AMA: Atlassian Head of Core Product Marketing & GTM, ITSM Solutions, Daniel Kuperman on Building a Product Marketing Team

In most B2B tech organizations (where I've spent most of my career) the PMM team owns the Go-To-Market. From a strategic perspective this means: - Who we should sell to and how - What should we sell and why - How we'll reach them and what we'll tell them - Knowing what works and course-correcting The challenge is that each of these elements is broken down into specific tactics, such as: - Who we should sell to and how: creating buyer personas, doing market segmentation, identifying sales channel ...Read More

I am very biased in this case because my company, Atlassian, makes tools that help with this. For example, we are heavy users of Confluence and for each product launch we have a page outlining the steps, ownership, deadlines, etc. related to each activity of the launch. This page is shared across teams and anyone can see it and understand what's going on.  In this Confluence page we can also embed specific Jira tickets that the product team is using to manage their deliverables for the launch, w ...Read More

I believe that adding more people to your team needs to follow the needs of the business. This means making sure you can break down the goals or OKRs that you, as a PMM leader, is responsible for and outlining the key initiatives that will help you achieve them. Part of this exercise is to also identify what you can and what you cannot do with the current team. For example, you may list out things such as "create competitor battle cards, conduct win/loss analysis, write 3 new whitepapers, implem ...Read More

Enablement tactics and tools that work for a team of 50 reps need to be adjusted when you deal with a team of 500 globally dispersed reps. Some common challenges I have seen include: Multiple enablement/training tools and portals making it confusing for reps to know where to go Breaks in communication and lack of localization of content Failure to take local needs into account Changes in personas and competitive environment Prioritization of requestsProduct marketers should work with their sales ...Read More

I've seen a bit of everything when it comes to the split of Product Marketing teams. At some companies it is done by product line, at others by industry, and some by customer segment. And I don't think there's a 'best' way to do it, honestly. It all depends on what makes sense for your company. I do think you can ask the following questions to get enough data to make good judgement call on this: 1. Do you have one or more products? And if more than one product, do each have their own distinct bu ...Read More

Although each company has their own way of building and growing their product marketing teams, one way to think about global vs local is based on customer needs and market dynamics.  If the product you sell has the same buyer persona across different regions and the market dynamics are such that the competition is basically the same everywhere, your 'global' PMM team is able to effectively message, position, and market world-wide. If, however, the moment you cross geographic zones the buyer pers ...Read More

That's an especially important question for PMM leaders today. There are a few key components to pay attention to: - Compensation - Work - Growth First is to ensure your people are being paid fairly. This means always keeping an eye on the market rate for people on your team and whether they are below, above, or in the middle range for the base pay. At larger companies, your HR team will be able to provide that, but at smaller companies and startups, you'll have to do some research using third-p ...Read More

If you had asked me this at the start of the pandemic I would have told you I have no idea what I'm doing. I had always worked in an office alongside my PMM co-workers and team. Going fully remote was a big shock. But now, having learned a lot and working for a company that is remote-first and having myself a distributed team (I have people in Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Sidney...) I believe I can give you some tips and things to avoid. The biggest challenge, of course, is not being present ...Read More

That depends on what you are hiring for and the level of experience you need in the new hire. If I were to hire someone to run my competitive program, for example, I would look for a PMM that has done this in the past, has created a competitive program from scratch and can show me examples of the battle cards they've created and the impact they have generated.  If, on the other hand, I need someone to support an existing program and I have someone more senior that is overseeing the program from ...Read More