AMA: Tremendous Head of Product and Corporate Marketing, Ambika Aggarwal on Establishing Product Marketing

If you are the first PMM hire in a B2B company, you need to very quickly establish your charter/mission and socialize your team's priorities and the corresponding KPIs that support the company's strategy. From there, you'll want to align with your leadership team on the gaps where you either need a new hire or a new skillset (i.e content) and come up with a hiring plan accordingly. For enterprise B2B companies, you need to work across product, marketing and sales so you need someone who has experience running sales enablement programs, partnering with sales, and can generally understand what it takes to help navigate complex buying cycles and buying groups with the right sales materials and selling strategies. For product-led-growth companies, you may or may not have a sales team. You'll be working closer with product, UX, and growth marketing to ensure you've optimized the customer journey and lifecycle. You'll need someone who has experience in testing new strategies that drive better conversion and engagement on your marketing channels and who is constantly looking at that data to tweak and create a more frictionless experience.

Being able to craft a compelling narrative for your product or solution that is targeted, differentiated, and drives urgency is one of the core skillsets of a PMM at any level. As you get more senior the scope of that narrative changes. Instead of covering one solution area or one particular audience, you might be covering multiple areas and audiences. At the director and above level you are likely covering the entire platform narrative and ensuring cohesion with the solutions/ICP level narratives. In terms of the day to day work, this looks like the following 1. Talking to customers 2. Listening to Gong calls 3. Analyzing competitors messaging 4. Crafting messaging frameworks 5. Empowering your marketing teams with the right messaging for campaigns 6. Creating sales assets (pitch decks, 1 pagers, outbound sequences)

Building your GTM plan is all about ensuring alignment and commitment across many different teams (Product, Design, Marketing, Sales, Enablement, CS, etc). Based on where you are in the GTM process, different teams play a heavier role in bringing the product to market. 1. I would start with ensuring the company is educated on what a successful GTM process & launch looks like. This is critical because you need the various teams to understand their role and responsibilities based on the product development and GTM lifecycle. 2. Once you've done that, you can map out the different stages of your GTM and ensure you're working with the right stakeholders at the right stage (i.e partnering closely with PMs & Design during the research and beta testing stage) 3. For engaging with Design, PM, and Eng, there's a lot of that partnership that happens early on in the GTM process (and throughout it as well). Your primary partner should be your PM and you can make sure you work with them to bring you in early and often into product requirements discussions, etc. 4. I think Design is a great partner during the GTM process. You'll be able to partner with them on customer and user research. Jump on calls with them and include them in some of the beta/ early access interviews as well. 5. Once you have your messaging and positioning, work with PM & Design to get their feedback not only to ensure accuracy, but also alignment overall on the value prop and benefit pillars.

I think the best way to do this is to try and get PMM experience and exposure at your current company. I've seen really successful content marketers and solutions engineers and sellers pivot into PMM and you have an advantage because you already understand your target market, business model, and the product. Here's what I'd recommend * Familiarize yourself with general PMM concepts & frameworks through Sharebird, PMA etc. Take a course so you can start speaking the same language as your PMM team. * Schedule coffee chats with existing PMMs at your company. Understand their core responsibilities, how they measure success, what their top priorities are. * Figure out opportunities where you can partner with PMM on projects. There are SO many opportunities here whether its customer research, demos, events, competitive research, etc. * Work with your manager and see if you can do a rotation in PMM or build it into your career growth plan

For smaller companies and start-ups PMMs will inevitably wear lots of hats and play more of a full stack role. Once the company grows and scales the role becomes more specialized. However, if your product serves a number of different audiences & use cases (as Tremendous does) you'll want to ensure even if you're a small company that you structure your Product Marketing team by Ideal customer profile (ICP) so that PMMs can go deep and craft compelling GTM strategies for their particular segment. Some considerations as you're thinking about adding talent to your team 1. Align with your business strategy - are there plans to expand to different audiences, industries, or even internationally? If so you'll need to hire PMMs who have more of a solutions or industry focus who can work across the funnel to drive awareness, pipeline growth, and help enable sales and CS. 2. Align with your product roadmap - where is your product roadmap headed? Are you working to add additional SKUs/ Product Lines? Are you going deep in AI or a particular area that would benefit from more specialized product experience? If so you'll want to hire core or technical product marketers who are experts on influencing the product roadmap and taking products to market. 3. Work with stakeholders to identify gaps - generally as PMM is a very cross functional role that supports business growth holistically, I always find it helpful to do a listening tour with the leadership team to understand their "wish list" or areas where they need someone strategic to drive a project. This could be pricing & packaging or building out a competitive intelligence program which also typically falls under the PMM remit.

This is a really good question as PMM can sometimes be seen as the "last mile" release arm when really that is such a small fraction of the role. Establish and socialize the PMM charter & mission Your stakeholders might all have differing opinions on what PMM is, and it is up to you to establish the function as a strategic one. You'll want to showcase the value of PMM by highlighting the core pillars of the team and how your PMM's work supports KPIs across the business. Build credibility with quick wins You'll need to earn credibility to be thought of as strategic, it doesn't just happen overnight especially if the team has been operating as the release/launch arm of the company for awhile. Not only do you have to showcase the vision for your team you actually have to act on it. The more you can start to show that your team is strategic, the more you'll be thought of as a strategic player and your team will get more opportunities. This could be creating a new sales pitch deck based on prospect and customer research, launching a targeted new campaign based on customer insights that align with a new industry or vertical you're pursuing, or even creating compelling competitive positioning that helps sales land a big logo. It really helps to measure your team's impact so the more you can show actual, tangible impact to KPIs like pipeline, expansion, usage/adoption, win rates, the better. Change the relationship dynamics If PMM has typically been seen as a launch arm that's a signal you need to change your relationship with Product and other GTM stakeholders. Start by working with your Product Manager by bringing them insights into customer pain points, problems, competitor deep dives, etc which will help them craft a stronger product roadmap. With sales, evolve from being seen as the team that just creates 1 pagers and decks and start to work with sales leadership to identify key win/loss themes that will help them scale best practices across their team.

Product Marketing org structure varies depending on the size, stage of growth, and nature of your product (i.e multiple product, persona, ICP). Ultimately you want to make sure you have enough coverage and the right skillset to cover the key pillars of Product Marketing (product launches, pipe gen, sales enablement, competitive intel, pricing and packaging). Here's a model that I've seen work really well: 1. Core PMMs - These are product marketing managers who align very closely with Product Management. They cover either a particular product in a multi-product organization or a grouping of capabilities (i.e AI). You'll want core PMMs to be adept at partnering with product and bringing them market, customer, and competitive insights to influence the product roadmap. You'll also want your core PMMs to have some GTM launch experience. 2. Solutions PMMs - These are PMMS who cover GTM for a particular segment, industry or persona. They go really deep on their particular segment and craft solutions focused messaging, integrated campaigns, sales collateral etc. Their closest partners are growth marketing, sales, and CS and they tend to be exceptional storytellers, skilled at messaging & positioning, and well versed in demand gen strategies. 3. Specialized PMMs - Pricing and packaging often lives in product marketing and requires a specific skillset, as does competitive intel. Often times sales enablement can also live under PMM in a smaller organization but as the organization grows the enablement org will typically sit under the sales team.

As the Head of PMM for a startup that didn't have Product Marketing, you have three goals as your onboarding 1) Build a solid understanding of your industry, product, and target market 2) Get to know your stakeholders and their priorities 3) Establish the role of PMM in supporting the company's strategy and goals. Build a solid understanding of your industry, product and target market As a PMM you need to bring a strong perspective on your industry, your customers needs, and quickly translate that into differentiated messaging and GTM strategy. In your first 30-60 days you should talk to sales and CS, listen to Gong calls, talk to analysts and read review sites and market research reports to understand the competitive landscape as well. Get to know your team, stakeholders & their priorities Very quickly you'll need to start executing and gaining some small wins. You can only do that once you truly understand what your stakeholders priorities are and where you (and eventually your team) can partner with them. Key stakeholders to pay special attention to are Head of Marketing, Head of Product, Head of Sales, and Head of CS. Establish the role of PMM in supporting the company's strategy & goals Towards the end of your 30/60/90 you should be socializing your team's charter, goals, priorities for the upcoming quarter or half of year. This is an area to showcase the company what Product Marketing should look like and how strategic and critical of a role it truly is.

Here's what I like to do when establishing (or reestablishing) the PMM function Conduct a listening tour with cross functional stakeholders Ask them the following types of questions 1. What are your top priorities? 2. What's working well with PMM (if a team exists?) 3. What are opportunities or gaps ? 4. Where do you think PMM could make the biggest impact today? Establish your PMM charter or mission Based on what you learn, establish and educate the company on the role of Product Marketing and the core pillars of how PMM can support in driving specific KPIs. Rank your team's priorities and share widely Once you've done the top two, you need to break it down into tactics, deliverables, and key results that align to your company's OKRs. Rank them based on impact and urgency (i.e upcoming product launch) and share and negotiate with stakeholders. Stick to this plan when new requests pop up to remind everyone what your team is focused on. If new priorities arise at least you'll be equipped to have the trade-off conversation.