AMA: Dbt Labs Former Director of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Product Marketing vs Product Management

Interests: What kind of questions do you want to answer? This is just my personal take, and probably oversimplified, but if you're driven by optimization questions like "Who is getting the most value out of this?" "How do we better articulate what this thing does?" "How do we increase close rates at the enterprise?" then you're more likely to want to stay in PMM. If you're driven by value creation questions like, "What would make this product really exciting and engaging?" "How do we stay ahead ...Read More

DATA. But I don't think the word "influence" is quite right. I really don't think PMMs should have an agenda when it comes to roadmapping. I think our role is to represent the needs of users, and bring data to PMs to help them navigate that decision making process. We can provide: NPS score trends Customer interview themes Data on win/loss rates Insight into competitive investments Product feature usage by differnet personas Data on where folks get stuck in using the product Top questions asked ...Read More

Any frustrations I have are either a reflection of my ego getting in the way, or a failure on my part to communicate expectations or demonstrate value.  Some examples: Sometimes it's frustrating when sales comes up with their own messaging, and slideware. However, if they're doing that it's because what they have isn't working, or they haven't been properly enabled, or they're not convinced of the results existing content can produce. This can actually GOOD to some extent, because you're getting ...Read More

A few answers here, based on use case!  Naming inside the product (like features, tabs, or experiences) would be handled by PMM during the launch process. PM is likely to have ideated an internally-referenced name early on, but as we get past the beta and understand what value users actually derive from the feature, PMM adjusts to better match what the user would expect to see, for the task they want to complete. Other copy in the product UI that describes what a function is, or does, in the sho ...Read More

I think both, though the latter (naming, branding, messaging, etc) seems to be the default for most PMMs. If PMMs want to partake in the beginning of the cycle—what's actually being built, they need to bring new data—not just personal opinions. Product managers have a product vision that aligns with the company mission, incredibly deep market grounding, a keen understanding of what's actually possible given engineering resource, and (hopefully) a clear understanding of product usage. They have s ...Read More

I've heard before that product marketing KPIs can be squishy—that it's hard to quantify the value of what we do. I don't agree! I have a few KPIs that are unique to PMM, and a few that are tackled with PM, just from a different angle. I'll focus mostly on the shared KPIs: Shared: Feature adoption. Self-serve or Sales-led/assisted - PM would be responsible for continuous feature use over the lifecycle of an account (is the thing we built actually useful and intuitively designed?) - PMM is respons ...Read More

Ah I'm sorry you're in that situation. PMM should be part of product roadmapping meetings, since everything that's in the queue should be going through some sort of business valuation (what is the cost/benefit of putting this feature into the world). But I think stepping back to understand the motives here might be a good place to start. Maybe there's a company OKR on product differentiation, or a cross-team initiative to reduce competitive losses? Or maybe product<>market fit isn't quite ...Read More

oh mylanta I love this question. I think a lot of this can be an interative process with the PMM, but I think the things I see most often left out of these documents that could completely change the way a new feature is positioned includes: - Not just what problem this solves, but how was the problem solved before this feature existed? (Was there a workaround in our product, or did users lean on external solutions?) - Not just who will use the solution, but who, downstream, benefits from its use ...Read More

I've always felt like this question felt a bit like, "who owns features, engineering or product?" Both teams are responsible for different points in the lifecycle.  In my ideal version of the world, pricing overhauls (a new pricing strategy like moving from seats to usage), is managed by a project management team. It's a lot of chasing folks for research, input, and decisions.  PMM should play the role of: Understanding market comparisons (how complementary and competitive solutions price) Featu ...Read More

Customer segmentation—who cares the MOST, why are they using us, what are their alternatives, why would they stay, why would they leave. Both qualitative (interviews), and quantitative( (product usage and sales cycle data).  I think getting incredibly clear on user profiles, habits and motivations is a critical input for every other area of the business. Things like posiitoning and messaging fall out of user understanding, and the very downstream activities many PMMs attach themselves to—things ...Read More

Yes depending on the type of feedback sought we have different owners, but we are trynig to move to a place where the Customer PMM owns tracking of outreach (we don't want to ping the same account 7 times across different deparments). In-product NPS is owned by customer success, but interviews off the back of low or high scores are often handled jointly by CS and PMM. Beta feedback is owned by the product team, but PMM might often tag along for interviews so we can see from a customer's perspect ...Read More

Oh interesting! I've done both, but I truly believe PLG is the future for everyone. Or, I should say the paths are likely to converge!  New organizational structures that are empowering end-users to make more decisions for themselves, coupled with extremely efficient try>buy experiences are reducing sales cycles and making the "executive buyer" persona less relevant (not irrelevant, just less of a blocker than it used to be).  As hinted about, none of this means sales GTM motions are going aw ...Read More