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Nicole Gardiner

AMA: Cisco Meraki Group Product Marketing Manager, Nicole Gallow on Establishing Product Marketing

December 21, 2022 @ 9:00AM PT

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  1. What are the first PMM artefacts to create when joining as a new employee on the product marketing team?

    Nicole Gardiner
    Nicole Gardiner

    Schneider Electric Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Cisco, Splunk, Quest Software • 3y

    My first step would be talking with the sales team (outside of my hiring manager and direct colleagues, of course), to see what they're using currently and what our customers are needing. Then create content for those immediate needs. Typically there are 'decks' (story of our lives, right?) or playbooks that either need updating or there's a need for net new content. Getting these content pieces done early and often will impress your manager and your sales teams -- win, win!

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  2. How do you develop quarterly/annual PMM OKRs and tie those to individual projects?

    My team used to do a lot of large campaigns so revenue was a really easy target to forecast over a specific time frame and establish as a key result target. However, for a bunch of smaller feature launches that are supposed to drive product adoption/engagement, it is a little trickier to parse out the impact PMM should drive and tie that back to team objectives. One approach I've thought about is setting high-level quarterly objectives for PMM (e.g. drive X monthly active users) and then evaluate feature launches/projects as levers to achieve that overall OKR (so the smaller launches aren't objectives in themselves, but bundled together they help achieve a larger OKR). The feature launches may also have more specific KPIs to measure success (eg X% of users adopt), but they should still ladder up to the north start quarterly metric.

    Nicole Gardiner
    Nicole Gardiner

    Schneider Electric Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Cisco, Splunk, Quest Software • 3y

    It's a fun project to take overall quarterly objectives like sales enablement or new feature launches and tie them back to OKRs. In fact today, I was talking with my team about how we can measure success for a sales enablement next quarter. We're going to do this a couple of ways:   Sales confidence -- Are sellers using decks, scripts, etc more (track this through CMS) than they were previously Competitive wins -- what percentage has our win-rate increased from the previous half  Aside from this ...Read More

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  3. At what point in building out your PMM team does it make sense to think about moving from a horizontal org chart to a vertical one? What factors do you consider when making the decision to grow horizontally vs. vertically?

    Nicole Gardiner
    Nicole Gardiner

    Schneider Electric Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Cisco, Splunk, Quest Software • 3y

    I believe the answer to this 'depends' on many factors, a couple of which are:  Company size  Org (PMM or reporting org) size If you have a large PMM team, having a more vertical org may make the most sense. At Cisco, I believe our PMM org is very balanced, not too flat or too tall, but would be considered vertical. That said, Cisco is a large company and having PMM leaders with teams of PMMs has been incredibly beneficial from a messaging and communications perspective. Each PMM is responsible ...Read More

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  4. How do you successfully engage other teams (Design, Product Management, Engineering) in a Go To Market plan?

    Nicole Gardiner
    Nicole Gardiner

    Schneider Electric Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Cisco, Splunk, Quest Software • 3y

    COMMUNICATE! Early and often!  In a successful GTM plan you're collaborating up front with PM, design, engineering, PMO, NPI, senior leadership, integrated marketing (demand gen), regional marketing, and so many more! From a technical counterpart perspective, I've worked with design teams to work through customer feedback since PMM is talking to customers and to sales so often. Having regular syncs with engineerings helps you not only gain a more techincal perspective that you can then 'uplevel' ...Read More

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  5. When establishing the PMM function in an org, how can you manage expectations and change perception if leadership (CEO, Founder, CMO) have a different interpretation of the role?

    Nicole Gardiner
    Nicole Gardiner

    Schneider Electric Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Cisco, Splunk, Quest Software • 3y

    This question is great and so very relevant. I've been companies where leadership has had 3 very different thoughts on the PMM org.  PMM IS AMAZING What the heck is PMM and why am I paying their salaries?  Eh, PMM exists but I don't care much about what they do. << my least favorite of them all, believe it or not.  PMM is amazing: This of course is an easy one! Keep doing great things and the leadership team will advocate for you. Communicate to them often on progress. Partner wherever nec ...Read More

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  6. How long do you think you should wait, as the very first Head of PMM, before you hire your first team member?

    Nicole Gardiner
    Nicole Gardiner

    Schneider Electric Director, Product Marketing | Formerly Cisco, Splunk, Quest Software • 3y

    Get that headcount ASAP! I kid, I kid.... kind of. My selfish, well, self, wants to say ask for approval as soon as you start -- first 30 days. Hiring someone doesn't happen overnight so you want as much time as possible to get applicants.  That said, the logical part of my brain says take some time to assess the business need and team need. I had a PMM team previously that included PMMs, PMs, Content Managers and Sales Enablement Managers. For a startup I'd bring on a content person first, assu ...Read More

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