AMA: Quizlet Director of Product and Lifecycle Marketing, Caroline Walthall on Influencing without Authority

The three biggest things that have helped me build influence as a product marketer have been: 1) Understanding the big picture workings of the business, including how you grow, earn, and retain revenue. 2) Building up strong credibility as a user advocate based on data and first-hand research. 3) Taking ownership and stake in the success metrics that matter most to your product, design, and engineering counterparts. This means, pitching in to get results! * Strong business understanding: * The reason that broad business understanding can be so helpful is PMMs often work across several PMs or product areas. Seek to be an asset and a partner who sees connections across orgs and products. In doing this, you can save your PDE partners time by providing more information to make better more integrated decisions. Making connections across a business can be a strategic superpower. * Business understanding is also essential to building up your credibility. We listen more to people who we think know what they are talking about. * Voice of the customer: * Being an awesome user advocate is also a multiplier. The closer you can be to understanding what your users value, the better you can add value in the product development process. If you aren’t already finding ways to conduct both qual and quant research on a quarterly basis, I highly encourage you to. The input you give will be taken 10x more seriously when your peers know you as someone who listens to users and synthesizes their problems, desires, and context. * The more contextual knowledge you build about your customer base, the easier it will be to hone your product intuition, as well. * Take ownership over metrics that matter: * Every company is different, but try to align closely with your product, design, and engineering partners in OKR setting. Make sure that you show that you’re “on the same team” and taking enough ownership for your product groups’ results. Even if you only have directly influence over a part of that picture, show that you are thinking about all the tradeoffs throughout the funnel. * If you can, show that you’re willing to be a team player and pitch in on parts of your colleagues’ work in interest of the whole team’s success. Make sure to protect your time if you do this so you don’t overextend or take on longterm scope creep. * Don’t discount the value of truly being in your colleagues’ corner. This is how partnership is built!

1. Face time: Face time, whether virtual or in person is always going to go farthest in maintaining connections. We’re social creatures after all. If you don’t already have a regular cadence of seeing some of the most important stakeholders in meetings each month, now is a good time to take inventory and get a little bit of calendar time. Now, this doesn’t always need to be in the form of 1:1s. There are plenty of instances where being part of regular cross-functional meetings will be enough. 2. Listen and validate: When you have those meetings, listen closely for the problems your peers are trying to solve and the types of opinions and facts they bring to the table. Finding moments to mention when you are aligned with their perspective helps you build a sense of alliance and validation. This sets the stage for them to take your needs and perspectives seriously when the time comes. 3. Concise written communications: Written communication can also be a powerful tool. If you can develop the discipline to write extremely succinct summaries of marketing results, strategic recommendations, market insights, and operational requirements, people will see you as a valuable contributor who keeps things moving forward. As we all know, less is more here and that’s easier said than done. Work on your executive communication (and ask for feedback on it) to ensure that many types of stakeholders will want to consume your content. 4. Get to know the humans and show you care: Make sure you also spend a little time seeing and knowing people for who they are. Appreciating their personality, interests, and family help build bonds that remind everyone of our shared humanity. We all appreciate being asked about ourselves or having an opportunity to lightly commiserate. 

* User and Market Research Decks: These types of share outs are a great outlet for building a narrative around a product direction or opportunity that arises organically in the market. * Marketing plan decks: If you’re looking to share more of a marketing vision, make it as simple as possible. Leading with messaging and the broader market story can be really effective here, especially if you’ve validated it with your customers. * Recommendation or POV one-pager: If what you’re looking to share is a point of view to influence decisions made, a one-pager can be a good artifact to summarize your argument and supporting points. * In situ comments on your peers' work: You have to keep in mind that all your stakeholders are incredibly busy with lots coming at them. Sometimes the best way to build buy in for a vision is over time in comments in documents and through verbal input in meetings. The more you position your vision as an integrated piece to plans your partners already have in place, the less cognitive load you place on them. Help your input feel organic to the work process rather than a grand delivery of your own polished plans. If they have some of their own fingerprints on the thinking, you’ll be much more likely to garner their support, and even advocacy. 

I think the most crucial skills for growing your influence are relationship building, curiosity, data-centricity, knowledge of senior leadership, open collaboration, defining clear roles, and delivering marketing impact. All these things contribute tangible value to your peers. * Relationship building: This can’t really be taught, it needs to be practiced and the work is never done on this skill. It’s about putting people first, being empathetic, and staying aware of give-and-take dynamics. * How well do you listen? How well do you follow up? How present are you to the problems your stakeholders are raising? Do you take things lightly rather than personally? Are you at least a little bit fun to work with? * The soft skills of relationship building are quite possibly the biggest differentiator between those that advance in PMM and those who plateau. * Curiosity: Asking good questions is easily one of the fastest tracks to building stronger influence. When you ask incisive and relevant questions, you help sharpen your stakeholders’ thinking. * The better you get at helping others pressure test their plans, the more you’ll be invited to give input. * Questions can also be a great way to communicate your perspectives or intuitions in a way that’s less formal and more "in the flow" of day-to-day work. * Data-centricity: At the end of the day, numbers can be a strong tool to bring disparate parties and functions to closer alignment. * Provided your source data is well documented, data helps you center your argument, opportunity, or area of concern in common language. * Better yet, if you can size the opportunity or problem and provide some lightweight validation of that sizing, it will be much easier for your partners to make the tradeoffs and decisions you are hoping for. * Knowledge of senior leadership: Who are your stakeholders’ managers? The better you understand the execs and senior leaders your peers report to, the better you can empathize and tailor solutions to their concerns. * Understand who really makes the calls. * Also, is there a “clean escalation” flow your company uses? Make sure PMM has some power to initiate those in the rare instances when it’s necessary. * Outside of that, make sure the important leaders know you. The more you build clout with leadership, the more your peers will slow down to listen to what you have to say. * The best way to do this is to prep well whenever you present to execs and show you can be someone who is both clear in perspective and open minded enough to flex in light of competing views or information. * Collaborative planning: This is perhaps more tactical. Be someone who lets your peers in on your marketing plans before they are finalized. * If you open your thinking and planning for commentary and input, your peers will typically be willing to reciprocate. * Take responsibility for improving cross-functional operations: Help the group reflect on what’s working and what is not. * Postmortems can be great for this. If you can own up to the areas where you can better grease the wheels and avoid slowdowns, you’ll earn respect for putting the interests of the broader group first. * Agreeing on clear roles and responsibilities: Product marketing can overlap a bit with other functions. * Befriend the DACI model and rigorously apply it to make sure you’re avoiding duplicative work, gaps, and unnecessary collisions. * Deliver strong results and clear learnings in your domain area: This should be a given but bears mentioning. If you put all your focus on your peers and fail to carve out the right amount of time to do work that is impactful, you are not going to be taken as seriously, and worse you may be wasting people’s time. * What can a PMM differentially deliver to your team and customers? * Your peers will look for a track record of wins and learnings to trust that you know what you’re doing and are playing your part. 

* Reflect: * I reflect on who I would ask to be my peer reviewer probably about once a quarter, even if we only do 360s annually. It’s worth thinking about: * “How have I helped this person lately? How have I made their job easier or more impactful?” * “What are their impressions of me? How could I show up as more of a leader and helpful peer with them?” * Ask for feedback: * You can also ask directly for feedback on what would make your asks easier to say yes to in the future. Especially after you’ve tried and failed to make a dent on the strategy or roadmap, it’s important to get more context. * Could you have provided more data and sizing to make your case? * Was your idea just too far out of scope for the current resourcing or strategy? * Was it bad timing relative to other commitments and plans being made? * Was it how you went about it that could have been better? * What soft skills could have helped tee things up better? * Brainstorm alternative approaches: * Think through the steps you took. * When did you start making your case? * Who did you start with? * What kind of buy in did you have? * How might you have better brought others in on your proposal? * Did your manager or other leaders support your position? * Do you think the issue was more around the quality of your case narrative and data? * ...or, more around how you built interest among stakeholders? * As you reflect on these questions, you can then ideate on ways to do things differently next time! * Consider looking for ways to redefine product marketing at your company: * After reflecting on what you could do better, you also may need to consider that it could be the company culture and attitudes around the role of product marketing that is a headwind to your efforts. * The best way to combat this is to think about how you can work to rebrand and clarify what product marketing does at your company. You’ll need some level of executive buy-in to make a shift, but this doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. * I’ve found that even putting together as little as two visual slides can accomplish the goal of laying out the role of PMM. For example, I’ve found it helpful to sketch out a flow chart of your company’s product development stages, and then call out what role PMM should/could play throughout. Make this a discussion with your stakeholders rather than a demand. You might be surprised how many of your peers just don't have a lot of historical background working with product marketers.

I believe strongly in giving my team autonomy to progress and drive their careers, but at a certain point, we all need mentors to help us think through specific actions that can grow our leadership influence. We all have blind spots. As I've grown in my career as a people manager and leader, I've developed a PMM Growth Framework to use with my team. I think that building influence can come from many things and it helps to pull apart the threads to understand where your team has it and where there is room to grow. * In this career reflection, I ask a few questions about my team members' short and long term goals. * I also have four key skills I have them self-assess against, which are broadly framed as: 1) Research and Audience Insights 2) Product partnership & Business Understanding 3) Positioning & Messaging, and 4) Launches & GTM work. * Lastly, I include what I call an "Influence Inventory." This is a super lightweight self-check on some of the key indicators of organizational influence. I created an acronym for these elements: VITALS. Each team member self selects "Feeling good," "Feeling neutral," "Feeling less great." This isn't a performance review but more of a tool to talk through how I can help them beef up their broader influence by getting more specific about where it may be lacking. * Volume/Output of work * Number of campaigns, tests, research projects, etc. * Impact * Getting meaningful results and returns from the work * Team Enablement & Collaboration * Doing things that grease the wheels for others * Autonomy & Scope * How broad the domain authority is and how much you need your manager to step in * Leadership & Repping the work * Serving as a leader across work streams and teams and/or sharing out learnings, decisions, etc. in a way that positions you as a leader * Strategic Influence * Decisions made based on insights you've provided The resulting career discussion helps us really prioritize not only the types of projects to sign team members onto, but also how we position them and give them platforms to drive decisions and share out learnings.

Information is power! Treat all your initial one-on-one calls with stakeholders as a research endeavor. * Ask about their goals and challenges. * Ask what they hope you can collaborate or drive forward. * Get a sense for their communication style and how they process information. * Ask genuine questions to both learn from them and show you respect the expertise they've built up. Outside of being a sponge and getting to know your colleagues, I would think through at least one "quick win" project you can complete that directly helps your Product Manager partner, in particular. Here are some ideas for showing value to your PM partner in the first 30 days: * Help with a small research project to influence the product roadmap. * Help with audience sizing to influence prioritization or make it easier for them to build an investment case. * Do a mini product launch or expand product education to drive adoption and engagement. * Conduct an audit of the marketing funnel and suggest both product and marketing solutions to improve it. * Do a competitive analysis that pertains to key strategic questions at-hand.