AMA: Persona Head of Product Marketing, Evelyn Ju on Stakeholder Management

Like most cross-functional work, the most important thing is to build trust and establish shared goals early on. Instead of delegating work, involve them in your process, provide them with proper context, and agree on timelines where applicable. They will be much more motivated to help if they have the same context and can be part of the journey. When giving feedback, make sure to provide the why and take a step back when necessary to ground your discussions around objectives, guardrails, and wh ...Read More

The focus is on product education and differentiation, essentially helping your customers understand why they should continuously choose your product over others throughout the customer lifecycle — from acquisition through retention. Without Sales as a touch point, PMMs need to figure out how to communicate product value through various touch points and ensure messaging stays consistent. You likely will be leveraging a lot of different communication channels (e.g. landing pages, email sequences, ...Read More

In general, I would bucket the insights we need into a few different categories: for team planning and priorities, customer insights, and feedback on specific messaging or product features. Planning and priorities: I find it helpful to check in regularly on internal stakeholders’ priorities and challenges they are dealing with. This can help you identify common themes across different functions when it comes to planning and prioritizing initiatives to better support your internal stakeholders li ...Read More

It’s important to set expectations up front in terms of what you are trying to accomplish, why it’s important and how it will be used. It’s easy for messaging related discussions to take a life of its own so aligning your stakeholders to the same goals will help focus the feedback you will receive. While PMMs are the drivers of messaging, it’s important to bring your stakeholders along as you test hypotheses and iterate on your messaging. They will often provide interesting perspectives that can ...Read More

The key is to first align on the framework for making decisions (e.g. market opportunity, customer retention/expansion goals, revenue impact, etc. and how you prioritize each) and then ensure the teams have the relevant information (e.g. customer research, feedback, metrics, or analysis) to make the actual decision when it comes to customer priorities. In smaller orgs, it’s easier to gather everyone from product, PMM, and customer-facing teams to have frequent meetings to stay aligned. For examp ...Read More

It’s always difficult to navigate tense relationships. It’s important not to take this all upon yourself. If you are looking to help, I think the first step is to assess the situation and try to understand the underlying cause that’s driving the tension. Is it due to misalignment of expectations and goals? Is it a result of constant miscommunication, which can stem from having different working styles? Is it a broken process that’s fueling confusion between teams? While it can be uncomfortable, ...Read More

It is one of the most important partnerships. There is a shared goal around enabling sales to sell by telling a consistent narrative and connecting with ideal customers through messaging and assets that will resonate. PMM and Sales Enablement should work together to identify and fill knowledge gaps that are blocking reps from moving deals forward (e.g. talking points against a new competitor or for a new use case) and ensure reps know where to find the right content. Sales Enablement is a great ...Read More

If you are at a smaller company with little or no structure, it’s a great opportunity for you to build the foundation from scratch. It can be a daunting task, but inaction will likely create more headaches for you down the line. Here are few things I would consider: Education: Help the teams understand your role and the value of the PMM function. Feedback: Proactively solicit feedback from your key stakeholders. Understand their challenges, needs, and perspectives on what can be improved. Chance ...Read More

PMMs here in general have regular meetings with Product, CS, and Sales to support ongoing product launches, facilitate internal training, and gather customer feedback. However, it’s important to shift what meetings you attend, which teams/individuals you meet with, and the frequency of your meetings based on your and the business’ current priorities. Otherwise, given the nature of PMM’s work, meetings can quickly add up. There are a few questions that can help determine whether it’s important to ...Read More

Invest and focus on learning new things — specifically anything that can help you better understand the business/product/customer or pick up new skills, whether it’s related to your specific role or not. Volunteer to work on projects that will expand your knowledge. Ask your Product, CS, and Sales counterparts how you can help, even if the tasks are not directly within the scope of your role. I would also recommend finding a mentor within the org. Someone who can guide you with their own experie ...Read More