AMA: Quickbase VP of Product Marketing, Sarah Din on Establishing Product Marketing

As a first PMM at any company you first want to establish your charter and define key areas of responsibilities based on company priorities. Based on that, you'd want to identify where the gaps are and build a hiring plan. If you are B2b, you likely need to support both product and sales efforts - so you'd want to structure your org design accordingly, and there are several ways of doing that. While this does not always apply, in general: * For companies with an early-stage product, you likely want to closely align more closely with the product team and build skills on the PMM team around market research, competitive intel, positioning/messaging, and launches. Then there are dependencies on your GTM strategy: * For Self-serve, PLG products, you also want to have skills on the team around growth marketing - someone who can think through onboarding, adoption, engagement, and retention efforts - with a focus on the customer lifecycle. I would look for people who have managed self-serve products before. * For enterprise, you want to add skills around sales enablement, but you also might want to add skills around solutions selling for instance, if you have a vertical sales motion.

Good frameworks should be easy to personalize - so the most important thing is to first start with a good framework for anything you are working on. For example: Product Launch Process There are fundamental workflows and deliverables that remain consistent no matter what company you work for. For instance, most launch frameworks will start with launch tiers - the concept remains true but how you define their tiers can shift based on your company, industry, product type, etc. The same goes for the actual workflows and templates - you'll need a GTM framework with messaging, competitive analysis, features/benefits, etc. But what you want to personalize is roles and responsibilities, cross-functional workflows, and the comms channels you leverage both internally and externally. I always like to start with what's already working well and then leverage a new framework to optimize that process. And to do that, you want to make sure you work closely with all the cross-functional teams involved to get buy-in early on.

The most important thing during this process is to clearly outline roles and responsibilities for both yourself and the new person on your team, I am a huge fan of RACI models for driving that clarity. Secondly, you want to clearly understand each of your strengths and key areas of growth for your new hire - so that you can make sure you are leveraging them for the right type of work where they can make a big impact while giving them the opportunity to work on projects where they can learn and grow. It can be uncomfortable for some people to give up that sense of "control" when you are used to doing everything as an IC - but in order for your own growth as a leader, it's important to make that mind-shift and realize that you are now responsible for someone else's growth and its important to give them room to fail and learn - even if things are done exactly in the way you'd get them done! One of the things I love to do is lead by example. Show what good looks like and then give your team room to learn and deliver!

* Do not hire more people until you have a clear charter for the team * Make sure you align with other cross-functional teams as you build your org design so that your team has clear partners across different functional - otherwise, this almost always fails * For smaller, newer PMM teams, avoid hiring people that have a very niche focus. You will benefit more from building and growing a full-stack PMM team

One of the biggest challenges I always see is internal education. Most companies where PMM is new will not understand what PMM can and should do and how to work with them. One of the most important things to do when establishing a new PMM function is defining a clear charter, goals, and even a defined list of deliverables and doing internal roadshows to educate different cross-functional teams on what you are responsible for, when to come to you and when to loop you in. The second most important thing to do is to define key processes very early on - such as the product launch process.

It's important to understand what your C-suite wants and needs from PMM. Product Marketing is a versatile role and often looks different at every company, and you need to be somewhat flexible in what you focus on based on company goals. But with that said, it's important to establish the core charter early on - and one way to do that with the executive team is to use examples of how PMM works at other (similar companies) and highlight why you believe it should be that way.

There is no generic rule of thumb for this, but i'd focus on company growth as an indicator. If your company is growing fast and you realize that there are too many initiatives to support and that you cannot support the larger strategic company goals & objectives with just one person, then its likely time to bring another person in :)

Outside of the core PMM assets like messaging, or buyer personas, here are a few other things I'd look for: * Existing sales pitches or sales assets to understand how the product is positioned * Gong calls (or other recorded sales calls you can get your hands on) * Competitive analysis work to understand your unique position in the market

PMM Org design really depends on a few different variables. You want to consider: * the maturity of your product * You GTM strategy * How your cross-functional teams are structured * What the biggest company objectives are for the next 12 months If you have multiple products or a complex, mature or sophisticated product/platform: you might consider aligning closely to the product org If you have dual GTM motions: Product-led and Sales-led: you might consider splitting responsibilities that way If you work at an established company with a ton of hiring budget - then you can afford to build a highly specialized team with people focused on specific roles with PMM like CI, Sales enablement, etc. I almost always prefer full-stack PMM teams with a matrix or hybrid approach - not only does this give you good coverage across your team but it also helps you grow different skills on your team.

your 30-60-90 day plan will really depend on where the company is focused for the next 12 months and where they really need the most help. But in general, you want to look at a few key areas: - Build strong cross-functional relationships - Build a PMM charter, establish your function and roles and responsibilities, and if you have been asked to build a team, figure our your org design - Establish key processes before you bring anyone on board. This can include things like product launches, internal comms, etc. - Then dive into the key gaps, which almost always starts with having a clear positioning and messaging strategy. As part of that effort, you want to have a clear outline of your market category if that's unclear, and clarity on your competitive landscape. It's important to build these 90-day goals with your executive team so that everyone is aligned on what you are responsible for delivering.

The biggest difference in my experience is that most PMMs are smaller companies that are full-stack PMMs and very early learn how to do a little bit of everything. They often need to wear multiple hats and do everything from writing blog posts to owning the GTM strategy and do all of that in parallel. PMM teams at larger companies can afford to build more specialized skillsets and you often find PMMs at larger organizations that become SMEs in certain areas.