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Hannah Hughes

AMA: Affirm Director of Consumer Marketing, Hannah Hughes on Product Marketing vs Product Management

August 31, 2022 @ 9:00AM PT

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  1. What specific areas of roadmap influence do you think product marketing can help the most with?

    Is it the decision of what features to actually build based on customer feedback and marketing opportunity OR more so naming, branding and how we position and target features?

    Hannah Hughes
    Hannah Hughes

    Plaid Chief Marketing Officer | Formerly Apple, Google, Airbnb, Facebook • 3y

    The answer has a lot to do with how you and your PM work together. Ultimately, much of the PM<>PMM relationship comes down to what you each agree to own- it's different for every group. It's a relationship that requires a lot of influence without control. The more trust and rapport you have built, the better your work will be.  If you and your PM don't see eye-to-eye, or they feel a lot of ownership over the roadmap and aren't open to influence -> Focusing on message strategy and GTM (s ...Read More

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  2. How different are the product marketing KPIs from the product management KPIs?

    Hannah Hughes
    Hannah Hughes

    Plaid Chief Marketing Officer | Formerly Apple, Google, Airbnb, Facebook • 3y

    This is a great question! Depending on your product and the complexity of your funnel, PMM may have more or less impact on the metrics PM is responsible for. As you plan KPIs for your PMM team, ensure that they are far enough up-funnel that your team can impact them- or make sure that the PMM team has enough influence on the downfunnel experience (which is usually within the product itself) to impact that metric. For example, if you're working on a credit card sign-up journey: PMM could own the ...Read More

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  3. Through the lens of a feature/product lifecycle, what are the critical points of collaboration between product marketing and product management? And what are the lines that distinguish who owns which part?

    Hannah Hughes
    Hannah Hughes

    Plaid Chief Marketing Officer | Formerly Apple, Google, Airbnb, Facebook • 3y

    1. Intial product definition - Owned by Product, PMM consults. Help the team to assess: Are we building something that meets the basic requirements of the market? Where do we fall alongside competitors? Are we creating a delightful experience that will keep users coming back?  2. Messaging/Value Prop development- Owned by PMM, Product consults. How can we talk about this product so that it drives comprehension and affinity? Throughout both product and marketing touchpoints, how might we create c ...Read More

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  4. How do you get product management to focus more on customer problems and solving them, and less on shipping features that customers don't need?

    They want to convey 20+ features to the public when we should only focus on top 3-5 features then figure out what the true benefit is to the end user.

    Hannah Hughes
    Hannah Hughes

    Plaid Chief Marketing Officer | Formerly Apple, Google, Airbnb, Facebook • 3y

    A few ideas on how to respond to your product partners in these situations:  Propose bundled launches- Group similar features into one announcement to decrease cognitive load for users.  Create requirements for broader marketing support- Create a framework of how PMM supports different levels of features. How does your team support features that are seeking product<>market fit vs scaled mature features? Share explicit expectations around funnel performance with your product partner, dig in ...Read More

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  5. Who owns customer feedback in your organization, and does that ownership change across stages like design partners, beta, and full release?

    Hannah Hughes
    Hannah Hughes

    Plaid Chief Marketing Officer | Formerly Apple, Google, Airbnb, Facebook • 3y

    I think there are actually 2 questions here. Who collects the feedback, and how a team decides to respond to it. The maturity of the product matters here, so I'll break it down into 2 stages: For very early-stage products, keep a much responsibility withing the core working group as possible- This means collecting feedback, troubleshooting, analysis, and sales enablement/internal comms and education. Shortening the feedback loop helps the team move faster. In this model, both PM and PMM collect ...Read More

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