AMA: Highspot Vice President Product and Customer Marketing, Jarod Greene on Stakeholder Management

I've seen organizational structures of all types over the last 10 years and have grown to appreciate a function with clear roles and responsibilities. The most common configuration (and the one I've had the most success with) is where I can have a leader for Core Solutions (your revenue generating products and SKUs), a leader looking after the Portfolio (someone who thinks about how to bring the portfolio to different audiences), a leader looking after Pricing and Packaging (who can work with yo ...Read More

I author a Product Marketing Playbook at the start of each year and use it in every interaction with my team, peers, and executive leaders. It clearly lays out what Product Marketing does for the business and more importantly, what we don't do. That extra step is really important because our discipline is still widely misunderstood. We cannot assume that everyone knows what Product Marketers do, so the best advice I've ever received is to tell your stakeholders in no uncertain terms what you're ...Read More

I find that the development of a Go-to-Market Playbook is a really good exercise. While it may feel antiquated in a digital world, writing down your positioning statement, value proposition, unique selling position, personas, competitors, ideal customer profile, competitors, customer stories, and buyer journey maps allows you to facilitate conversations throughout the business. It's likely that other groups in your business are working on pieces of these things but only Product Marketing has an ...Read More

So much of Product Marketing is about information and invisible influence. The challenge is that while Product Marketing doesn't own Product, Marketing, Sales, or Services - we are expected to serve these teams with equal rigor and depth. It's what makes our function both fun and challenging, and there is no shortage of stakeholders to manage at any one given moment. As best as possible, you need to be diplomatic.  I've learned that so much about relationship management is about setting clear an ...Read More

Product Launch is where all the magic happens. So many stakeholders have both vested interests and points of view of how the launch should be executed, but only Product Marketing has an end-to-end view of the product, go-to-market team, and the external market, so is best positioned to champion the process.  We've broken our launch into four phases where the first and last stages have the most stakeholders present, and the middle two have the fewest. What we've had success with understand that s ...Read More

While it might be easy to find industry standards on the number of PMMs per stakeholder team, I find the better marker to be the number of products in the portfolio, segments served, geographies, or even industries. Small teams can pack a mighty punch if swim lanes are clear and roles and responsibilities are understood. For example, a PMM team of 3 with respective focuses on core product marketing (use cases, value props, enablement, release/launch, pricing, etc.) audience/portfolio marketing ( ...Read More

It's hard and it's an area I am still working through. So much is asked of PMM and there's a natural desire as a connecting function to say "yes" to everything so in order to prove our value. The reality is if everything is important, nothing is important, so a Product Marketing superpower to develop is one that can gauge and asses what projects and deliverables will drive the most impact for the business, and prioritize accordingly. Having executive leadership partner with Product Marketing on ...Read More