AMA: Samsara Head Of Product Marketing, Suyog Deshpande on Building Product Marketing Team

Change Management: As you grow the team, you will have to restructure and assign new responsibilities to individuals. This can be tough when you are going from a do-it-all mindset to functional expertise. While making such a change, it could feel like you are taking away the responsibilities from individuals. It is important that you are able to articulate the reasons and define a growth path for all roles as you make the change. Additionally, change management requires communication with stakeholders. If change is not communicated, stakeholders and the team will either start executing based on the older model or the team will get frustrated because they are getting asked about workstreams they are no longer responsible for. Communicating priorities and responsibilities: As the team grows, it is important to align the team on priorities. It is growing to be harder and harder to oversee individual projects and workstreams. If everyone on the team knows the priorities, goals, and DACIs well, things can get streamlined across projects. Internal Promotions vs External talent: As you grow the team, you want to reward the employees who have worked hard, who understand the culture, and who have the relationships. However, it is equally important to bring external talent to learn and uplevel the work. As you grow the team, you will need people managers, and promoting internally vs. hiring externally will be a sensitive decision

* You must have crafted regional value props. Discuss how you approached building those. The same framework can be scaled to craft global value props * You must have led a regional sales enablement program: This also scales well for global PMM teams. Your playbook will be similar just that the target audience will be larger * Market Intel: You should highlight this as a strength. For a regional PMM, market intel (competitive landscape, customer insights, industry knowledge) is crucial for their success. Share how you gathered, used, and distributed those to your stakeholders. Global teams sometimes miss this and you can add tremendous value * Partnership with regional PMs: This is another skill you can scale. As you join a global PMM team, the number of PMs you support won't increase significantly. So, this is s a transferrable skill.

Two things: Build company narrative: If you are just starting the PMM function in the company, this would be one of the first things to focus on. Most likely the existing narrative was built out by the founding team but bringing expert perspective and start building out a differentiated narrative for your company. A good framework is a 3 Why funnel. I recall reading a blog about 3 Whys funnel (Apologies that I don't recall who wrote it). Why the problem you are solving is critical, Why they should choose you and Why should they make the decision now. Support the lead gen engine: Every company needs leads. Most likely at this early stage, the company is still figuring out what is the right path to generate leads. That would be a top priority for the marketing team. So, it makes sense to align some work of PMM to support this priority. If the company is focusing on inbound then building out content or overseeing content development and influencing what content gets rolled out would be helpful. If the company is focusing on outbound, then arming sales with right talk track, and assets would be critical. 

Refer to my answer for this other question here (link) For a team of 3, I can suggest some frameworks to use- Do you have multiple products and can 3 people own 3 product GTMs? Do you have a team where there are different strengths and are you able align people by functional expertise? For example: Could you have one person lead company messaging, positioning; one lead product launches and enablement and the other can own solutions or programs/pricing? Do you have different GTM motions - Enterprise, product led sales, volume sales for SMB? Can you align by that? For a 3 member team, you can also do a project by project assignment - every quarter you can assign big projects (This can be confusing and it will require you to spend more time every quarter on planning but if the company is still figuring out sales structure/product groups etc, then do it all model could work as well) ---- In the end, it comes to marrying company priorities with the strength/weaknesses of your team.

DO IT ALL -> FUNCTIONAL -> BY PRODUCT -> GRID It depends on the size of your team and the maturity of the company. Typically what I have seen is that - * With 1-2 PMMs - it's "do it all" approach. These PMMs take on all responsibilities - Positioning, Messaging, Launches, Product GTM, Competitive, and Market Intel. However, that is doable at that size of the company beacuse PMM counterparts are doing the same. Sales will be a small team, the sales team won't wait for sales enablement to happen, they hustle and build their own pitch deck. Same for the product team * As the company grows and you have 4-5 PMMs - It might make sense to start organizing the team by functional expertise. My assumption is that the company is still a single product company (90%+ revenue is coming from your core product) * As you launch more revenue-generating products, you might want to assign PMMs per product and still have a bench with functional expertise. The product PMMs will start becoming SMEs for the product, the target market, use cases. The functional experts will amplify their efforts * At the next stage, you will want to align with your product and sales teams and this will result in a grid structure for the team. You will have product GTM teams, industry, solutions mkt team, regional PMM (ex: LATAM or EMEA), Market Intel, AR, Sales Enablement, Pricing. As you grow, you may want to assign PMMs to company priorities (For example - if you are trying to drive from product led growth for your product, it's best to have a PMM that is focused on driving trial to paid conversions)

Why do you want to communicate updates and activities? If the goal is to communicate just the work the team has been doing, then I don't think that you should be communicating this to a large audience. This may be a good weekly summary email to your manager (Also, why would your manager need it?, the manager should already know it and it should be in your 1:1 doc), anyway, my point is communicating just WHAT you or your team is working on is waste of time for you and the reader. I would rather communicate the impact and how other teams could leverage the work your team has done. This can be done in different forums. For sales, that could be training. For product teams, that could a roadmap review meeting, for gtm teams, that can be launch messaging and GTM meeting. For demand gen and the rest of the marketing team, you can help them by sharing how they could roll out your work in the market to drive more demand. We use different forums - sometimes it's 1:1 with other functional leaders, sometimes we plug our work into existing enablement programs, sometimes we create a new training, we participate in campaigns planning process, we join team meetings for other teams to share how they can leverage our work.