AMA: Attentive Director of Product Marketing, Candice Sparks on Stakeholder Management

During the first 90 days of any new role, I like to go on a listening tour. Identify your counterparts you'll be working with across the spectrum of the organization (everyone from finance to product) and ask them the same 3 questions. What you'll start to understand is where the answers differ and where there is an opportunity for alignment. By going on this listening tour you are first understanding where the organization is at, and where there are challenges and opportunities before coming in and changing anything. The second thing I will do is to try and get a deep understanding of the numbers. For example, what does our sales funnel look like? How do we measure the adoption of features? What are the OKRs and how are we pacing? What are our customers saying? This enables you to have an informed and data-driven opinion. Finally, a huge part of trust is building great rapport and relationships. Scheduling virtual coffee meetings, lunch and learns (if you're in an office) or just simply slacking and asking how their weekend was, is important to start knowing your teammates on a personal level.

There are a few things that I believe help PMMs to prioritize and manage expectations across the organization. 1. Creating quarterly and annual plans. These plans should include the top priorities for you and your team, your OKRs, and key projects. Once these plans are set I share them with my key stakeholders (product, marketing, sales, exec) to ensure there's visibility and alignment on what PMM is working on. As new projects or requests come in you can stack rank them against your currently planned projects and agreed OKRs you're focusing on. I like to review these plans on a quarterly basis in case new products or company initiatives have been introduced that may alter your current plan. 2. Top 3 - In my current role, the executive team does a great job of sharing what their top 3 initiatives or priorities they are working on. Making sure you and your team's top 3 align with what the execs believe to be most important at the time is also crucial to ensure you're prioritizing the right things. 3. On a personal note for my to-do list, I also like to implement the Eisenhower Matrix: This method involves dividing tasks into four categories: important and urgent, important but not urgent, urgent but not important, and neither urgent nor important. Prioritize tasks based on their urgency and importance.

Getting stakeholder alignment is critical for the success of any project or initiative. I think this skill set is even more important to a PMM as a large part of the job is getting teams aligned on the desired outcome and path to achieving your goals. Step 1: Understand who the proper stakeholders are. This may differ with every project. I like to create a project plan at the beginning that includes the RACI model (a model that identifies roles and responsibilities within your project and stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed) Step 2: Determine their needs and expectations: Once you have identified your stakeholders, determine what their needs and expectations are. Take the time to understand what is important to each stakeholder, such as revenue growth, customer satisfaction, or market share. This will help you tailor your communication and messaging to their needs. Step 3: Develop a shared vision. Work with your stakeholders to develop a shared vision for your project or initiative. This will help ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals. This includes what are the goals and key metrics you're tracking against in this project. Step 4. Communicate regularly. I like to set up weekly, or bi-weekly meetings with all the necessary stakeholders to communicate progress and roadblocks. This creates transparency and trust across the org.

Any client-facing teams I believe should provide feedback on your messaging/positioning. For example, your client strategy/customer success teams get a ton of feedback from your customers who are actually using your product and have a great perspective on what resonates with your prospects and customer base. Secondly, a part of sales, but a key subset of your sales team are sales engineers. Sales engineers have a natural way of telling a great demo story and are boots on the ground hearing directly from prospects on what they're looking for, what key competitors have, why they're switching from their incumbent solution, etc. Partnering closely with the lead sales engineer on my product is a must for me! Finally, your marketing team. They have an invaluable perspective on how your messaging/positioning for specific products works with your overall corporate narrative. They should be a key decision maker when it comes to how you are positioning your products to the market and how you're differentiating.

Different meetings are needed at different stages of a company and products maturity but some meetings that I think are crucial at any stage are the following: Monthly product release meetings: PMM to present upcoming monthly releases to marketing, sales and CS teams. This allows them to ask questions, get a demo, and hear about upcoming releases and how they are being marketed. Bi-weekly product development meetings: Discuss in-flight products being worked on, their timeline and any roadblocks. This typically includes PMM, product, engineering, design and PMO. Bi-weekly GTM meetings: This includes leads from sales, PMM, product, and CS to discuss key metrics were tracking against, any major projects or releases and open discussion time.

One of the key challenges with communicating product marketing achievements is often times there are less concrete KPIs. For example, demand gen is looking at MQLs and sales is looking at quota attainment. For that reason, communicating PMM success can sometimes come off as "fluffy". I believe there are some organic ways to drive transparency and visibility into your team for example presenting at All Hands on recent releases, in sales team meetings on new collateral created or sales plays, and in training to your internal teams on recent product releases. This naturally builds visibility into your team and the impact they are having across the organization. I also like to do a monthly recap or roundup of all the progress made against your quarterly PMM plans. What I touched on in a prior question on building plans, you should be reporting on the progress made against these plans. For example, if it's to increase your demo pipeline - what are we doing to accomplish this on a monthly basis and how are we tracking against these key metrics? The great news is that PMM is a high-impact and visible role across the organization so naturally your team will be involved in a lot of large cross-functional initiatives.