How do you build better relationships with product marketing? I feel like this is the most complicated relationship out of all cross-functional partners. How do you constantly stay aligned?

I don't think my answer here is unique to building relationships with product marketing. The key for me is to engage with people early and often. Eearlier on in my career, I've definitively made the mistake of treating product marketing as the 'launch team'; the product development teams build the product and throw it over the fence to marketing team to do the launch.

As I highlighted in my previous answer, PMMs want to deliver customer value as much as PMs do and it's therefore important for PMs to involve PMMs as early on in the development process as possible and well beyond launch. Establish trust by being open with your product marketing colleagues about the customer problems you're looking to solve and the value that you'ree looking to deliver. This provides a fertile ground for a productive working relationship between PMs and PMMs, working out early what the respective responsibilities are throughout the product development process. 

Since I have experience on both sides of the aisle, I can agree that this is definitely a complex relationship! PM and PMM are two of the toughest roles involved in bringing products to market, because of the high degree of uncertainty that each job entails and the need to tailor each role's work to both product and organizational maturity.

I think there are three focus areas for creating and maintaining a great relationship with PMM:

1. Clear roles and responsibilities. If you haven't already conducted a functional roles assessment and gap analysis with your PMM team, you should start there. You don't literally have to use an instrument like Pragmatic's Framework Gap Analysis (https://mediafiles.pragmaticmarketing.com/Framework-Files/Gap-Analysis_1307.14.xls) but I have always found that one helpful at surfacing disconnects between who is responsible for something and who is being consulted. This is obviously much more of a job for PM and PMM leadership but if you're an IC and not getting the clarity you need from your management team, this is a good thing to push on.

2. Regular operational cadence and measurement. The corollary to this is to bring PMM into product development early. I can't emphasize enough how important it is to keep PMM read in, even during product management's discovery phase, and sharing rough drafts of artifacts like PR/FAQs and designs. This is even if you don't anticipate that the feature or product will be launched for several quarters. Doing so ensures PMM internalizes the broader context of what PM has in mind, what customer problems they're trying to solve and segments they're solving them for. When it's time to launch, the feature and its motivations are not a surprise. The same goes in the other direction. I want to hear from PMM regularly on what messaging and positioning is or isn't working in the field, what salespeople are saying they need in order to sell, how PMM's work is being threaded through to demand generation and campaigns and its impact on the top line.

3. Agreed-upon communication artifacts and bill of materials. I use a single spreadsheet that is a rough roadmap, plus PR/FAQs (other companies use "one-pagers") to explain to PMM what is the value proposition of each feature being built, in a customer's language. All of this rolls up to one high-level product strategy document that is updated once a quarter. Having a small set of detailed artifacts for information interchange keeps communication concise and accurate. Similarly, I expect PMM to maintain an evergreen "bill of materials" for each product and be able to explain on what cadence each BoM item is updated. This also helps both PM and PMM manage the sales team and prevent the creation of rogue, one-off artifacts that aren't on brand or on message.

TLDR: Stay aligned by clearly defining your roles and responsibilities. There are published RACI models on the role of PMM. Align on a RACI and stick to it. Then establish a continuous cadence for staying in contact throughout product development to ensure PMMs are always in the loop.

I love product marketing as a function, and there is nothing more valuable to me than a strong product marketer. The triad model of product development often refers to Design, Product, and Tech/Engineering leads but truly it should be a "quad" model to include product marketing. The relationship shouldn't be too complicated. It should be pretty clear where one function begins and the other ends based on the owners of certain deliverables:

Product manager - product strategy docs that talk about positioning - what differentiates the product relating to competition/alternative solutions, PRFAQ, PRD, use case requirements, user stories, prioritization of requirements and features, roadmap - both in presentation and system format

• Design - Figma mockups, user journeys, user persona research, UX research (plan, notes, analysis)

• Arch/Engineering - technical requirements on user stories/eng requirements doc (ERD), solution architecture, sprint plan, quality / testing plan

• Product marketing - product messaging brief, sales plays, field enablement (on products, buyer/user personas, use cases), customer facing decks, industry analyst presentations

Where this can get confusing in some organizations is deciding who owns pricing/packaging and competitive analysis. Sometimes organizations actually have departments that own each of these areas separate from product and PMM. I often see pricing/packaging owned by product and competitive in PMM.

I meet with PMM every other week. PMM joins customer calls, gets access to early product strategy docs to provide feedback, pulls data to analyze different dimensions of performance and sales for me, and proactively creates messaging docs that she asks me to review. We have a lot of trust and open lines of communication because we have very clear ownership areas defined.

My #1 tip here is to bring the Product Marketers into projects as early as possible! PMMs can bring valuable customer perspective to discovery, research, goal-setting, and scope refinement. Engaging their input at kickoff will (hopefully) ensure that they are equally invested in the success of the the solution you will jointly bring to market.