AMA: Global PMM Lead, Google AI Marketing, Pratik Gadamasetti on Stakeholder Management

"Politics" can mean different things at different companies, so for purposes of answering this question it may be helpful to provide a loose definition. A very simple way to think about it is that within any organization, there may be way of operating, driving decisions, gaining support, etc. that is driven more by relationships within the org, than the actual process or content itself. I'd like to say this doesn't exist, but the reality is, every company (especially more mature companies), may have some version of this that exists. These things that are mostly out of your control, so my advice for anyone entering a new team, organization, or project is the following: * Respect people's time and input. Send pre-reads whenever possible and provide clear opportunity to gather feedback. Once all feedback is in, spend ample time addressing comments including why or why not feedback was addressed. * Be the most organized person in the room, document everything. Be hyper diligent about documenting notes, decisions, next steps after meetings. This will provide transparency and clarity for stakeholders and they will respect you for taking the initiative. * Invest in real relationships. Take the time to get to know your peers and stakeholders. Grab coffee, eat lunch together, spend time outside of work if your personal life permits. These connections will help you when you encounter more difficult conversations or environments.

"Influencing the roadmap" is a phrase that you'll hear often at tech companies as an unwritten goal for marketing, sales and research teams. It's also something that should be approached thoughtfully. You probably won't get very far if in your first meeting with you PM counterpart you say something like, "I'm really excited to influence your roadmap!" Influencing the product roadmap requires you to build trust and confidence with your respective product peers. Here's how I've typically approached: * From my experience, I've found it most effective to first deeply understand my PM's goals, roadmap, and KPIs and come prepared with well thought out questions to develop some initial trust. * Once you have a deeper understanding of your product partner's goals, you can then begin to educate product partners on how you and your team can help contribute to these goals. As a PMM, typically, this will consist of a combination of inbound intelligence (deeply understanding the market, customer needs, and competition) and outbound marketing (determining how best to bring products to market, drive adoption of products). Influencing the roadmap will come from thoughtful, data-driven inbound intelligence that highlights macro market needs and opportunities which goes beyond just specific feature requests. * The trust and confidence will grow as you prove to your product partners that you can provide helpful inbound intelligence and drive thoughtful and effective outbound strategy for a particular launch. Being excellent at both inbound and outbound will increase your chances of being able to influence and inform the roadmap on a regular basis. During my time at Spotify working on the ads business, we introduced something called the bi-annual Market Needs Review. It was essentially a 360 analysis of the biz that analyzed customer and sales feedback, competition, and our own company (3Cs). * This analysis would lead to 3-5 "market needs" or "market opportunities" that we would present to the product teams. We would focus on market or customer needs (the opportunity) as opposed to specific feature request (the solution). * For example, in the early days of Spotify's ad business, ads measurement from leading third party providers was a critical need from most large customers and ad agencies. We collected this feedback from our sales partners and customers directly and quantified the lost revenue by not having these measurement solutions in place. * We positioned the market need as "Best in class ads measurement" along with the supporting customer and revenue data. PMs, Engineers and Designers responded well to data-informed market needs than simply saying, "X company has this feature and we need it too." * The amount of data and rigor put into this analysis, and the objective assessment of what was most needed from our customers helped established a strong partnership with product teams and regular cadence of inbound intelligence that aligned with product planning cycles.

Similarly to influencing stakeholders without authority on an XFN project, there are a series of steps you can take gain stakeholder alignment at the C-Level on a decision, project, or set of approvals. 1. Develop a DIN framework Start by developing a DIN (Decide, Input, Notify) framework that will allow you assign roles for each stakeholder you're working with. It should be reviewed with your cross-functional peers to ensure their respective leaders are included with the right role. Typically this can be vetted by senior leaders on your team. In a "flat" org, there should be very few decision makers, and mostly folks categorized as "Input" or "Notify." 2. Layout the critical path to getting buy-in and decision. Next step is dependent on company culture, how input is gathered and ultimately how decisions are made. It's critical to deeply understand this process so that you're being as efficient as possible (not wasting people's time), and getting to the decision as soon as possible. How are you gathering feedback from your stakeholders? What forums are you using to provide updates to your stakeholders? Your critical path to a decision and alignment should include how you will gather input/feedback including how many rounds of feedback there will be. If the ultimate decision will be made at an exec C-level forum, there is likely a sequence of reviews that need to happen before your project even reaches this forum. 3. Identify peer and exec champions - You'll need supporters from other teams and an exec champion to help you drive the decision, approval, or whatever else is needed when the time comes. Supporters will likely self-identify through the review process. Your exec champion should be identified with help from your manager. Getting C-level alignment in a relatively flat org with many stakeholders was a very common situation at YouTube. An example of this was our 2024 strategic plan for YouTube Shorts. Ultimately, our 2024 plan needed to be approved by our CMO and CEO, both designated as Decision makers. Along the way, there were MANY stakeholders we needed to gather input from and notify along the way including product, business, and global marketing partners. Establishing our DIN framework and critical path and sharing this with our respective stakeholders helped establish a clear and efficient roadmap for the planning process.

The PMM is typically responsible for owning the strategic brief for campaigns and launches that informs partner teams and channel owners. Creating an inclusive process where feedback is encouraged during the brief phase should foster an environment where channel owners also feel inclined to follow this behavior. If there is still disagreement, it's important to identify the decision maker as part of the DIN (Decide, Input, Notify) framework to be able to move forward. * The brief includes things like positioning, target audience, product details and overall objectives/goals. The brief kicks off the campaign/launch process with other relevant cross functional teams, including channel owners (e.g. Growth, Social). * Usually there is a review and feedback period for partners (including channel owners) to clarify, pushback, and suggest. By allowing partners to review and provide feedback on the overall strategic direction of the campaign or launch, it creates an environment where others are also encouraged to seek feedback. * When channel owners present their plans back to PMMs and the rest of the team, there should be an opportunity for PMMs to provide feedback and make sure the proposed tactics align with the goals from the brief. * It's important to challenge ideas, not people. If you have feedback on a particular recommendation, you need to have data and/or clear rationale as to why you're objecting. If both the PMM and the Channel partner can't agree, then the next step is to present a clear comparison table of options (with pros/cons) for respective leaders to make a decision from. From here, the best thing you can do is disagree and commit to the final decision!

This is probably one of the critical skills for a PMM to have, influencing without formal authority or aligned goals. I wish a had a silver bullet type of answer but the reality is, it depends! Ultimately, I try to build a solid biz case consistent of clear timeline, scope, asks, etc. and then work with xfn peers to get early input and feedback. From there, I'll develop a critical path to getting buy-in and decisions by utilizing a DIN (Decision, Input, Notify) framework, commonly used across YouTube/Google. Identifying the critical decision makers early and your path to getting to them is essential in getting buy-in for your project. Below is a slightly more detailed view on my general approach (used at YouTube, Google, and Spotify) for aligning XFN on the same objective/project: 1. Build a solid biz case and get early feedback: * Do your homework. Before making your ask, you must deeply understand the teams/people you're working with and their respective OKRs or goals. Without this understanding, it's near impossible to convince others to why they should be aligning to your proposed objective. Ultimately, it will be a trade-off decision for other teams. * Timeline and scope: Think through time horizon and scope of your project. Is this a small experiment that you're looking to run and get data back from to inform a larger proposal? Is this an annual objective, quarterly objective, or something else? * Define success metrics: What's the goal and how will we know if we're successful? Do you have the measurement infrastructure in place to quantify your results? How often will you report on progress? * Capture proposal in a brief memo (1-2 pages). Once you have a solid understanding of the details above, you'll need to capture details in a memo (or slides, whichever is preferred at your company). Questions to answer include but not limited to: What is the scope of the proposed project? What involvement / support do you need from other teams? Is there a budget requirement What is the business need and is it time-sensitive? What are the goals and how are you measuring success? * Get feedback early! Identify peers in respective orgs that can provide early feedback. 2. Layout the critical path to getting buy-in and decision. Next step is dependent on company culture, how input is gathered and ultimately how decisions are made. It's critical to deeply understand this process so that you're being as efficient as possible (not wasting people's time), and getting to the decision as soon as possible. A simple DIN (Decide, Input, Notify) framework will come in handy here as you think about all the stakeholders you're working with and what DIN category they fall into. Identify your "critical path" of decision makers, forums, and champions. * Build stakeholder list and assign DIN status for each person. There should be very few D's, likely one leader from each XFN team. * Determine ultimate decision makers and work backwards to identify forums and flesh out workback timeline. * Note: Feedback is a gift, how you respond to feedback has on impact on how stakeholders will feel about working with you in the future. Throughout the process, be sure to listen and make people feel like their feedback has been received. A frustrating thing for partners is when they actually spend time reviewing your doc, adding thoughts and then their ideas are dismissed or disregarded. This is critical because it's likely that you will be working with these people often. What's also important is to be decisive and clear on how feedback is or is not incorporated. You will never be able to please everyone!