AMA: Chime Head of Product Marketing and Insights, Meredith Shields on Establishing Product Marketing

Chances are you will inherit a number of projects in queue Day 1. Do your best to deliver on those projects to drive results out of the gate. This will instantly help you build credibility with colleagues. That said, start thinking about a learning agenda for each of your org's big areas. At Chime we have built LAs for banking, credit, liquidity and insurance. The PMMs on my team work lock step with PM, UX, etc. to translate Chime's goals into a series of powerful initiatives twice a year. From ...Read More

One of the big bets we made in PMM at Chime this year was to commission and activate a deep segmentation study. This has been a bit of a Rosetta Stone for our entire organization and has been picked up by many stakeholders cross functionally. Many of us are using this work to think deeply about product market fit with various sub segments of the market. We are looking at how might it inform future TAM expansions. This has brought our Growth, Strategy, PM , UX and PMM teams together in deep colla ...Read More

My first 30 days at Chime was all about team. I needed to spend a lot of time listening, observing and reviewing learning agendas to see how they think and what value they were adding to the organization. I talked to their day-to-day partners and stakeholders (across UX, PM, Creative, Insights). The next 30 days (Day 60+) was all about the app, the experience and understanding the durable competitive advantage by product in our portfolio. You cannot be a great product marketer if you are not usi ...Read More

Project Diversity.  Terrific PMMs can oversee a number of projects at different life stages simultaneously (incubation - insights - strategy - planning - beta / pilot - GTM). This requires great attention to detail but more importantly the ability to flex, pivot and be very nimble across initiatives. I came from a strategic planning background in the agency world and managed multiple accounts from wide spans of brands and categories. I also worked at CBS in journalism and there is nothing like t ...Read More

1- Don't focus on a singular, perfect process. You may need to vary your processes depending on the intent (eg. simple feature release v. next flagship product GTM launch). 2- Get input from your stakeholders to know where process is breaking down (eg. is there too much swirl in the creative review and approval process?). You can solve for that with more in-market testing and optimization to remove the subjectivity, if so. 3- Look at all of your inititiaves collectively. Were you mostly working ...Read More

If PMM is a new discipline within your org chances are other teams were "covering" PMM unofficially. This could mean product managers trying to wear marketing hats or lifecycle / brand marketers pitching in to support product. My advice is to start developing a rapport with PM leadership out of the gate. Set up team norms, artifacts and practices to operationalize PMM. Look at the product - eng roadmap and create work back dates to maximize marketing impact. If PMs have been doing product market ...Read More

Customership. Is your team being tagged in by cross functional stakeholders to weigh in, collaborate and spar?Are you getting asked for more support for your team to lean into big agendas in the "grooming" phase (not just GTM execution)? Are others (like PMs) advocating and helping you build the case for additional headcount YoY?What is the relationship between the PMM and Strategy disciplines at your Company? What about Biz Dev? Are you regularly and organically connecting? If you can answer, " ...Read More