3/ Collaborative Leader: You will only maximize your impact and influence by working with other functions. For every strategy you develop, start to question how you can 10x the impact by working with other teams. Practice communicating with empathy, bring them into your process early, and share goals with them to build trust. 4/ Team multiplier: The most important tenet is to shift away from pure task execution and towards adding value. Learn to delegate strategically and if possible start to mentor talent early. Lastly, start to build a clear goal for your career. The next step is only a stepping stone. Is your path leading you to a VP of Product Marketing role, CMO, shifting into Product Management, or starting your own firm. Work backwards from there to build the right skills and path.
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Liz Gonzalez
Zendesk Director of Product Marketing - Global Enterprise (previously NYSE: ZEN) • August 23
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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Claudia Michon
Automation Anywhere Senior Vice President, Product & Solutions Marketing | Formerly Salesforce, L'Oreal, Godiva Chocolatier • April 25
Generative AI is a tool, an assistive technology. We all need to keep this in mind, especially leaders who erroneously think how they can replace their people with this tech. Why is this the case? The tech (today) cannot do one critical thing - creative, strategic thinking. It's dumb. It can serve data and knowledge, but it doesn't have wisdom. What makes the best PMMs is wisdom, having the ability to harness past experiences, customer needs, and sales requests, understand the market and the technical components of a product - and use all of that to make decisions, craft stories and bring something new to life. Keeping that in mind, I think of generative AI as helping with the microtasks that slow our work. Get a great tool that's flexible to grow with your team. There are quite a few out there. We have a tool that we use company-wide that's sanctioned by our IT team. In addition to Chat GPT there is also Glean, Jasper, Writer - and many more. You can create your own "GPTs" - essentially building knowledge bases with relevant inputs and data and training them to meet your needs, like giving them skills. I have a list of GPTs my team has built or plans to build. You're going to have to experiment here, so be patient. Example GenAI for PMM Use Cases: * Research a competitor's product lines or messaging * Turn video transcripts into blog posts * Create engaging demo scripts from step-by-step how-to's * Email nurture series generation based on core messaging and target persona * Create customer case studies from interviews * Create a GPT for a specific persona and rapidly generate value prompters and objection-handling documents * Brainstorm product names, taglines, or website headlines Will the tech get smarter? Of course. I recently heard a great quote from Seth Godin - "it's clear that AI is as dumb today as it will ever be again tomorrow." We all must keep up and become expert users to elevate our skill sets and remain relevant contributors to the success of an organization. Have fun!
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John Gargiulo
Airbnb Head of Global Product Marketing • November 30
Great question. Post-launch is the most underrated parts of the cycle. You've spent months aiming the rocketship, putting fuel in the tank and blasting off - now you've got to steer. Let's break it down into three steps: 1) ANALYZE The first thing is to immediately begin watching not just usage of the product, but which parts of the product. How are people interacting with your features? Where are they dropping off? Where are they spending their time? This will give you context and clarity to move onto step two. 2) PLAN Now that you know where your hypothesis was roughly right or wrong, develop a plan to go after those areas. Our team uses a one-pager that is incredibly simple, laying out the problem we're trying to solve (ex: the pricing is too high, awareness is too low) and mapping out in specific detail, right down to the deliverable specs, how we plan to solve it. 3) EXECUTE Especially soon after launch, when blemishes become clearer in the light of mass user feedback, we aim to move quickly. If you're still talking about a major problem with the way the product has been positioned or messaged two weeks later it's been way too long. Standups with your cross-functional team including creative shouldn't end at launch! The fun is just beginning...
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