AMA: Twilio Sr. Group Manager, Product Marketing, Lindsey Weinig on Stakeholder Management

Each role, level, and business requires a some nuance for product marketing hiring, but I generally focus on a few key characteristics. * First, successful PMMs need to be able to prioritize in complex environments. Through ambiguity, constant change, and conflicting stakeholder pressures, effective PMMs have some sort of framework they use to weigh and decide rapidly what they should focus on and what goes in the backlog. * Second, PMMs need to be influencial communicators. They need to build strong relationships with their stakeholders and collaborators, navigate conflict, and drive to results cross functionally. * Finally, a core quality in great PMMs I've worked with and hired is their ability to build a narrative. Whether building a launch messaging framework, a pitch deck, or a webpage, engaging storytelling with a keen understanding of their target audience is paramount. 

Marketing your accomplishments is critical! It is epecially important to align leadership expectations with reality since product marketing roles and responsiblities can vary greatly from business to business or even across products/BUs. My team and I address this in a few ways. First, we share quarterly email updates with a broad distribution list. These emails include our topline priorities, related initiatives, shoutouts to our key stakeholders (since most of what we do is collaborative), learnings and pivots, as well as a link to an archive doc with all of our previous updates for easy reference. I also ensure my direct leadership is aware of our goals and accomplishments so they can know what we're focused on and can speak up when given the opportunity in higher level meetings. Finally, not leadership specific, but we are active on team slack channels sharing key activities across sales, marketing, and product teams in real time.

I recommend making the effort and taking time to connect with the people behind the roles. Working so closely with people, but in an all-remote environment can be really challenging. I do this by asking about their weekends/vacations, remembering their family/pets/hobbies and asking about them. I also share snippets from my personal life to build the relationship. I've also found that any opportunity to meet in person (assuming everyone is comfortable with in-person) while in a more casual environment like for coffee, meal, shared volunteer opportunity, or team building can make great strides in building these connections. 

We tend to take a pretty standardized approach for leading launches with my team. First we do a kickoff meeting with key stakeholders/deliverable owners across sales and marketing where we cover the target persona, problem and positioning of the new launch (shared early as a pre-read too) including a proposal of launch deliverables like emails, blog posts and their proposed owners. We then open for discussion on the proposal, requesting suggestions for additional opportunities and feedback. Stakeholder feedback can get more complex with high-stakes messaging like for price increases or XL launches. In those cases we build a tiered review schedule with deadlines (can use a RAPID to build tiers), and often request teams comment their feedback in the launch plan/comms content/deliverables schedule at the same time to uncover conflicts in what may be subjective feedback across teams. Then we follow up with a meeting to hash out any conflicting comments. 

Whenever possible I try to have a customer-first, data-driven approach. We've used A/B testing, customer research, or referencing market standards to hash out disagreements in the past. If those aren't an option, but the decision is crucial to the success of the project, I recommend forming a RAPID team/framework to ensure the best option is selected. 

In my experience, preferences need to be considered here. I personally have found success by adopting a variety of strategies across communication channels and with varied cadence in order to cater to others' varied preferences. First, we do a lot of writing; sharing plans, strategies, and agendas in advance of meetings allows for deeper engagment vs. a real-time discussion in the moment. Second, we schedule regular check-ins with key stakeholders, both 1:1 and cross-functionally to keep people informed and accountable for their participation (with key considerations for timezones). Depending on the newness of the material for the cross functional team we prepare presentations to educate stakeholders on the value and messaging of our launch/product/initiative to build shared ownership. In this time of attrition and growth, we welcome intro 1:1s and have a centralized document with our goals and training assets to help onboard new stakeholders to the cross-functional team. We also send quarterly team email updates with priorities + progress to all key stakeholders in which we also actively request feedback. And for real time engagement, we have several cross-team and project-specific slack channels where we share noteworthy updates.