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

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 pointed at some point in the retention metrics or adoption metric funnel to change behavior that you can try to track. For example, after your assessment you have an X customer reach out to number with a Y conversion rate, you can implement activities to try and affect change in either of those numbers. If you hit those numbers, you can try and claim credit for them based on your activities. It's sometimes an art in stakeholder management to ensure the credit will also come to the Product Marketing team as an enablement function, but at least you have clear understanding of what was going to happen without Product Marketing support, and the additional activities can be credited in the right way. Understanding the business and the core metrics will be what drives the ability for the Product Marketing team to drive change, and if there isn't a core understanding of that, it will be a hard case to make.

Retention. Always retention of the product when it's new. If you're not retaining people, you have a leaky funnel and your product is not ready to be widely distributed. If you're retaining customers and they're staying, you can continue on and expand. Never ignore retention in the early stage of a product.

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 accelerant not just the recipient of credit.

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 time, so ensure your product usage stays high, and your return or bounce rate from the product is low.

Start with the why. Why isn't this organization data-driven? Unpack the history, and why certain things are important and how they drive the outputs that the business values. Then build metrics from their importance and get buy in on those measures. It would be very hard to change the culture of entire organization, unless you're leading it. If not, figure out the why and how you can affect that why long-term so you can be aligned on the outputs that the organization wants to produce.

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 get to a place on how they're driving more customers or more money, re-think them.

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 revenue growth. In the end, the Product Manager is responsible for their product and its adoption. Product Marketing can take a piece of it, but even what product marketing contributes will credit Product Management. While it's great to have ownership of an adoption number or KPI, the truth is, that so much of this is influenced on if the product is ready for the market, it's not always wise to take on a KPI that you can't fully control. Set yourself up for success while you can, and that entails being honest on your contribution, and where you will actually affect change, vs. trying to own a larger metric than you can actually change.

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 up with is the baseline. What do we think the product would do in the most conservative launch activities? Then, the exercise for PMM should do, is how do we amplify or accelerate the ability to get to that number. Examples: * Will additional sales enablement activities drive close-win percentages an additional, x% to bump up the goal? * Will an additional influencer campaign, focusing on the relevant audience drive uplift of X to the baseline of activities? * Will launching 1 month earlier on X day, deliver better timing due to seasonality of the product, and we'd hit our goals faster and in a larger timing? Then product marketing can own the uplift/accelerant number vs. the entire baselines. The product/sales team should own the baseline. If there is nothing PMM is doing above the baseline, then how are you making this launch better? And are you really doing product marketing or are you project managing the launch? A B2C example of this, is at Monzo (a UK Bank Fintech), we had a product called 1P Savings Challenge, that was going to be launched as a subscription-only feature behind a paywall during December. Product Marketing took control of the Go To Market strategy, and pushed for it to be launched in January, which would be relevant timing and outside of the paywall. The baseline for the product was the initial number of X number of activations of the product, which product owns. It was VERY SMALL, in the hundreds. They were happy when we launched the 1P Savings challenge that it hit 1M users within weeks. Congrats to the team who pulled this off. A B2B example of this, is at Meta we were launching a huge investment in automated/AI driven campaigns in the app install advertising objectives called Automated App Ads. We worked to figure out the baseline of activity of sales and product amplification, finding a significant uplift to the business if we launched well. PMM understood that goal, and added significant press, sales enablement, measurement and additional support activities to amplify the activities significantly. We 2x'd the baseline goal within the first two months of the project. Product Marketing was able to take a shared stake of that huge uplift, and we all celebrated crushing the gaol together. Congrats also to the team to pull this off! Because we established the baseline, Product Marketing could really take credit for the increased channel activity and what we pushed to accelerate the launch. Too often, I see teams not thinking through the baseline, and seeing Product Marketing activities as part of the baseline, which is a recipe for under valuing our activity. It's much harder to do, and takes a ton of support before the launch to do this, but afterward, you will be able to take credit for your wins as much as product, and your function will continue to be funded.