AMA: FiveStars Former Product Marketing Manager, Ross Overline on Product Marketing

Not trying to deflect this, but this depends on your role, organization size, team structure, budget, target customer, and goals. That list sounds solid to me if you're a midsize company with some startup bend still. Some other tools to consider: * Leadpages or Unbounce are solid tools for building lead generating landing pages fast. * Mixpanel for instrumentation. * Marketo for scaled lifecycle communications (SFDC integration is helpful) * Mailchimp for scrappy email work. * Redash.io is a solid SQL interface. * Get Adobe suite if you can. Makes content collaboration easier since many designers use it. Hope that's helpful!

While there are benefits to both, judging from my experience, I believe PMM reporting into Marketing is more effective. * Reporting into makreting creates stronger ties between PMM and the revenue organziation (marketing, sales, operations, etc.) and can therefore lead to more buy-in from those stakeholders during launch. * Reporting into marketing positions you as a core partner in the revenue org. You have greater flexibility to "lead" the revenue org through launches and strategy shifts, while the PM can then focus more of their time on R&D (product, design, engineering, analytics, etc.). This creates a clean and powerful parternship for leading the entire business through GTM. * Reporting into product can lead to channel conflicts, while reporting into marketing can create easier entry into core channels. For example, if PMM reports to product, you won't be as closely tied to growth or channel owners and may have more difficulty getting slotted into channel calendars. If PMM is in marketing and has a stronger relationship with growth or channel owners, it can potentially make those conversations and processes smoother. * PMM reporting into marketing may make marketing budget more accessible. If you're in marketing, you'll be more incentivized to think in terms of marketing metrics, which naturally leads to the development stronger arguments for unlocking marketing budget. You'll also have closer ties to the owners of marketing budget as well.

There are a few questions here: How do I influence the team, how do I influence the roadmap, and how do I get them to listen to the feedback I'm bringing from customers. First, seek to understand. Approach your product team and roadmap decision makers with the intent to understand their values, motivations, goals, concerns, and needs. Once you've developed this level of understanding of your stakeholders, you can then truly understand what it is they want. After understanding my product team, what I've found most effective is to uncover the intersection between what they need and where I can deliver outsized value. Understand their strengths and your strengths, and then understand where that "Venn Diagram" does or doesn't overlap, in line with what the product team wants. Broadly, for a PMM I'd recommend knowing your customers, category, and competition better than anyone else, and see which of those product is most interested in. It's hard to address the piece about consumer feedback because I don't know the specifics of your situation, but let's assume you're bringing them qualitative feedback from customers from 1:1 interviews. What if they are already talking to customers? What if they believe they already understand that specific segment? What if your team prefers quantitative data over qualitative? Are you asking the types of questions that your product team is looking to answer? Do you have clarity on their top priorities and does the feedback you surface reflect that alignment and support those priorities? The answer to those questions come from understanding the stakeholders. You may need to start with giving them deep competitive insights. Once you build trust and become a thought partner, doors open for you to introduce other kinds of insights. There's a lot to say on this topic, but I'll start there. If you have follow up questions, feel free to message me with more specifics and I can try to offer more tactical advice! There is also a PMM leader named Mike Polner who is worth trying to contact. He taught me all of this :)

Asking for a raise is tricky. Ultimately, you need to be driving value, right? That can be broken down quantitatively, but also qualitatively. Quant: What impact are you having on funnels? Run A/B tests to prove that your strategies are driving impact. How have NPS and sentiment changed? Qual: Do you have strong relationships with stakeholders? Are you driving value through strategy, creative, and channel partnerships? I would also recommend using your companies job ladder as a tool, or if you don't have one, job descriptions for other similar roles. If you're a PMM and the expectations for a PMM are X. But you're operating at Y level, which are the epxectations for a Director of PMM, then you should surface that. If you're exceeding expectations for your role, make that known during your review. Comps may be a useful tool as well. Look at what other companies are paying for your role if you think underpaid. You need to have some credible target to aim for.