AMA: Braze Vice President Product Marketing, Kelsey Nelson on Growth Product Marketing

As we have more data available to us about the customer journey, we have a lot more opportunity to partner with growth marketing and growth product management to drive tangible ROI as PMMs. One of a great PMM's superpowers is deep understanding of the customer: their pain points, goals, patterns of behavior, etc. Now imagine amping that up with data-backed insights throughout their journey with your product or portfolio/platform: your strategy for how to drive new business/upsells/retention can ...Read More

The magic here is getting very specific as to the steps that are required to achieve 'hello world' and sophisticated adoption. Is there a key integration step that is causing most customers to get stuck on their adoption journey? Are they only getting to the point of a basic use case, and not experimenting with more sophisticated outcomes -- why? Are they unaware they can do so? Are they feeling overwhelmed by how to get started? If you deeply understand the granular steps required to get to 'ad ...Read More

I would not say it is wildly different from a PMM's role in a more traditional sales-led company -- you still need a deep understanding of your customer, market, and product. You still are partnering closely with your product and demand gen teams to drive pipeline and support sales. However, you may have different channels for activation of those messages: unlike a traditional sales-led company, where you (hopefully!) are spending a substantive portion of your time on field enablement, you will ...Read More

I'd leverage your Growth partners to help you show quantitative value of PMM initiatives. Often as PMMs we are the fuel for other parts of a GTM motion: we provide training/enablement so sellers can prospect, navigate, and close deals. We provide thought leadership narratives to help corporate marketing and demand gen teams build awareness and pipeline. We provide market insights so product teams can define a roadmap. As a result, it can be difficult for PMMs to set KPIs that aren't 'output' ori ...Read More

I believe all product marketers today would strongly benefit from having a growth mindset and skillset -- but whether or not that's the entire charter of their role depends on the core goals of their specific product area and your business priorities. For example, you may have products that are highly effective for landing/driving revenue, while you may have others that drive retention or lead to more upsell pathways. The latter is a great place to have a Growth PMM, either as a dedicated head o ...Read More

I'd first start by being clear on the outcomes you're trying to achieve with this cross-functional growth function, and build your growth PMM charter around that goal. Some common goals could be: Acquisition (e.g. driving a free trial customer to a paid customer) Adoption (e.g. improving the end-to-end experience that leads to certain adoption or usage goals) Expansion (e.g. upsell or cross-sell) From there, depending on the scope, I've had PMM's that are individual product owners have a growth ...Read More

Ideally both a PM + PMM have a shared north star metric, e.g. revenue, potentially in the form of free trial conversions; adoption/usage; upsell/cross-sell; etc. (this should be true regardless of whether they are in a traditional product area or in growth). As a few examples of where I've seen overlap/handoffs: Shared: Deep understanding and detailed definition of customer journey, e.g. from first touch to 'Hello world' moment, steps to adoption of a key feature, etc. Metrics aligned to key ste ...Read More

Ideally you are aligned with Growth (and Product) on your north star metric/KPI -- e.g. we're trying to drive more pipeline in xyz segment; increase acquisitions through our free trial/paid motion; reduce churn by driving deeper adoption/usage of xyz feature; increase LTV with upsell/cross-sell. From there, I'd map out your overall strategy and assign clear owners/KPIs to each component of the strategy. Growth marketers are amazing partners because they have tons of insights into different tests ...Read More