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 be much more effective it you can more quickly identify potential friction points and support the appropriate internal business team with strategy, positioning, and assets to remove those issues. To seize this opportunity, double down on deeply understanding both your customer's journey to and with your product(s) -- and also your field team's sales process. Where are there moments of friction? How can you partner with your counterparts pre/post sales as well as in product to eliminate those points of friction to improve conversions/adoption/retention?

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 now need to leverage direct channels (likely via your digital / demand gen teams) to help prospects progress through their journey. To be successful, spend even more time understanding your customer's communities -- what are their digital 'watering holes'? Where do they go for sources of insight? Ideally these are already on your radar, but with PLG motions, you rely more heavily on the product selling itself, which means you want to understand exactly which problems each prospect wants to solve, work with demand gen to surface your solutions in those relevant spaces, and, when they land in your product, ensure they can see how to achieve that mission.

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 or with adoption as a significant part of their specific KPIs. As another example, you may have a platform with a free trial/paid conversion strategy (e.g. potentially traditional PLG for some/all segments). In this case, it may make sense to have dedicated PMM(s) that partner with PM and demand gen to identify and build out use cases in product, supplementary external assets (testimonials, guides, video examples, etc.), and even explore specific pricing/packaging/offer options aligned to optimize those paid conversions.

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' oriented: build a new BoM for product launch. Create new thought leadership narrative on industry trend with a report/blog/infographic/etc. Research new industry trend and recommend point of view for company. Growth teams can help validate these recommendations and show ROI for certain initiatives. E.g. How do we know if that thought leadership narrative is effective? Can growth teams help us more quickly a/b test this story versus a different narrative? Can we get any insights into how it's performing relative to competitors on the same topic via public channels (SEO, etc.)? Ultimately we are all beholden to the same KPI: growth! Which likely means pipeline, sales, and retention. By partnering with growth teams, you can start to glean insights into relative impact of your initiatives -- and refine your programs for more impact in the future.

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 'bent' or a growth PMM that's focused on the objective(s) end-to-end for the product set. As tangible examples: 1. Traditional PMM with Growth responsibility: some features or product areas may not directly align to a SKU or revenue but are still critical to win rates or reducing churn. I've had PMMs partner closely with PM and product analytics to build out a data-based adoption funnel, then based on friction points may collaborate with product, marketing and customer success to provide insights, activate a community, or showcase incentives to help drive deeper adoption. 2. Growth PMM standalone: there may also be need to have a dedicated PMM to partner with Growth PMs on initiatives like converting free trial to paid customers or thinking holistically about upsell paths as customers mature throughout your platform/product suite (note this could mean transacting within the platform or with a sales team). Based on your goals, your strategy may be targeted programs for certain existing customer segments or certain prospect types that rely on PMM to for tailored messaging and demand gen/field/post sales support.

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 steps in that journey, e.g. 'Hello world', key markers of sophisticated usage, etc. PM: * Understanding customer requirements and determining development plans for features/UI requirements when the metrics show a dropoff or slowdown in the customer journey * Development strategy for features that unlock new use cases, persona, etc. with your product or platform/suite * Development of in-product guides and use cases PMM: * Strategy to accelerate acquisition/adoption with GTM teams, e.g. would better discovery in post-sales onboarding help improve awareness/value of key features? Would short form demo videos of templates drive more relevant interest in the free trial experience? * Development of assets, pricing/packaging* (definitely in partnership with PM; may also fall under a separate P&P function but PMM should be a close partner on strategy) for driving adoption/growth * Market research on new use cases or persona that may be a fit for your product in the future to help inform PM roadmap

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 'adoption', it'll become much more obvious where the friction (or acceleration!) points are in the journey, so you can quickly diagnose and take action on resolving those pain points. The resolution could require a range of solutions: an in-product guide that shows where the API keys are to set up that integration; a post-sales playbook to help a customer understand why and how to set up your SDK; a set of new templates or guides to show the art of the possible (and reduce fear of a blank canvas); and so on. From there, it's all about measurement and iteration!

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 on what's working and what's not with different customer cohorts. By partnering with these teams, you can get insights into different key messages, asset types, use cases, and offers to see what is most resonant. If certain parts of your strategy aren't working, what else might you need to do to change course? I've found these partners are experts in experimentation models and activation channels -- leverage their insights! PMM can help fuel their programs with insights into potential new ways to reach your ICP; new persona to engage; new narratives or use cases to try; and much more.