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

July 22 @ 10:00AM PT

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How do you update stakeholders, and the company as a whole, on the recent activities and achievements of product marketing?

What channel/form, what content do you include, formats, etc.

Alexa Schirtzinger•

Watershed Head of Marketing • 4y

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 ...

1081 Views

2 requests

What kinds of ongoing, cross-functional meetings do you think are important to have? Which teams are involved, and what agenda items do you recommend?

Alexa Schirtzinger•

Watershed Head of Marketing • 4y

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 struc...

897 Views

2 requests

How do you get the Csuite team to buy into a new pitch deck?

I just joined a new company, and their pitch decks are AWFUL and the sales teams are losing deals because of poor pitches. I'm working with a few key stakeholders to create better pitch decks, but several CSuite team members are apprehensive about trying something new because we'll be filing for IPO soon. They'd rather be consistently bad, then differently good.

Alexa Schirtzinger•

Watershed Head of Marketing • 4y

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...

466 Views

1 request

How do you deal with other departments 'taking' major projects and core product marketing responsibilities for themselves simply because they have resources and product marketing has a weak stance in the company, without supportive leadership and has only one or two Product Marketing Managers (who are therefore barely staying on top of product launches)?

Alexa Schirtzinger•

Watershed Head of Marketing • 4y

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 l...

541 Views

2 requests

What's your advice on improving a historically tense relationship between functions?

Alexa Schirtzinger•

Watershed Head of Marketing • 4y

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 ...

470 Views

1 request

How do you structure your Product Marketing team?

Alexa Schirtzinger•

Watershed Head of Marketing • 4y

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 portf...

1682 Views

2 requests