AMA: Klue Senior Director of Product Marketing, Jason Oakley on Establishing Product Marketing

I actually did a presentation on this about a month ago, which you can watch here. I don't split it out into 30-60-90 day increments, but within that period, these are the things I'd suggest doing: 1. Get to know your product - if your sales team has demo training, consider going through the same process 2. Start building key relationships internally - have lots of 1:1s 3. Create battlecards for your top 2-3 competitors 4. Put your positioning on paper 5. Define a product launch process 6. Set up your internal communication channels 7. Perform a content audit and find the gaps that need filling 8. Gather the tools, templates, frameworks that will accelerate your success Another late edition to this (added after my presentation) is to create your own PMM Charter. This is a foundational document that lays out the goals and objectives for your product daprtment. It helps you create guardrails for your team around the things that are in your wheelhouse, which will come in handy as people start firing projects at you. 

It's hard to give a specific answer here because every company is unique, but here are some things to think about: 1. How experienced are you as a PMM? If you've built and managed multiple PMM teams in the past, you already have a solid understanding of the types of people you're looking for, how you plan to structure your team, what "great" looks like in every role. In that case you'll want to give yourself 2-3 months to get the lay of the land at your company, but then you might as well start building. But say this is your first time building a PMM team. I would suggest giving yourself 4-6 months (even more) before you start looking. This will give you time to roll up your sleeves and execute for a while. Learn what jobs need to be done at your org, what roles you need to fill, what "great" looks like. 2. What level of experience are you hiring for? If you're looking to hire senior PMMs you can likely start faster (and you should since they're hard to hire). These people will come in with their own methodologies and best practices, and if you're looking to give them a lot of autonomy, then they can likely hit the ground running. They just need time to understand the product, market, customer, etc. If you're looking to hire junior PMMs you'll want to consider waiting a bit longer until you've had a chance to do that role yourself. This allows you to carve out a role and what "great" looks like that you can then fill later. 3. Has anyone in your company been been doing the "job" of a PMM before you got there? For example, have there been any team members who've been owning sales enablement, competitive intelligence, sales collateral, etc. on the side? Chances are there are some people who haven't had a PMM title but have been doing some parts of PMM before you arrived. You might want to consider recruiting them right away vs taking over their job (assuming they are great at it). I've had success hiring internally for PMM roles. People already know your product, market, and customer, plus they already know everyone in the org. This has actually happened to me at Klue. In my first month I've already recruited two internal hires to the PMM team — a customer marketer and competitive enablement manager.

I was one of the first marketing hires at Chili Piper. I personally think there's an arguement to hire product marketing first or second. Positioning, messaging, segmentation, sales enablement, these are all critical things that should be focused on early. If not, you'll waste a lot of time and money churning out content and ads that miss the mark. 

1. Sales win rate, more specifically competitive win rate Make sure that you're reps are populating a "primary competitor" field in your CRM so you can track this effectively. You'll then be able to track win rates over time and show how your efforts to enable your team with competitive content is driving you win rates up. 2. Influenced deals Is your PMM team responsible for things like customer references, creating custom content (ie. decks or leave behinds), or generally brought in to help on strategic deals? If so, add a special field to Opportunities in your CRM so you can mark when you've "influenced" a deal. This will give you an additional way to show how your work, especially ad-hoc requests, are influencing revenue. 3. Sales confidence Distribute a quarterly survey to the sales team asking them to rank their confidence in the ways you support them. Some ideas are: 1) competitive enablement 2) collateral and 3) product positioning and messaging. 4. New product revenue If you're launching a new product or service offering, track revenue during the first 30-60-90 days since this is largely a result of your GTM launch. A bonus tip that's less of a measurable metric: any time someone praises your team, like a sales rep, department leader, customer, etc. grab a screenshot of that shit and save it all somewhere. It can never hurt to have social proof that your team is killing it. 

This is a really great question, and something I think a lot of poeple struggle with. I've found this article from First Round Review really helpful. It's based on Molly Graham's concept of "Giving Away Your Legos." A quote from Molly – "If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months." They interviewed Molly on an episode of the In Depth Podcast as well. 

Great question. I don't actually know if it has to start with generalists and lead to specialists. I've been at some companies, like Chili Piper for example, that have 100% generalists who own specific product lines. I definitely agree that at least the first PMM should be a generalist. But at Klue for example, I'm adding two specialists as my first two hires just because they are internal team members who have been doing the roles of customer marketing and competitive enablement already. I had the opportunity to bring them over and I jumped on it. As a general rule of thumb I would say that generalists work well in smaller starups while in larger enterprises you start to see more specialization. In terms of what specialized roles to hire for first, I would say that it really depends on the needs of the business. Do they have a lot of stiff competition? Do they ship a lot of product? Is the sales team begging for collateral and customer stories? I mention those three things because that's what I would most likely look at first. That answer was all over the place, but hopefully it helps. 

Assuming you were hired for this role, I think that this type of conversation should ideally happen before you accept the job. Asking a question like "what vision does the CMO, Founder, CEO, executive team, etc. have for this role?" Even just digging into the job description and asking for more detail. If their perception is something wildly different than yours, you might not want to take the job. But that doesn't really answer your question... So, if you find yourself in this position as a new PMM, I would start an internal campaign to educate your CEO, for example, on what PMM should look like. At Uberflip, we created a presentation for our executive team, outlining the role of PMM. We leveraged a bunch of content from the Pragmatic Institute at the time, to highlight the strategic jobs PMMs should be responsible for. We just started to raise our hand for some of the more strategic jobs in an effort to show how we could help impact the business in a more strategic way. The true way to change your CEO's mind is to show them what kind of impact your can have when you devote your time to real PMM work. All that said, you want to make sure your priorities match the CEOs. If you're off paving the way for Product Marketing and letting other projects that they deem important falls through the cracks, you won't be the PMM for long. 

I can't think of three good ones right now, so I'll give you two of my favourite: 1. Saying yes to everything When you come in as the first PMM, people are going to be throwing projects at you left and right. It's easy to say yes to everything, after all, who wants to say "no" in their first month on the job. But it's important to set the precedent that everything can't be your top priority right away. At Klue, I'm hopping on calls with as many people as I can and asking them for their top priorities/asks for PMM. At the same time, I'm very transparent that I'm building a project board of every priority that I'm going to be sharing internally. Then, with my boss and some other leaders across the org, I'll work to prioritize the list so everyone can see what's going to be worked on, when, and why. 2. Dissapearing into a hole A solo PMM is naturally a very autonomous role, so it can be easy to slink away into a dark hole while you work on a big project. Don't. Everything we do as PMMs should be collaborative, especially when you're new to an org. You should be getting feedback and iterating often. If you keep projects to yourself for too long, you run the risk of wasting huge amounts of time on something that doesn't work. And people will notice.

A lot of this depends on the size, stage, and goals of the company, but here's how I suggest approaching prioritization. Create your PMM Charter With the input of your boss and other leaders in the company, you'll first want to define what PMM looks like at your org. This helps set the guardrails for what product marketing is repsonsible for at your org and what your main objectives are. This will take into consideration what the top priorities are for company leadership. Set out on a priority seeking mission In your first month or so, you have the opportunity to have a ton of 1:1 conversations as a new employee. During these conversations, I ask everyone if they have any priorities or asks for product marketing. I use all of this to create a master list of all the internal priorities/projects that people would "like" my team to focus on. I also like to do a content audit, focusing on all of the collateral that's leveraged throughout the sales cycle. I'll map the existing assets to the sales process and try to uncover gaps, or things that need updating. After all of the steps above, you'll likely have a sizeable list of competing projects that you need to prioritize. Some factors to include in how you weight each project: * What impact can this have on revenue and how soon? * Is it tied to an existing deadline, like an upcoming product launch? * Who is requesting it? Is the CEO asking for this, or is it a one-off request from a sales rep? * Does it fall within your charter, or is it outside the scope of product marketing at your org? * Where does it fit into your strategic objectives for that year, quarter, etc. I would map this all out in a spreadsheet or project board and circulate it between a few key stakeholders in the company, ie. your boss, Head of Product, Head of Sales, Head of CS, the CEO, etc. You could even send them the raw list and ask them to rank it in terms of priority. Using this feedback I'd create your final, prioritized project list. They key is to then make it available to everyone in your company so everyone can see where things fall and why.

They know very little about our market, product, and competitors, and haven't really made an effort to learn. One way to stand out in the interview process is to show that you have a solid understanding of what the company does. If you can confidently speak about their competitors, talk about their product, show you understand their market, you will impress them. They'll have confidence in your ability to hit the ground running, and you'll show you took the initiative to learn about their space. When I can tell that a candidate knows little about what we do, I: 1. Worry about how long it'll take for them to start executing 2. Feel like they don't care enough or have the common sense to prepare for the interview

I'll start by saying that I love the initiative you're taking to break into product marketing. It sounds like you are doing a lot of the right things. A lot more than most who are in your shoes. I think my first question would be why are you preferring to look externally for your first PMM role? If joining your PMM team is a possibility, I would definitely encourage you to consider it. It sounds like you're already helping out on some projects, and you clearly understand your product, customer, market, etc. Even if you were to join their team for 6 months to gain some experience and the title of PMM. I don't necessarily agree that you wouldn't get an interview if you applied to a PMM job in the tech space. It's hard to hire great junior PMMs so a lot of leaders are broadening their search to people with different backgrounds. I think your experience in product, paired with your marketing and sales experience makes you a great candidate. That said, there will always be some recruiters who will only look at people with "Product Marketing" job titles, which is why I would suggest getting that at Meltwater if you have the opportunity. One other thing I'd suggest is joinging a product marketing community like PMA and taking one of their courses. A lot of great companies are looking to scoop up new grads from these programs and the PMA network is a great place to find orgs looking for junior PMMs. Last piece of advice is to just start connecting with PMM leaders on LinkedIn. Chances are, 50% or more of them are looking to hire in 2022 and would love to chat. Me included!

I think it's a hugely valuable and strategic relationship. Sales Enablement is invested in the growth and performance of the sales team. They provide the systems, processes, and tools that reps need to ramp quickly, and continue hitting their quota. They ususally have credibility amongst the sales team and reps listen to what they say/ask. For Product Marketers, this is a huge strategic partner. Our messaging, content, tools, etc. provide valuable content Sales Enablement can use in their training. We can leverage their existing processes and ear of the sales team to effectively distribute our content. Sales Enablement is also tapped into the needs and priorities of the sales team. This makes them a great source of information when it comes to existing sales priorities, gaps that we can help fill, areas where PMM can provide a ton of value. 

I was one of the first marketing hires at Chili Piper. I personally think there's a strong arguement to hire product marketing first. Positioning, messaging, segmentation, sales enablement, these are all critical things that should be focused on early. If not, you'll waste a lot of time and money churning out content and ads that miss the mark.

Know the product and their role (product management) well. In my experience, I've been able to build credibility with PMs by being able to speak their language, communicate in tools like Jira, Confluence, Miro, Figma, that they use every day to do their job. While product knowledge is important, market and competitive knowledge is a huge asset for PMs and something they often don't have. If you can bring that to the table, you'll be seen as a valued partner. I've also experienced a tension between PM and PMM when it comes to overlapping jobs and who owns what. PMs may feel like a new product marketer is taking some of their responsibilities away from them. This naturally leads to a poor working relationship. In my experience it's been helpful to sit down with the PM team or my PM counterpart to carve out together, who is responsible for what. As a backstop, when I know I'm in this situation, I try to tread very lightly and offer to support them vs taking a job away from them. 

I don't split it out into 30-60-90 day increments, but within that period, these are the things I'd suggest doing: 1. Get to know your product - get demo certified, the same as your AEs 2. Start building key relationships internally - have lots of 1:1s 3. Create battlecards for your top 2-3 competitors 4. Put your positioning on paper 5. Define a product launch process 6. Set up your internal communication channels 7. Perform a content audit and find the gaps that need filling 8. Gather the tools, templates, frameworks that will accelerate your success Another late edition to this (added after my presentation) is to create your own PMM Charter. This is a foundational document that lays out the goals and objectives for your product daprtment. It helps you create guardrails for your team around the things that are in your wheelhouse, which will come in handy as people start firing projects at you.

I'm still trying to master this one, but here is what I do. Create your PMM Charter With the input of your boss and other leaders in the company, you'll first want to define what PMM looks like at your org. This helps set the guardrails for what product marketing is repsonsible for at your org and what your main objectives are. This will take into consideration what the top priorities are for company leadership. Set out on a priority finding mission In your first month or so, you have the opportunity to have a ton of 1:1 conversations as a new employee. During these conversations, I ask everyone if they have any priorities or asks for product marketing. I use all of this to create a master list of all the internal priorities/projects that people would "like" my team to focus on. I also like to do a content audit, focusing on all of the collateral that's leveraged throughout the sales cycle. I'll map the existing assets to the sales process and try to uncover gaps, or things that need updating. After all of the steps above, you'll likely have a sizeable list of competing projects that you need to prioritize. Some factors to include in how you weight each project: * What impact can this have on revenue and how soon? * Is it tied to an existing deadline, like an upcoming product launch? * Who is requesting it? Is the CEO asking for this, or is it a one-off request from a sales rep? * Does it fall within your charter, or is it outside the scope of product marketing at your org? * Where does it fit into your strategic objectives for that year, quarter, etc. I would map this all out in a spreadsheet or project board and circulate it between a few key stakeholders in the company, ie. your boss, Head of Product, Head of Sales, Head of CS, the CEO, etc. You could even send them the raw list and ask them to rank it in terms of priority. Using this feedback I'd create your final, prioritized project list. They key is to then make it available to everyone in your company so everyone can see where things fall and why. 

It's challenging because there are so many overlaps, but I think it boils down to clear, consistent communication. And maybe breaking it down into how you work (or don't work) together on a project-by-project level. For example, on a product release, your committee will likely include people from each of these teams. When you set out the plan for that launch it's important to clearly define who own what. After enough releases, you all should be in lock step for how you work together on those particular types of projects. Over time, apply this approach to other projects types and soon you'll start to carve out everyone's niche. In one case at my last company, we also worked with the product team to create a document outlining all of the responsibilities we "owned" or "supported". The idea being that each responsibility needed an owner, but it doesn't mean another team could be involved in a supporting role. If anything, it helped facilitate the conversation around who owned what. I'd also check out my previous answer about creating your PMM Charter.