AMA: Adobe Sr Director of Product Marketing, Creative Cloud, Katharine Gregorio on Establishing Product Marketing

At its core product marketing is reaching the right customer with the right message proposition at the right time to get someone to consider, try, buy or renew your product. How you do this for B2B and B2C often differs across the messaging, channels and tactics used to reach your goals. Why? Let's break it down. B2C product marketing targets individual consumers who typically make decisions based on personal preferences, emotions, and immediate desires or needs. Marketing strategies therefore tend to focus on creating a personal connection with the consumer, using messaging that taps into emotions, lifestyle, and instant gratification. The goal is to appeal to the consumer's needs, desires, or aspirations in a way that feels immediate and relevant. Channels and tactics to reach the target consumer could range from out of home to social to media placements to other niche solutions perhaps around community building or events depending on the goal being executed against. For B2B product marketing the audience typically involves multiple stakeholders who make decisions based on considerations relevant to the role they play for the company and the need they have for a solution to the problem the product offered is seeking to solve. Thus, B2B marketing typically focuses on rational messaging, emphasizing the business value, ROI, and long-term benefits of the product. Up market aspects around control, compliance and security are critical tablestakes as well. Marketing is usually less emotional and more focused on solving business problems, improving efficiency, or enhancing profitability. Importantly less emotional does not mean boring or a bad story and there are outliers here, especially with PLG companies. The primary channel and tactic is about enabling and supporting a sales team (note this includes your website) and the messaging can and should evolve through the buying process.

Product marketing gets more resourced, specialized and thus more complicated as a company grows. Let's look at a hypothetical contrast. Company #1 - A start up with one PMM hire PMM #1 wears many hats (some often beyond traditional PMM). Key activities likely include: * talking to customers * writing website copy * launching the product as a beta or out of a beta and subsequent new features * creating decks for sales teams * enabling the sales and support teams * writing content across the buyers journey * writing help and faqs for one to many * analyzing the competitive landscape Company 2 - A PMM IC at a Fortune 50 company PMM #2 wears one hat working on outbound PMM for the SMB segment in the US of a product in a broad portfolio. Key activities likely include: * talking to customers (usually through other functions who do qual and quant research or via CABs but good ones still go and talk to customers outside these channels) * writing messaging frameworks to give to copywriters who write website copy * creating go to marketing strategy decks that are reviewed in several internal rounds of approval that then beget go to marketing strategy plans created by marketing functions (comms, demand gen, etc),sales enablement functions, and specialized content teams for each type of content being created (or via agencies) including sales, marketing and support content * analyzing the competitive landscape in partnership with colleagues who do their role around the world and perhaps with other nearby b2b segments such as micro businesses There is obviously a range in between and as you advance your career to manage PMMs you work will change as well.

Storytelling is a way to structure content. Successful storytelling structures content that engages an audience across a journey or via an experience that creates a feeling that remains with the audience well after the journey or experience is over. Think of the last book great book you read. Can you remember what it was about? Maybe. Can you remember how it made you feel. Probably. The interesting thing I really came to realize during Covid is that storytelling isn't just for external audiences. They're useful for internal audiences too. With this framing in mind, the answer is simply - storytelling is crucial to the day to day work for PMM (and PM). It helps run successful meetings, manage up, execute launches, drive decisions, influence roadmaps, enable sales teams, etc. It also helps craft company and product stories to help grow the business. As one advances ones career there are more opportunities to hone your craft, but the fundamentals remain. The last thing I will say here is that in my experience the best PMMs are the best storytellers. They can net out the signal from the noise for executives, TL;DR the customer feedback to the meat for product; and write copy that resonates with prospects. If there is one skill to really practice that will make you a successful PMM I would encourage you to lean into becoming the best storyteller you can be.

The answer to this question is so contextual. What product(s) does your company have? Who are they for and how do you reach them? Who already is in place in the company and what skills do they possess? And then of course all of this changes as a company grows. My advice is to sit down and look at the goals for GTM. From there look at the strategy that is needed to deliver on these goals and the capabilities required to achieve the tactics that support the strategy. Through this you can define the functions needed and outline the best roles and responsibilities possible against the needs you have, the resources you have and can hire. Over communicate where there is possible friction from the gray areas and put in place a process/way to check in on the R&Rs established as things change (new products, high growth, new competition, etc). When things (inevitably) change you can simply repeat this process again.

The answer is this depends. If you're the first hire, go do the best job you can do against the goals you have - finding pmf, growing top line, driving awareness of the product in the market, etc. Then as the company matures and you have a better sense of who the ICP is and how to reach them let the GTM strategy dictate how you hire and build out your team. For PLG you'll want to think about the role community and social plays for example while for enterprise you'll want to explore whether you need to double down on sales enablement or think about industry or vertical specialization over time.

There are a few things I do before I accept a new PMM role and a few things I do within my first 30 days. Before I accept * Talk to customers - either by asking the company for references or working my network to find users * Read what people are saying about the space and the company - how competitive is the company, what is their positioning and how differentiated is it * Ask the people on the PMM team and others that I'd be working with what the biggest challenges and opportunities are My first 30 days * Talk to customers * Look through the work that has been done - what exists and doesn't, how old is it and how does it match to the conversations I've already had * Meet with the people on the PMM and others (both who I interviewed and didn't) to ask those same questions again, what's working and where there is opportunity

Pursue a lot of different ways to collect user feedback that are both quantitative and qualitative. 1. Conduct feedback on a schedule - win/loss analysis monthly, weekly NPS roundups, quarterly CAB sessions 2. Conduct feedback ad hoc - seek to understand a certain dynamic or segment through a one off quant survey 3. Cultivate your own personal user board of prospects and customers who will tell you the truth (not just what they think you may want to hear which is one issue I sometimes see with CABs) to gut check or do quick tests on things ranging from messaging for a campaign landing page or who will give you the scoop on a beta of a competitor you can't get access to or something else The most important thing is the feedback needs to generate insights. Make sure you know why you're doing whatever you are doing and then make sure you get insights and not just raw data or feedback from the activity so you can take action against the reason you did it in the first place.

This is a really hard question to answer because PMM differs at every company and also in many ways PMM is the most valuable and least understood function in tech. I've seen Venn diagrams that show that PMM serves as an interface between product and sales, organizational charts that have PMM in product, marketing, and even once design. Across the three startups where I stood up PMM as a function, talking to friends at other companies and now at Adobe, I have learned that the best way to lead and communicate what PMM is requires showing not telling. Some ways I've done this in my first 90 days are: * A competitive landscape teardown with insights and recommendations * A positioning workshop across functions * Synthesizing customer conversations for product and executive teams * Executing a small launch and driving results I welcome examples in the comments for ways others have shown what PMM is.

The biggest mistakes I see product marketers make are: 1. Not talking to customers enough - If you're not talking to a few customers every week (or month if you're at a bigger company) you're missing out. From message testing to hidden opportunities for workflow improvement to whatever else you're looking into after ~5 conversations you will likely start to see a pattern. 2. Not using the product and its competitors - It's hard to develop empathy for your customer if you don't use the product or if this isn't possible watch your user use it. Pick a project and test out your product against the competitive landscape. I guarantee you will learn a lot and might be inspired for other ways to differentiate or hidden opportunities to message. 3. Not speaking up to try to influence the product roadmap - By far the most painful part of product marketing is launching a product or feature(s) and having them fail and then being asked by executives why KPIs aren't being met. It's far more helpful to get involved earlier to influence the roadmap to ensure that what is being built will be successful. Tip - Talking to customers and using your products and the competition go a long way to help here.