AMA: Glean Head of Product Marketing, Paloma Ochi on Stakeholder Management

Fostering strong relationships begins with having the right mindset: assume everyone has the best intent, and you’re all there to build something great together. (If you don’t believe that’s the case, then you’ll likely want to reevaluate whether that’s a place you want to be working.)  Next, figure out what unique value Product Marketing can add to help other departments. Working with Product? Help create a narrative that articulates how your product is differentiated in the market, and use cus ...Read More

The best Product Marketing and Product relationships are the ones where the two departments work in lockstep to: Understand customer needs Create a compelling product narrative that addresses customer needs Determine what to build to make the product narrative into a reality Once the team has determined what to build to support a compelling and differentiated product narrative: Product leads the charge on gathering build requirements and determining the plan for delivering a great product Produc ...Read More

A key part of getting buy-in from different stakeholders involves first ensuring that everyone understands the context behind the project, the objectives for the project, and the importance of moving quickly. Make sure all of this is very clearly laid out for stakeholder consumption. Set a timeline for when you need to make a decision, and make sure stakeholders also understand the consequences of not moving quickly— in some cases, it could be a tradeoff you’re willing to make. In many cases, pr ...Read More

Prioritizing and managing requests from various stakeholders across the business requires: Understanding what’s best for the business. Prioritizing what’s best for the business is the best way to get stakeholder buy-in. Determining what’s important vs. what’s urgent. While it’s easy to get caught up prioritizing the most urgent requests that come in, that can lead to spending all your time just playing whac-a-mole with urgent requests; there’s always something else urgent that requires your atte ...Read More

When rolling out a new GTM launch tier framework across the business, start by identifying key stakeholders across R&D and GTM who can represent their functions’ objectives and needs for launches. With the group of key cross-functional stakeholders, determine which launch tiers you need. For each launch tier, determine the cadence and product criteria that defines each tier. For example: Tier 0 launch: Happens once per quarter. This is a large feature or bundle of features that have signific ...Read More