AMA: Morningstar Head of Marketing, Enterprise Solutions, Kristen Kanka on Building a Product Marketing Team

1. Revenue - this should specificially be marketing contributed or influenced. 2. Retention - this is typically a percentage and the target number will be dependent on the maturity of your prodcut line. Its also possible to see this target exceed 100% if you are increasing your price on your product or if you are focused on upsell / account expansion based on your marketing strategy. 3. Net promoter score - or any other key indicator of cusotmer satisfaction. If all three of these things are positive, you’ve likely got happy customers, and I’m happy if the customers are happy!

The most important thing is understanding that regions work at different paces—the rate of acceleration between role types and career progression. And it’s also important to understand the hierarchies of every region: While it might be OK in the US, for example, to get direct answers from team members of every level, when you work with teams overseas, sometimes it’s best to start with the leadership. And small gestures can go a long way toward building international teams—international-friendly meeting times and virtual group events go a long way. On a business level, you have to build a market strategy around regional nuances: What compels a client to act? How is that different from other regions? How can we adapt proven strategies to specific areas? Awareness and responsiveness are crucial.

The biggest challenge for me is scaling my management style as the team has grown. It’s not easy! I want to be a manager who’s responsive to the needs of my direct reports, wherever they are on their career journey. More-tenured people need a sounding board, and reassurance in their plans, whereas less-tenured people might crave more instruction. I love balancing that and helping them set the groundwork for the next stage of their careers. For managers that also means that the bigger your team gets, the less you‘re able to dive into the details. You need to build a team that’s strong enough to handle those details so you can focus more on strategy and less on execution. But that takes a whole lot of trust: They have to believe in your plan, and you have to believe in their capabilities.

I talked above about regional nuances, and how understanding those aspects of a region are crucial, but that doesn’t mean a huge shift in strategy is needed for every region. I think that if you build a strategy made from a modular set of parts, you can then deploy those parts across regions without the overhead of creating each piece from scratch.

Storytelling is the biggest trait is look for. I want all of my product marketers to be able to tell stories that anyone can follow that inspire action. Everyone I interview is asked to provide a writing sample so I can see if they’ve got “it.” The next trait is problem solving: In every interview I ask the same question: Tell me about a go-to-market that failed. I don’t care so much about the “why” of the failure; I want to know how you determined it was off track, and what you did about it to get back on track. And third is collaboration. How does someone build relationships? How can they earn a seat at the table with a diverse group of stakeholders? If they aren’t able to collaborate, it isn’t a role for them. You have to want to be the glue that holds a team together.

I love this question – and I am going to take a different approach to my answer here. One of the things I think product marketers can struggle with is responsibility versus authority. To be effective in their role, product marketers must be highly collaborative, lead and influence people who don’t report to them, and engage a wide group of stakeholders – especially for large go-to-market moments. I like to structure my teams to give product marketers the most autonomy possible, so they can have both the responsibility and the authority. As a manager, I want to be able to send one product marketer who can make strategic decisions into a working group—not 2, not 3, one. To do this, I recommend first looking at how your sales teams are structured. Is it by segment or by product line? How is your product management organization structured? Organizing product marketers works best when they can own a product (or own a thematic topic) over a portfolio of products, so they can find that sweet spot of responsibility and authority.