How do you break down responsibilities and KPIs for product launches between product management and marketing?

While there are different specific metrics that marketing and product teams track for product launches, what's critical is the alignment between the two and agreement on the metrics to track prior to the launch. Some examples of metrics tracked by each team: Product team: Satisfaction, usage by users and individual accounts, full funnel from a user trying the feature to actually using it Marketing team: % of reps enabled on the new product, leads generated, competitive win rate changes Metrics t ...Read More

The partnership with Product Marketing is one of the most important functions when it comes to rolling out a successful product. Don’t read too much into the last part of that statement though, a Product Marketing Manager (PMM) is a crucial teammate to include from the start, not just at launch time. If I know who I will be working with in advance, I tag them in Product Requirements Documents or other important materials. Sharing context from the beginning is so important!  As far as the KPIs go ...Read More

Oooohhhh, this is a good one and something I spend a lot of time balancing. Product owns the product and at the end of the day both gets unearned credit and unearned blame. It is your neck on the line for the end to end experience. Thinking through the experience that users get both in product and out of product (traditionally the domain of marketing) is well within Product's scope. That being said, as you expand your career and scope you'll find more and more that you don't scale. Not just in t ...Read More

I love this question because it's something I'm currently involved with at CookUnity. At a B2C company the marketing team is a Product Manager's best friend, especially in the early startup days. You can build the greatest product in the world but there are only so many Field of Dreams "if you build it they will come" success stories. You need someone out there telling your product's story and building awareness, hence the PM's need for a great relationship with the Marketing organization.  Laun ...Read More

I don't 😬 Obviously it depends on the size and scale and the situation so take this answer with a grain of salt, but I am a firm believer that you shouldn't ship the org chart when it comes to product goals and KPIs and landed impact. You're one team, one unit. You build and ship together, marketing included. Of course you have different techniques and tactics and skillset but you should all goal towards the same KPIs and the same landed impact. Ultimately you should optimize for the same things ...Read More

PSA: This perspective comes from a product-led growth company, where the product itself plays a central role in acquisition, activation, and retention. In more sales-led or enterprise contexts, ownership may look different, and that’s okay. The key is aligning accountability to influence within your model. Research and Data define the ICP. The rest of the organization (Product, Product Marketing, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success) continuously refine it based on real customer behavior and f ...Read More

Just like Shared KPI's between Engineering and Product Management, a similar shared KPI framework between Product Management and Marketing is a great way to build high quality products that bring customer delight and high ROI. This also builds camaraderie and encourages teamwork towards a common goal between these teams. Generally PM's would own Company, Business, Acquisition, User Engagement and User Satisfaction KPI's. Examples are: MRR, Churn rate, Number of users, DAU/WAU/MAU, Number of sess ...Read More

I generally think in terms of OKRs rather than KPIs, so here let's agree that we are talking about some shared measure of success! On our teams, Product Marketing is responsible for all communication about the product or feature to people outside the Product-Eng-Design org. They're our liaison to the outside world! That includes: Creating campaigns and collateral for customers Developing positioning documents Developing and rolling out enablement materials for go-to-market teams Implementing cam ...Read More

Every team is a little different, but based on my experience, generally this is how things typically get divided up: Product: Responsibilities: Feature specs / use-case definition (hopefully, you most of this is already covered in your PRD!) Technical readiness Beta testing coordination (In an ideal world, your beta testing yields some real customer results that can be leveraged by marketing in the initial marketing push) Success metrics definition Internal enablement (Sales, Support) - dependin ...Read More

I think this is one of my favorite ways of categorizing different kinds of product managers - based off of the KPI’s that they are being optimized for. Product managers who are focused on building products, fast, and shipping them to market are going to be measured a little bit differently than product managers who are about getting sales, reaching a particular enterprise market or even a product lead growth. For example, when you think about KPIs of one who is focused on marketing activities ve ...Read More

Before going in, we have to know who owns what. This is how Id go about it: Generally, a PM owns the what and why. Marketers own the when and how. Product should own the GTM strategy, not marketing, even though a PM with a marketing background can. The reasoning is simple: the product team knows the user better than anyone else. A lot of traditional thinking places this burden on marketing, but high-performing companies are moving away from this siloed approach by mixing product and growth (some ...Read More