AMA: TeamSnap Senior Director Consumer Product Marketing & Strategy, Rayleen Hsu on Stakeholder Management

Product Marketing sits at the intersection of many cross-functional teams, especially when it comes to go-to-market and marketing campaign planning. This means that PMM has the benefit of collaboration across many teams but it also means that PMM is dependent on a lot of cross-functional partners in order to actually get things done. That said, great project management and communication is key to managing timelines with your cross-functional partners to drive towards successful outcomes. What I' ...Read More

As a new comer, it's important to demonstrate value as quickly as possible and to do it with minimal direction. When joining new companies or new teams, I've found that the best way to do this is the following: Identify key stakeholders and partners you want to align with and set up 1:1s to get to know them, what they're working on and how you can best partner and support with them. Continue to build ongoing relationships with these people through recurring 1:1s as needed. Build deep understandi ...Read More

"Feedback is a gift" as people like to say and it certainly can be. However, to ensure feedback doesn't spiral into an endless cycle of differing opinions and back and forth conversations, it's important to align on process, key decision makers, and timelines up front. Notably, different workstreams require differing levels of feedback. If it's something as simple as a presentation for a sub-group of people (e.g. presenting campaign performance to a small marketing team), feedback loops with you ...Read More

In general, I think prioritization is less about what asks are coming from your top stakeholders and more about prioritizing the team and company's top initiatives and the stakeholders that map to those initiatives. Simply put, PMM should be prioritizing the work that is the most meaningful and impactful rather than prioritizing people and their asks of PMM. Managing expectations though of your top stakeholders and being able to clearly communicate what you and your PMM team are working on is cr ...Read More

Influencing the product team, and the product roadmap in particular, can sometimes be both the most challenging yet most rewarding thing to do. Product leaders are by nature very structured, highly analytical and incredibly focused. If you happen to join an organization at a time where they are already midway through planning or if they already have a clear product strategy and roadmap in place, there can often be limited opportunity for diverging from that plan. That said, coming into a situati ...Read More