AMA: Pinterest Director of PMM, International, Susan "Spark" Park on Product Marketing Goals

Product Management should own the adoption number, because it's indicative of their ability to build a successful product. Product Marketing is an accelerant function, and should be delivering ideas on how to exceed the goal. So Product Marketing should play an active role in increasing that number and responsible for ideas on the growth. It's a metric that should be extremely important to both functions. Thus, when thinking goals with sales and or product team, the most important number to come ...Read More

Product marketing is an accelerant function. If you drive a change in the behaviours like additional programs, marketing, activation work, measure the uplift of either. Even if it's a new product, there should be a forecast of baseline perspective of activities, or what is expected or hoped to accomplish. If there isn't, that should be the first step to assess before moving into additional activities. Assess what is needed, what the baseline is and then you can drive activation programs that are ...Read More

Revenue. So many teams touch revenue. It's the hardest to distribute credit to, and most companies follow a last touch/last click method or multiple teams take credit for the whole revenue number. It also is the toughest to move because you have to convince people to buy something. This is why I often like to take on change goals or uplift goals vs. the revenue number. The goal of product marketing is to be an accelerant and drive change to what the number's course was moving at. Be the accelera ...Read More

Retention would always be the top of my list to monitor around a launch. This simple view of whether or not customers are sticking around will tell you more about the success of your product than even revenue or customers in. For example, think about products like Threads that brought in hundreds of millions of users, but very few stuck around after months of usage. While many products have had explosive growth, it can be temporary. Retentive customers can most likely be monetized or grown over ...Read More

The Product Marketers' KPIs should roll-up into metrics that will change a business. Those are generally are in two buckets: Customers and Revenue. If these KPIs are not analysing how you're getting more customers or gaining more revenue, then you're probably tracking a useless KPI when it comes to marketing. Product teams can have other KPIs that are valuable to their infrastructure and reaction goals like responsiveness. But with marketing, if your KPIs are not telling a story or eventually ge ...Read More

I think adoption of the product ultimately is a Product Management owned goal. I actually believe most goals are owned by the Product Management team. It's up to the Product Marketing team to understand those goals and accelerate or go above what product thinks they can get. Product Marketing should understand the baseline of that goal, and taking credit for the uplift from that baseline, and place their efforts towards the products that they can impact the most change in either customer or reve ...Read More