AMA: Intercom Director of Product Marketing, Jasmine Jaume on Stakeholder Management

I believe that the ability to build relationships with stakeholders and influence others is key to being a successful PMM. As you've noted in your question, due to the nature of our role PMMs are often drivers of very cross-functional projects, which involves co-ordinating peers and potentially people more senior than you too.  Really, it comes down to all the classic relationship-building things: Build trust - spend time with the people you need to influence (and not just when you need somethin ...Read More

In general, PMM roles at Intercom are more of the 'full stack' variety - i.e we cover the whole journey from feeding into the roadmap to launch, including competitive research, buyer/persona/market research, GTM strategy, positioning and messaging, enablement, launch planning etc.Our team sits in marketing and reports into a Senior Director of PMM. Our team structure has shifted several times in the time I've been here, based on changes to the company strategy, product team structure and where w ...Read More

This is actually something we're working to improve at the moment, as the process at Intercom hasn't been that standardised in the past. Historically at Intercom, betas were driven by the product team and wholly focused on collecting product feedback (often via research interviews and feedback through our messenger). As our PMMs work closely with PMs - and are often involved in sending the messages to beta participants - the feedback from these betas would be shared with PMMs and we'd use it as ...Read More

I think the first step is to understand your buyers and market, so you can define who you're targeting and how you want to position your product. So as you say, competitive research, understanding the pain points of your buyers and customers, talking to your sales team to understand why you win/lose deals and creating an outline of your target buyers (or personas, if you're into those!)I'd then develop a GTM starategy, including defining where you want to position yourself in the market, and a m ...Read More

In the past we've used things like Google Sheets/docs, but for the past 18 months or so we've started using Coda and it's been a game changer. We do all our launch planning in Coda, which means there is one 'source of truth' where all stakeholders can see progress, timelines, who's responsible for what etc. This has been much easier than our previous world of having loads of different docs and no one ever knowing where anything is! I actually published a template of our launch plan in Coda , whi ...Read More

We collect feedback in various ways. We obviously use Intercom ourselves, so we get user feedback through conversations, responses to our announcement messages and conversation ratings, for example. We also do run NPS surveys, using survey apps integrated into our Messenger. Some of our product team recently recorded this podcast about how user feedback informs what we build, which may be of interest! We also have an amazing research team at Intercom, who will do research interviews, concept tes ...Read More

The product team at Intercom are very invested in understanding our customers so they often themselves talk to customers, interface directly with sales, read customer feedback from conversations in Intercom and so on, and we have a very talented research team who do more in-depth studies for us. This mean that it's not just down to PMM to represent the customer voice (which is a nice place to be!) That being said, in general the key to getting alignment around priorities is being able to demonst ...Read More

As I said in another answer, being a successful PMM relies heavily on being able to build relationships and trust with your cross-functional stakeholders. The tips in that answer about building relationships apply here, but I'll also add 2 things:1. Always look for opportunities for PMM to add value, and make sure you understand other functions' goals and priorities. If other functions can see the value PMM bring - and that you want to help, not hinder them - it's much easier to get a seat at th ...Read More

This is a tough one! It can be really difficult when you have exec stakeholders who aren't aligned. Ultimately, it's on them to get aligned and provide clear direction 'down the chain' but a few things that could help: Understand where the misalignment is - is it the whole strategy, or specific parts of it? Is there a compromise you could propose that would help get alignment? What are the main concerns of whoever isn't on board, and can you ask questions to better understand what is driving the ...Read More

This is a tough one to answer without more context on your specific situation, but in general it sounds like you may be being asked to craft messaging for a product you don't believe truly meets customer needs.When you're in this situation it often means that PMM haven't been involved early enough in the product development process and product are throwing something 'over the wall' for you to launch. This is a common challenge for PMMs, and requires work to get PMM 'a seat at the table' and show ...Read More