AMA: Benchling Head Of Product Marketing, Katherine Kelly on Building a Product Marketing Team

Make sure every early hire you go for has a clear "mission" - what are you going to get from that person. What problem are you going to target them at. Once you start to get past hiring to solve specific problems - refer to my other answer about how you think about coverage of market / product in...more

I've really come to value true product marketing experience in my more senior hires. It's really nice to have a few folks on the team who know the drill. But I've also found that my PMM teams tend to skew more senior overall, each person is sort of in charge of an area and as such you want a more...more

IMPACT. So often product marketing teams get snowed under by trying to do all the things. They focus on completeness. They want to have every box checked. But they have no idea if any of it is working. Every other team in the business will have endless needs - endless requests - of PMM, but you h...more

Ooo this is a great question. And I have a great answer - it depends! In all seriousness - I've long been a believer that there's no perfect model for a PMM team, it really comes down to the needs of the business and maturity of the organization. As a general rule of thumb, I like to have a...more

Fun! It sounds like you have so much potential for impact. I would recommend looking at your external and internal factors. So it'd be tempting with a "complex" feature set to say - split it into equal sets of product to become expert in. But the thing is - I may be unpopular for saying this -...more

I'll tell you a few of the red flags that immediately turn me off a candidate: 1. too many "I" statements. PMM is so collaborative, so cross-functional...if you are making it sound like YOU did all this stuff on your own, either I fully doubt it, or in fact that tells me something was wrong. ...more

I've pretty much been consistently hiring for the last several years. I almost always have that "I'm hiring" thing on my LinkedIn (It's there right now!!) Here are a few tips: * Be transparent - if you like a candidate, tell them straight up and tell them where you are in the process. ask the...more

I focus on the fundamentals: 1. Opportunity - how does each person on the team have opportunity to grow? 2. Appreciation - so many ways to show appreciation, big and small 3. Prioritize the person - work is work, life is bigger. walk the walk on making it work for them to prioritize thei...more

For me, I have to be intentional here. Because it's so easy to get sucked in to the work and just surviving from deadline to deadline. But you have to put it to the forefront and make it a priority.  One thing I like to do is involve the team in determing the values we'll prioritize, that way ...more

Trick question! All my teams have been equally fantastic and I love them all the same. BUT I would say that one thing I focus on is trying to develop PMM teams that know how to collaborate. There's a lot of focus on "coverage" and areas of ownership -- but in all my teams I've forced matrices ...more