AMA: Sourcegraph Director of Product Marketing, Andy Schumeister on Establishing Product Marketing

30 days: Prioritize understanding your customers, your product, and your company:  Shadow customer calls (or listen to recordings if they exist). Get to know your cross-functional partners - schedule time with people from product, sales, marketing, engineering, design, etc. This will help you understand areas of opportunity as you establish relationships internally.  Learn about your product - get access to a sandbox account, read the documentation, read case studies, etc. Educate your company o ...Read More

Try to align your portfolio with the job description: If the job description focuses on messaging and positioning, share an example of a messaging framework or landing page that you put together. If the job description focuses on launching products, share an example of an Asana board or spreadsheet you'd use to coordinate a cross-functional launch. If the job description focuses on writing, share a blog post, case study, or e-mail you've crafted. If your portfolio doesn't align with the job desc ...Read More

I generally use a modified version of the Eisenhower Matrix (I just learned the name). On the spectrum of "not urgent to urgent" and "not important to important," you should prioritize the deliverables/needs that are both urgent and important. When you're the first product marketer, it's easy to fall into the trap of just prioritizing the urgent needs without evaluating the relative importance.  When you're building out a new function, spend time meeting with the teams you'll be working with to ...Read More

While there is no "one size fits all" metric that works for product marketing, my recommendation is to try to align your goals with either sales, demand gen, or product depending on what you're working on. Ideally, you'll have explicitly shared goals with one or more of the cross-functional teams you're working with. This ensures everybody is optimizing for the same outcome. For a new product launch, I'll typically have a shared adoption goal with product and/or an attach rate goal (percentage o ...Read More

Ultimately, it takes time to build relationships and prove your ability to add real value to be seen as a strategic player vs a launch arm. This can be done by leading a successful product launch, shipping a new pitch deck for sales, being the best resource for competitive intelligence, etc. For the purposes of this AMA, I'll focus on short-term strategies that'll help you establish yourself.  Educate: When you're establishing the product marketing function, it's possible that the current team h ...Read More

The biggest surprise is that even though product marketing may not exist as a function, the company is already doing product marketing: launching new products, pricing and packaging, creating messaging and positioning, etc. The challenge is that this work likely doesn't have a clear owner and is distributed across many teams.  As the first product marketing hire at Sourcegraph, I spent time in the beginning meeting with product, sales, engineering, marketing, design, etc. to understand what had ...Read More

30 days: Prioritize understanding your customers, your product, and your company: Shadow customer calls (or listen to recordings if they exist). Get to know your cross-functional partners - schedule time with people from product, sales, marketing, engineering, design, etc. This will help you understand areas of opportunity as you establish relationships internally.  Learn about your product - get access to a sandbox account, read the documentation, read case studies, etc. Educate your company on ...Read More

Great call to have commonly shared KPIs with the product team - this is the best way to ensure mutual success. When it comes to product launches, it depends a bit on what you're launching. If your company has a "core" product and you're launching a new SKU or a product with a separate revenue stream, a great shared goal is attach rate: percentage of customers that have purchased the product. You'll want to look at the overall attach rate as well as the attach rate for new deals (out of all the d ...Read More