AMA: Square Product Lead, Carrie Zhang on Product Management vs Product Marketing

It’s a good idea to try internal transfer if you want to transition from PMM to PM, or vice versa. Learning the craft of a new discipline is not easy. You are more likely to set yourself up for success if you minimize other variables like new company, new product, new team. Anchor on your strength. There are many transferable skills between the two disciplines, e.g., customer discovery, data analytics, communication and influencing skills. Leverage your strength in the new role and you will find ...Read More

Ha, organizational design questions are always the fun ones. :) These types of questions don’t have a right or wrong answer. Each design will have its pros and cons and it’s all about what you are trying to optimize. When I started in product marketing at Square, we reported into marketing. About 8 months later, we got spun off marketing and reported into product GMs. While I didn’t think that changed how I did my job - reflecting on the experience - I did feel some differences. While I was in m ...Read More

Good question. I view product management and product marketing as close partners since we co-own the strategy and business outcome. Cannot say I have best practices, rather some guiding principles of how I would like to see us work together. Involve each other early. I hate the model where the product team does a hard handoff to product marketing only when the product/ feature is ready to launch. PM, PMM, as well as other disciplines like Design, Engineering, and Data Science all bring unique pe ...Read More

The product manager (PM) decides “what” to build and “when”, and is accountable for delivering the product or feature that delights customers. The product marketer (PMM) informs “what” to build, and is accountable for driving the demand for what has been built. Both require deep customer and market insights. Both need to think strategically about how to differentiate your product in your space. The difference lies in execution. On a day-to-day basis, the PM works very closely with designers and ...Read More

From the very beginning and throughout the development process. This is very much related to the previous question. I will try to bring to life how the process works on the Square teams. For any new feature development, we hold a kickoff/ problem alignment with PM, PMM, Design, Eng and Data Science. The goal is to align on the customer problem, generate hypotheses, identify open questions that need further investigation. From there, PM, PMM, and Design may divide and conquer customer research ta ...Read More