AMA: Privy Vice President of Marketing, Daniel J. Murphy on Establishing Product Marketing

Earliest stage: soon as you have a product in customers hands, you could use product marketing. That's not always realistic... sales, engineering, product resources take priority. And there's always that question in leadership, why do you need PMM so early if you have product management? But the ealier you have someone learning, building a knowledge base of customer insights that'll help the GTM teams excel like bringing new features to your early adopters, establishing an understanding of where you fit in your market, those things can pay off huge as you scale the business.

I don't think courses or books will substitute real world management experience, ever. Courses and books are helpful, but in terms of interviewing for a Director role with people management responsibility, they are not a substitute. I've hired first time managers a few times. Nothing against someone trying to get their first at bat managing or running a team. All depends on the situation, who they will be managing (and how many). Probably the best advice I can give here is just what I'd look for if I were hiring a Director of PMM to run a small team (which I happened to be doing last year). First, they need to show command for product marketing - how it would fit in the org, how to scale it as the company grows, the tactics, etc. And that's totally within your control, sounds like you have plenty of it. Second, I'd want to know how they'd approach managing an employee or a small team. How would they delegate, would they take partial IC ownership, what roles would they prioritize hiring when its time to scale. Third, would want them and the employee they'd manage to spend time in the interview process together, make sure it's a mutual fit. Is the employee excited about the idea of this person coming on to lead the team? (the #1 question always) and care they still excited about their career growth prospects with this new manager? (also should be a yes) Hope that helps :) 

I think this one's simple: you include them in the plan. No better way to get aligned with another team than planning with that team. The GTM plan doesn't work without product, design, and R&D, so make that clear to them and build a plan that aligns with the product roadmap. Successful engagement is when your both executing on a strategy in tandem that helps the business grow.

Great question. Yes, been there & struggled there before. Think ultimately the more you can make product marketing a group of strategic thinkers and enablement gurus to marketing, the more clout your team will build. If demand gen wants to parnter with PMM to understand how to market features for a campaign, if content looks to product marketing for competitive intel or market insights to build content, those are all signs you've built a PMM with real value to the marketing org.

So first of all, the biggest product marketing team I've built is two (and I was half of it). I'm really much more knowledgeable around establishing PMM within the org. But I'll take a crack at answer the question because I certainly have studied scaling PMM orgs (and been part of a few). I think you really need to start with product ownership. If you're going from one to two, make sure that gives your PMMs more time to get deeper product ownership. That usually coincides nicely with how the product management team is being built out. So PMM has one or maybe two direct partners in product and there's alignment between the two orgs. Scale your PMM org from there until product(s) are fully owned and you're at a 1:3 PMM to PM ratio. From there, if you're growing PMM one idea I'd consider is sales enablement sometimes known as solutions marketing. A different wing of product marketing but if your selling enterprise (long sales cycle, multiple buying personas, etc) you'll want a team of enablers & learners to be close to sales helping knock down doors and take sales conversation insights back into the marketing and prodcut orgs. Can't understate how important (and often missed by PMM) those insights are. Hire 1-2 solutions marketers, probably align with your sales motion (smb, mid market, enterprise).

Interesting question. I'll say Demand Gen (a.k.a campaigns team) owns the offer and executive associated with the campaign the product marketing team owns the strategy and intel for that campaign. Depends on how the demand gen and product marketing team as staffed as well. Usually demand gen has more people to handle the execution and can own reporting too. 

Good question. And admittedly it's been a minute since I've worked with a growth team so my answer might be 2-3 years outdated. But I think if you're in product marketing and you're lucky enough to have an adacent growth team, first of all, partner with them. Doubt it'll feel natural at first, but that team can be a major advantage to product marketing because it gives PMM the time to work elsewhere in the org on other problems (customer and prodcut fit, user and feature fit, etc). Also growth teams usually work in shorter term projects, while product marketing is hopefully building an org that owns responsibilities long term (sales enablement, product messaging, positioning, etc). Growth can skate out a head, test ideas and bring product marketing super valuable insights that'll make their work smarter. Lets be honest, product marketers have to make a lot of assumptions in the work they do (small teams, less time to test, no budget, etc). Growth usually has the opposite problem, a nice budget, time to test but no or fuzzy long term ownership within the org. That makes for a good working partnerships between the two teams. So not an exact answer to KPIs, metrics, activties, but my recommendation would be set up a way to implement growth into testing and data and product marketing to own traditional product marketing responsibilities, see how that fits within the org. KPIs wil come later. 

Are you executing on intiatives that align with your leadership team's top priorities? Is product marketing asked to join to product roadmap planning conversations? Does demand gen and content marketing rely on product marketing for insights and knowledge to executive a campaign or the content strategy? If the answer is yes to the above, then you're PMM function is strategically valuable.