AMA: Box VP Product Marketing, Alexa Schirtzinger on Stakeholder Management

A lot of it depends on the types of products you're marketing. Some teams can be easily organized into solution-based pods, so if you have a lot of products in your portfolio, you might have product marketers who focus on individual products reporting up to a solutions marketer, who represents a broader category.  At Box, our products are more horizontal, so we have a team of product-focused marketers who work closely with the product and engineering teams, and then a team of solutions marketers ...Read More

The thing I don't do is a weekly/monthly team-based newsletter. I find that these generally take a ton of work, aren't read by many people (we're all busy!), and can too easily veer into a kind of self-promotion that can build resentment within other teams. Instead, we generally focus on cross-functional project updates -- status emails for major launches, announcement emails when the big launches go out, and project-based presentations at exec meetings and company or departmental all-hands meet ...Read More

First of all: patience. Lots of it. :) As you start to unravel the history of the relationship, you’re likely to find norms that were established so long ago that no one knows why they’re there. And with every new person who comes on board, you have the opportunity to start building new, more positive norms...but of course this can take a long time. In addition, a few other tactics I rely on: Build support at every level. The individual contributors on a team can be just as powerful as the execu ...Read More

Bad content is so frustrating! I generally use one or all of these tactics when I’m facing headwinds like this: Try to understand the cause. It sounds like what's behind the c-suite pushback is fear of change, and in my experience, CxOs (like the rest of us!) sometimes just need to be reassured that everything will be fine. You can help everyone feel better about trying something new with a little social proof (e.g. at most software companies, the corporate pitch gets a refresh every 3-6 months) ...Read More

This is a tough one! I'd probably start with a simple start/stop/continue. So for exmaple: STOP: One thing you might want to do is try to get the team out of “keep the lights on” mode. When product marketing is relegated to pushing launch after launch out the door and doesn’t have time to step back and think about the big-picture story and strategy, it ends up doing a disservice to the customer and the whole company. Even if you don’t have the buy-in or resources to do more, but you can always d ...Read More

Ah yes, the meeting trap!  Unfortunately, my answer is that it depends -- on how mature your PMM team is, what your priorities and key projects are, and how you're structured. That said, a couple of guiding principles: Keep it light. I try to let most meetings be ad-hoc or project-based, with only a few standing meetings. The standing ones are mainly just weekly 1:1s with our Product counterparts (at the team lead & IC level), and then quarterly project-based ones (like QBRs or roadmap revie ...Read More