AMA: DigitalOcean Vice President Product Marketing, Raman Sharma on Building a Product Marketing Team

August 17 @ 9:00AM PT

View AMA Answers

AMA Page

With the job market so hot, how do you structure the recruiting process to go slow enough for you and the team to evaluate several people and fast enough not to lose them to another company?

Raman Sharma•

Confluent Vice President, Product Marketing • 3y

It is important to have a good idea of what you are looking for. We ask the hiring manager to have a good enough conversation with the candidate before bringing them in f...

339 Views

1 request

How do you divide the workload between two product marketers covering multiple products?

(context: small company, still establishing product marketing function, no senior marketing leader to guide, lots of room to carve own path, looking for best ways to support success!)

Raman Sharma•

Confluent Vice President, Product Marketing • 3y

I would recommend ruthless prioritization. Work with your product counterparts to figure out the most important products from a business/strategy standpoint. Then make ...

357 Views

1 request

In hiring additional Product Marketing Managers, is it more important that they have Product Marketing experience, or that they're a well-rounded marketer/communicator?

Raman Sharma•

Confluent Vice President, Product Marketing • 3y

Product Marketing means different things in different companies. So, asking for "prior PMM experience" may not always be as helpful as you think since this experience cou...

351 Views

2 requests

What systems have you put in place to ensure your product marketers are kept up to date with changes to product timelines?

Raman Sharma•

Confluent Vice President, Product Marketing • 3y

My philosophy on this is that PMMs should almost be embedded into their counterpart Product/Engineering teams. Schedule or scope changes shouldn't come to them as a surpr...

1587 Views

1 request

for Dev software, how do you go about building a PMM team when you are the first hire for the function and that's the first measure of your success?

early-stage, post-PMF, series A funded company. devs and data teams core audience. head of Marketing already aboard who's also been a PMM all their life. by-stage advice for hiring team members over, say, eighteen months, will be helpful.

Raman Sharma•

Confluent Vice President, Product Marketing • 3y

I might have a slightly controversial take on this one. I think if you are in the business of marketing products to developers, you have to learn the trade a little bit...

1356 Views

1 request