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

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 ma ...Read More

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 hav ...Read More

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: Have them work on something that will let them go deep on how your target audience thinks and behaves—how ...Read More

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 ong ...Read More

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 ...Read More