AMA: Anthropic Startup Marketing Lead, Sarah Khogyani Wolf on Stakeholder Management

Get everyone in the same place.. a room, a doc, a Slack channel, whatever works and have a direct, honest conversation about what you're actually trying to accomplish together. I have found that most misalignment isn't really disagreement, it's just a symptom of not zooming out far enough.

When goals conflict, peel them back until you find the bigger goal underneath that everyone can get behind. Once that's shared and explicit, the smaller trade-offs get a lot easier to work through.

Honestly, just help. Look around for what needs doing, raise your hand, and get it done. Early on, you build trust by being the person who shows up and delivers. And the bar matters here.. don't just get things done but get them done really well. That's when you've earned the trust to start building on your own ideas.

Sales is sitting on a goldmine of customer insight: the actual pains, the real objections, the words customers use, what's clicking and what's not. Your job is to uncover and unveil that, not just push messaging. Ask what's working, what's falling flat, where deals are getting stuck. Sales adopts messaging they helped shape, not messaging that gets handed down.

From there, you pattern-match until you find signal. That's what you turn into messaging that actually lands with customers at scale.

The biggest thing is building a real partnership with your PM. Not just a weekly check-in, but a relationship where you're in the room when decisions happen. If you're new to a PMM role, this is the first thing I'd invest in.

But that only works if you show up with something to say. Bring your own point of view on the market, on customers, on where the product should go. The PMMs who get a seat at the table are the ones product wants in the room because they make the thinking better.