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

August 17, 2022 @ 9:00AM PT

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 Product Marketing Leader (Microsoft / DigitalOcean / Sourcegraph / Confluent) • 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 surprise. We have utilized multiple tools like shared calendars, regular update meetings, dependency tracking tools, etc. Those are all useful but they are just tools. The intent is for PMMs to constantly stay in touch with the Product team to understand the what, why, and when of the customer value being delivered. Having this minds ...Read More

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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 Product Marketing Leader (Microsoft / DigitalOcean / Sourcegraph / Confluent) • 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 sure you are giving these products the lion's share of your time and energy. Work with your business leaders to understand the most important GTM initiatives (self-serve, Sales, Field marketing, etc.). Then make sure you spend the majority of your effort on prioritized GTM. It is no use creating beautiful-looking slide decks if ...Read More

362 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 Product Marketing Leader (Microsoft / DigitalOcean / Sourcegraph / Confluent) • 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 could mean something completely different from what you are looking for. While relevant PMM experience is a plus, I have also hired several people from non-PMM backgrounds into PMM roles. Specifically for tech, people who have spent time in customer-facing roles (especially those with a technical element) tend to ramp well in PMM r ...Read More

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2 requests
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 Product Marketing Leader (Microsoft / DigitalOcean / Sourcegraph / Confluent) • 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. You must understand developers, developer tools, preferences, contemporary development trends, etc. If you are beginning to build a PMM team in a business like this, I recommend bringing someone who is a part marketer and developer. Such people exist They are building micro-SaaS apps, they are writing books or building content ...Read More

1,361 Views

1 request
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 Product Marketing Leader (Microsoft / DigitalOcean / Sourcegraph / Confluent) • 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 for a full round of interviews. This initial validation gives us confidence that it is valuable for 3-4 other people in the company to spend time with the candidate. We make it quick for the candidates by clustering all of these interviews as close to each other as possible. I think the decision around who to bring into the compa ...Read More

347 Views

1 request

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

View AMA Answers

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

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

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?

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?

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?