AMA: HoneyBook Former Director of Product Marketing, Loren Elia on Stakeholder Management

PMM ultimately shares adoption goals with Product. There's two sides to adoption though: awareness and usage. PMMs focus is primarily in driving awareness and education (how and why you should use the feature), and Product's focus is usabilty (building a feature that solves a real problem). Because PMMs shares adoption goals with Product, it's important that PMM share back to Product user insights and barriers to adoption. To do this, you need to track performance of each channel involved in the ...Read More

I think that depends on your company goals. At HoneyBook we've identified a specific segment that has the best product-market fit, so we're solely focusing on that segment. Therefore it makes more sense for us to split the work by feature (product line) and by user lifecycle stage. But I think that what's most important is to understand what are your company's priorities and organize your team in a way that supports those priorities. If you work for a startup, these may change year over year, so ...Read More

At HoneyBook we have established a product feedback process between Sales/CS/Product. We meet every 6 weeks and share customer feedback. We prioritize feedback based on number of requests, which we track in Salesforce and with an internal system. But what has really made a difference is that instead of sharing 20 feature request, we dive deep into 3 of them. We tie the request back to our key value props, so product understands how it's affecting the user experience. We bring lots of quotes and ...Read More

I like to use a 5 question messaging framework: Who am I? What am? Who am I for? Why am I good for you? Why should you buy me here and now? I start by answering these questions. I do user research to really get the insights to answer to "who am I for" and "why am I good for you", and I do competitive analysis to understand what differentiates us from other companies and create urgency. The answers to "who am I" and "what am I" revolve around branding and also being able to describe the escence o ...Read More

Product Marketing should be hub and glue that brings all teams together. I usually create a brief for each product launch (see messaging framework question below to see what goes into the brief) and I think through what channels should push the feature. I use another framework for this, which clasifies features into "likely to attract new customers" vs "delights current users" and "innovating" vs "catching up". This creates 4 quadrants. Then I choose channels accordingly. I created a table where ...Read More

Ah, that's the million dollar question. At the beginning of each half we align with the leadership team which features and projects we're going to work on. This helps set expectations. Then I socialize with PMs what PMM is working on, which usually includes other projects besides feature launches. It's important for them to know what else you're working on to set expectations. Having said that, there's always adhoc requests and we either say no, and explain why we don't think supporting that req ...Read More

I have found that what works really well is looping in both product and sales throughout the whole go-to-market planning process. I keep both teams (and customer success) updated with what we're learning from users and what we're thinking in terms of channel execution and get their input often. This allows me to take decisions and how we bring the feature to market and also get their buy-in. This also helps with making the launch more effective because everyone knows what's going to happen ahead ...Read More