AMA: Meta (Facebook) Product Marketing Director, AR/VR, Chad Kimner on Messaging

This partly depends on the role that PMM is expected to play, and we know that this can differ pretty dramatically from company to company, even within the same space. At Meta, we have a clear mandate - probably the clearest I've ever seen - to truly lead as GTM "captains". Leadership relies on us to lead the business, defining goals and strategies, driving cross-functional execution and shouldering accountability for all GTM execution. In an environment like this, the business goals are our goa ...Read More

I like this kind of question because so much time is spent at work getting humans to agree that we're talking about the same thing. My particular answers are less important than creating a shared lexicon with the teams you need to mind-meld with. That said, I do like precision and so here's how I parse some of these terms: Value Proposition: This is the reason that your target audiences should choose you instead of your competition. It's the thing that you do uniquely well and it's the reason so ...Read More

Starting in CPG brand management I had the good fortune to wear both of these hats (and many more!) early in my career. This ignited a love for both disciplines and started me down a path where I'd jump back and forth between them for about a decade (thanks to all my incredible managers who never forced me to choose a lane!). There are similarities in the roles - which sometimes creates confusion and tension - in the ways they focus on the end user, influence through storytelling, sweat position ...Read More

There's very little I can say that someone like April Dunford hasn't said better and I find her approach relevant across b2b (where she developed it) and b2c. The following homework is required, in my experince, to generate a high-value positioning that can drive messaging, brand, and all gtm strategy, planning and execution: Hopefully, you've got some customers who really love your product and it's essential to understand what they think is so amazing about it.  Understand your true competition ...Read More

As a start-up, there really can't be any daylight between your mission, strategy and initial product manifestations. That is, your company positioning and your product positioning are the same. A disciplined, successful company will continue to invest in new products that pay into the company mission and don't require major strategy shifts in order to successfully get to market. Of course, strategies will shift as companies and markets evolve, but innovation bets should, in my experience, be tet ...Read More

The behavioral shift in buliding a marketing team whose output is celebrated for small optimiziations occuring at scale is probalby the most important transformation a modern team can undertake. Moving away from the "6 month sprint to launch" and towards "the ongoing work of getting better at delivering the right message at the right time to the right audience in the right channel" is critical to better messaging.  At Mozilla, our Agile transformation enabled a test/learn/adapt philosophy previo ...Read More