AMA: Coda Former Core Marketing Lead, Andrew Stinger on Building a Product Marketing Team

“People don’t leave bad companies, they leave bad managers” is the adage a lot of folks toss around. I’m not dusting off any “World’s Best Boss” trophies on my mantle, but from feedback from my team, I know that they appreciate when I do the following: * Celebrate wins. Acknowledge & mitigate losses. Discuss what was learned. Trust and empower to deliver a better outcome the next time. * Give due credit for hard work done well. * Help set priorities. * Over-communicate, especially in terms of broader business context. * Have very real, action-oriented career conversations (pssst . . . free template alert: https://coda.io/@they-win-you-win/career-conversations-tool), and advocate for their growth, advancement, and overall autonomy & agency at work * Discuss what work is exciting & empowering, and what work is a slog—often, and then align to passions and opportunities * Understand that every single person on your team experiences work in the dimensions of “I” (me at work), “We” (my team at work), and “It” (my company, its culture, and its goals); if this triumvirate feels imbalanced, understand why

In my experience, most Product Marketers want to have positive impact, and do superlative work. This means my job as a manager of Product Marketers is to get really clear on the kinds of impact we need to have as a marketing org, and what the standard for excellence is on my team. If you get really clear on those two things and have a few, well-facilitated conversations around them, the rest will follow. My team (which includes Product Marketing and several other marketing functions) knows they have two primary jobs: 1. Own the narrative 2. Accelerate the business Depending on their role, these two principles will translate a bit differently, but the incredible humans I work with have taken these prompts and run with them so wonderfully that I typically only have to ask two questions to get a pulse check on our culture and team health: 1. Have you felt successful since the last time we met? 2. What will make you feel successful by the next time we meet?

The foundations of a strong Product Marketer are going to look and feel a lot like the foundations of a strong overall marketer: Can you connect as many of your target users as possible to the value of your product? That can happen via exciting brand experiences, growth marketing nurture campaigns, well-placed social posts, and more. On most Product Marketing teams I’ve been a part of, there are two dimensions to the organizational matrix: (1.) PMMs aligned at the top level as a function, and then (2.) PMMs “dotted-lined” to a focus area, which can be product coverage, audience coverage, or functional expertise. Doing #1 (keeping PMMs together as a team) helps establish a functional center for excellence and consistency across your business. For example, briefs will share a similar structure which enables partners from the rest of the business know how to find what they’re looking for, regardless of which PMM “owns” the coverage area. Doing #2 in tandem with #1 creates agency and ownership amongst PMMs. If everyone owns everything, then no one owns anything. So, it’s important to have clear owners of business focus areas. If the company is aligned around product areas, then it makes sense to map PMMs to those areas. If the company is aligned around personas, verticals, or firmographic opportunities, then it makes sense to map PMMs to those areas. If it’s a mix—then you get to work a bit of your organizational magic :)

I’m always wary of painting with too broad a brushstroke when it comes to hiring. Your job as a hiring manager is to spend time understand the super powers of the people you meet as part of your interview process, and to evaluate if those super powers have a place at your company. With that in mind and the current context of our work at Coda, I can share some commonalities in some of our recent all-star hires: 1. Curiosity with the intrinsic motivation to go find answers (vs. letting questions persist indefinitely or waiting for an answer to be handed on a silver platter) 2. A genuine interest and engagement with our product 3. Stellar, engaging, thorough communication 4. A “test and measure” mentality that knows (1.) what they want/ought to measure, and (2.) how to structure a test to get the insights they need to do the job well 5. Belief in the innate capabilities of humans to do amazing things with positive impact

While we’ve evolved the shape, size, timing, and application, some resources I either stood-up or leaned on as Coda’s first PMM that are still in use: 1. A PMM “Hub” - Your single source of truth for all things product marketing. From “Who do I talk to about X?” to “What dashboard can I look at for Y?” to “What’s the deal with this persona?” If it’s not documented, it’s not part of your strategy. Luckily, we have a great template for Team Hubs: https://coda.io/d/Design-Team-Hub_dos6bXTG3xZ/A-beautiful-team-hub-thats-easy-to-update-and-prevents-context-s_suQXC?utm_source=slack 2. A launch schedule - What’s launching, when? Share the responsibility to update with required information with your PM collaborators, and use it to keep the trains running out of the station on time. A template: https://coda.io/@shivar/rethinking-googles-famous-launchcal 3. A standard launch brief - This can be used for product launches and/or campaign launches. What information do you need to plan your execution? What document helps you scale the information the rest of the company needs, on-demand? An example: https://coda.io/@codatemplates/launch-brief 4. A decision-making framework - This will evolve over time, but the concept of two-way write-ups was in practice before I started at Coda, and I can’t imagine not using this system for the rest of my career. Learn more: https://coda.io/@lshackleton/two-way-writeups-coda-s-secret-to-shipping-fast If you have these in place and hire great collaborators, the rest will follow. Personas will change. Target metrics will evolve. But if you can equip your team to find the information they need quickly in a self-serve manner, and have a way they can use that information to drive decisions and quick execution, your team will be set-up to expand to multiple contributors.

The answer depends on the stage of your business and the depth of your marketing bench. As one of my mentors shared with me: As you get started, you need a good pool of generalists who can do the job you hired them for—and potentially cover off short term needs that may fall out of their explicitly-defined scope. As your team grows, you should start to become more aware of some of your greatest marketing opportunities, and can hire specialists for those roles. Just remember: Someone had to give every PMM you know a shot at the role before they had formal experience.

Time spent understanding the customer is not time wasted. Period. A lot folks tend to look at marketing as the “front page news” of flashy executions and campaigns that people outside of the company see and/or experience to help them understand what is you all do. There is so much work before the point of external outreach that makes a great PMM. My strongest marketers are supremely empathetic with our users and their challenges/needs. These marketers can describe users in depth, they know where users look for information, what users want for our product (and broader market), and they know what brings users delight. So, if you’re starting out in Product Marketing, don’t be afraid to ride sidecar with researchers or designers on your team conducting user studies. Shadow phone calls or listen to call recordings ruthlessly. Read analyst reports (but not too much). Interview users on your own. Time spent understanding the customer is not time wasted. It is actually your greatest priority.