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

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 senior person to lead that. Which means that the career path to PMM is often building up experience in other roles and transitioning into PMM later in the career, so for mid level roles I think that well-rounded marketer could be a perfect fit.

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 and collaboration and sometimes it's been hard but in all cases I've been proud of the way the team grows when they work together and learn to lean on each other.

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 we can bring it up if we ever lag and discuss what we need to do to bring them forefront again. I like to create cultures the focus on: accountability, collaboration, empowerment, expertise, transparency, directness, support...and I always like to have a sense of fun and humor as well :) 

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 - it's not on PMM to be the expert in the deep technical product. But to be expert in how the product intersects with key market segments. So I would say split it by looking at your core GTM motion - whether it's particular market segment, or expansion v new business, bonus if it aligns well with the way the rest of the organization is aligning leadership so you are lined up to specific stakeholders that you can focus on. And keep your eye on the core business metrics - not vanity metrics. Doesn't matter if you make a ton of content - if you can have a smart conversation about how the product is hitting in a market segment and what you suggest to do about it...that puts you in a totally different league than saying "last quarter we did this launch and got x views" Have fun!

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 intersections, that's where you start to get scale.

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 their life, whether that's encouraging a vacation when you suspect burnout, ensuring they feel safe to take time for family when / how needed, celebrating their milestones, understanding how life events impact them, etc. And a happy hour or two never hurt ;) But the bonus comment is - realize that it's a small world too. I once bragged about how I went through a number of years without any attrition; which felt great to be sure. but I've also realized there's reason to celebrate when someone on my team has grown and gotten a cool new role - even when that's somewhere else. And by celebrating that with them, supporting them in that growth.... and staying in touch, I keep my hiring network intact for the future. 

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 them where they are in theirs. What do you have to lose by saying "Look, you seem like an incredibly strong candidate and I feel you'd be a great fit for the team. But we like to get a full panel of candidates in to ensure equity in hiring so we're probably a week (or whatever) out before making a final decision. What is your timeline looking like?" * Focus on what actually helps you decide - you don't need every cross-functional person on your panel just because. Whose opinion will actually sway you? Focus on those people. If you want to see work samples - do you really need them to do a mock project for your company, or can they share their own historical work? Think about how you can consolidate steps - I've sometimes skipped "presentations" and just asked for past work to be sent as pre-reads prior to 1:1s and then we condense the whole process AND give interviewers fodder to talk to the candidate about in their 1:1. * Don't stop recruiting until a candidate signs. Because you might lose them. Plan like you think you'll lose them because it happens.

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. 2. Speaking in too many absolutes. When I ask about how you do a thing, if you respond like there's one way - that actually makes me feel like you're just quoting the textbook. I love when a candidate says "well it depends...in this scenario, I did it like this. In that scenario, I did it like that" shows me that you're connecting insight through to strategy through to execution and I'm more confident that you'll be able to apply that experience to a new situation.

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 an owner for every major intersection of buyer and product. So if you have two very different buyers of the same product, it might make sense to have a PMM owner for those personas. If you have two very different products to the same buyer, it may make sense to have a PMM owner for each product. If you have a complex system of multiple buyer segment/personas and products...you may need to build a matrixed team to scale to cover all those key intersections. I'd say most commonly I've ended up with some kind of matrix. The next consideration is maturity of your PMM processes - if you have a fairly mature organization where day to day functional foundation (launch processes, pricing and packaging process, enablement, quarterly planning, competitive, etc) are in place...great, focus on getting coverage of your key buyer/product intersections. If not - you may want to hire someone with that functional expertise and task them with building that foundation. For some period of time that may be more critical to you than having those intersections covered. Hope this helps!

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 have to get good at calling out what metric you're focused on and how you think you can ladder into it. Get good at talking to the metrics of the business and get good at thinking about how what you do ladders into the business stategy.