AMA: Airtable Head of Solution & Category Product Marketing, Kevin Wu on B2B Product Marketing KPI’s

Good Product Marketing OKRs really depend on the business and what the company is trying to achieve. For example, if there's no unified launch process, you may set an objective to develop a launch program. Or another example: you're starting to lose deals to a specific competitor. You may kick off a competitive program to mitigate losses on competitive deals. It really depends on the business. For product launches: Did I reach my intended audience for this launch? How many people engaged with ou ...Read More

I agree with this statement. Sometimes when I look at PMM resumes that say something like “Increased sales pipeline by 30%” or “Increased product adoption by 15%”, I’m often skeptical because how much credit can a PMM really take? Did you write all the content? Did you do all the work on campaigns, ads, paid performance, SEO, SEM, digital, video, webinars, and webpages? PMMs operate through influence, not authority. We’re the strategic center of marketing—defining the strategy, personas, messagi ...Read More

This is a big question! I’m assuming we’re talking about new product positioning vs re-positioning an existing product. If you’re working on a mature product, it will be very difficult to change the position of that product in the market. For a new product, I would research and consider the following perspectives: Company vision, narrative, and category - What is the vision for the company? What’s the narrative? Is there a category you’re trying to create or win? How does this product fit into t ...Read More

Stakeholder management is an important skill of all PMMs. If you're actively driving an important program or initiative, there are a few tactics you can try out. 1. Organize, structure, and lead regular "cadence meetings" - For cross-functional initiatives, people often don't want to volunteer to be the program manager. If you're willing to put in the work and set up the calendar invites, manage the agenda, run the meetings effectively, and foster healthy participation and collaboration - you'll ...Read More

PMMs should be responsible for KPIs that bring users and customers to the product and through onboarding and activation. Are the materials provided to educate a user leading to activation? Is the onboarding experience good? Are experiments leading to intended results? Once the user has activated, PMs should be responsible for owning long-term adoption of specific feature areas. At some point, sending more emails to remind users that certain features exist just won't cut it. If the feature isn't ...Read More

It really depends on the company you work for, but for product-led sales companies like Airtable, we look at key performance indicators along the entire customer journey. Early in the funnel, we’ll focus on metrics like sign up and activation because we want to ensure people who find Airtable are successful onboarding onto the platform. For decision-makers, we’re looking at marketing qualified leads and conversion to sales accepted leads. For existing accounts, we focus on user growth, retention ...Read More

I see PM and PMM as different sides of the same coin. PMs face engineering, design, and research while PMMs face marketing, sales, and success. PMs are responsible for solving a customer’s problems in a delightful way and owning the roadmap. PMMs are responsible for taking products to market and driving awareness and acquisition. The two roles intersect on product launches. The truth is, many of the skills required are highly transferrable. PM and PMM are both roles that work through influence a ...Read More

Today Airtable is often compared with project management tools like Smartsheet, Monday.com, and Asana. That's because project or program management is the most common use case for teams needing to transition off some combination of email, Slack, and spreadsheets. People who give Airtable a spin quickly learn that our platform is much more powerful than a project management tool. Our strategy is to continue focusing on driving awareness within functional departments (marketing, product, IT, HR, f ...Read More

This depends on the industry, segment, and target buyer. When I was at AppDynamics marketing application performance monitoring to IT Ops teams, the land could take up to 3-6 months and the expand could take 6-12 months depending on the size of deal. At Airtable, there’s a lot more variability because we sell into so many functions (marketing, product, IT, HR, finance, legal, etc). Generally speaking, the more tech-forward departments like marketing, product, and IT will buy more quickly than sa ...Read More