AMA: Lightning AI Senior Director, Product Marketing, Bruce Lin on Establishing Product Marketing

As a product marketer, your relationship with Product is one of, if not the most, critical ones to build. If you find yourself in an organization where there isn't an existing relationship, I've found it helpful to build the initial connection both formally and informally. Because product marketing as a craft covers a lot of different functions—from market sizing to customer interviews to growth campaigns—it's often defined differently across companies. As a result, your product team may not have the same starting point for how to think about the PMM function, how they'll work with you, and what outputs and outcomes they can expect from you. It sounds super basic, but having a clear (and concise) doc or deck that walks through how you've structured the PMM discipline, key functions and capabilities, top priorities, etc is helpful in more formally introducing and establishing the craft. On the other end, strong relationships require trust. Trust is built in many ways, but some of the best ways to do it are through a combination of close alignment (which often happens informally in hallway conversations or as you work through problems together) and strong, collaborative execution. This can mean spinning up a quick project to bring in audience/market insights that can help unblock roadmap or GTM decisions. Or it could be planning and hosting a scrappy devcon to bring the product team closer with the audience to drive deeper engagement and capture user feedback.

In this scenario, I think it can be helpful to explore initiating a product marketing function from other disciplines in addition to Product. Since product management and product marketing are so closely related, if not originally part of the same function, carving out a PMM function from within product is of course the most natural extension—i.e., there are likely already some product managers or product ops folks that spend more time looking at external/business-outcomes, instrumenting ways to measure adoption, sources driving desired outcomes, etc. But there may also be folks in other functions for which transitioning to a formal PMM role would be a natural transition—they could be AEs that have been building their own enablement materials and refined the product's positioning and messaging through deep insight from customer calls. Or similarly, demand gen/growth marketers that have been crafting their own product messaging and landing pages for various experiments and have gotten close to the product and audience as a result.

I don't think there's a great one-size-fits-all answer for PMM team sizes relative to the size of the company. This is often highly dependent on what other marketing disciplines exist outside of PMM, how technical the product is, where the company is in its growth trajectory and lifecycle, how experienced the PMMs are, and more. But as general proxy, I've found it most helpful to look at PMM to PM ratios. Ideally, this ratio is somewhere in the range of 1:3 and 1:6. For new products that ship major features quickly and are rapidly evolving to go after a large market, having more PMMs per PM is helpful in enabling the PMM to go deep enough on the audience, market, and product to build impactful GTMs and drive ongoing adoption. Once products are established, features don't ship that often, and the audience and landscape is well understood, having fewer PMMs per PM can lead to more efficient teams.

PMMs often play a jack-of-all-trades role, so it's hard to say what things PMM should absolutely not do. Especially at earlier stage companies, PMMs are often brought in early for their ability to get close to the product strategy and business goals and translate them to effective GTM strategies. This can mean taking on audience research, site design and development, events, community management, and so on. That said, I think it's typically least efficient/effective to have PMMs focus on the ongoing management and optimization of always-on channels like paid ads or brand awareness campaigns. It's important for PMMs to define the approach, targeting, and messaging, and run through the first few cycles. But after this, the time, focus, and expertise required will effectively mean the PMM is fully operating in a demand gen/channel marketing function, and will take away their capacity from doing core PMM work like competitive analysis, crafting narratives, etc. leaving a gap between Product/Eng and Marketing.

I think one of the hardest things to do when transitioning from being the first/sole PMM to bringing on a team is sharing the foundational knowledge around the audience, market, product, and business that have allowed you to operate efficiently—from being able to make great decisions quickly to nailing voice/tone of messaging. One way to go about this is to onboard your new PMMs in two ways: 1. Have them work on something that will let them go deep on how your target audience thinks and behaves—how they make decisions on what solutions they need, where they learn about products like yours, what their ultimate motivations are—and help them understand the competitive landscape and where your company plays. This could be customer interviews and message testing to inform a new feature launch, sizing a new market you're looking to enter, etc. 2. Have them learn how to operate efficiently within the org through an initiative that you've done many times and is well-defined enough to transition—this could be a typical product launch, a site refresh, a new piece of content, etc.