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

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 application rate while PM owns ultimate card sign-ups.

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 consistent language and a seamless user experience? 3. Go-To-Market Planning- Owned by PMM, Product consults. What is our GTM approach? How will we launch this in a memorable way that puts product in front of the right audience. 4. The launch itself- Owned by Product, PMM consults- Monitoring performance in the moment, navigating unexpected challenges and bugs, partnering on responses when needed.

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 (sometimes called 'outbound marketing') can be an easy way to show value as you build the relationship. As you develop these deliverables, use data to help communicate what is working to your PM. Can you run some message tests? Partner with user research to run some interviews discussing a few variations of the value props? When you demonstrate measurable value, your PM will be interested in applying your gains to the product experience. If you are able to show up as a contributor to the product experience from the beginning, it will feel much more natural for you to contribute to the roadmap directly. Find ways to add value- if your PM isn't valuing your input, go to user research, content strategy, design. Give people information that will help them make better decisions, and always be thinking of ways to build trust with your product collaborators.

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 with them about how to improve feature engagement. * Highlight risks- If a feature doesn't seem valuable, be vocal in expressing your concerns! This, if handled with grace, could save the org a lot of time and effort. It's definitely sensitive and needs to be handled delicately. A few ways this has worked for me in previous roles: connecting PMs working on similar features and asking them to consider a consolidation, partnering with Product on usability feedback, suggesting a different launch time (different month or quarter) to avoid conflicts with other launches.

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: 1. 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 feedback through the channels they have access to. PMM is critical in this stage because they are helping craft product direction before there's a lot of data to draw from. PMMs assist in the actual collection of the feedback, and help interpret the information into a roadmap, a messaging pivot, or a critical bug fix. 2. For scaled/mature products, leverage the strength of the organization- In my experience more mature product feedback has been collected by teams with particular focus on certain channels: Social care and support, Customer Service, and Product. They each own their respective channels for feedback and they are collated at specific moments (such as quarterly planning) to inform the product roadmap. This work has usually been owned by Product with input from PMM- where PMM can add the most value is contextualizing that feedback. Which of these pieces of feedback should we prioritize and why? Is there something in the competitive landscape that will escalate a certian set of features? A bug that is particularly harmful to the product's reputation or user experience?