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

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: Curiosity with the intrinsic motivation to go find answers (vs. letting questions pers ...Read More

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 th ...Read More

“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 broade ...Read More

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: 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-beauti ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More