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

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 " ...Read 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 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 la ...Read 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 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 differe ...Read 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 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, ...Read 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 - 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 ...Read 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 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, d ...Read 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 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 wel ...Read 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 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 ...Read More