AMA: Unity Vice President Product Marketing, Jon Rooney on Building a Product Marketing Team

These may seem overly simplistic, but I've found these to be effective even when interviewing for senior PMM roles: Tell me about your current/last company - what do they do? Who are their customers? What problems do they solve? When customers pick your company, why (why do they win)? When customers pick competitors, why (why do they lose)? What launch/program/piece of collateral are you most proud of? What impact did it have? How did you pull it together? What skill do you have that was the har ...Read More

Obviously exact metrics will vary by company, but metrics that fall in one of these 3 buckets: Revenue (ARR, MRR, LTV) - some measure that shows that the products/areas you focus on are capturing, as well as creating, value. Product usage (Activation, churn rate, time spent <...>) - "shelfware" is the bane of many a PMM's existence, but with cloud, modern telemetry and PLG motions, it's never been easier to see if people are using your products and how, for how long, etc. Customer engageme ...Read More

I've always structured my PMM teams around customer segments/audiences (a "buyer back" approach), which is an outside-in vs. an inside-out view that better aligns to sales and is less subject to product-first, inside-the-building myopia. This structure forces your teams to take a customer view first - what problems am I trying to solve? what are my goals? what am I doing today and what's lacking? - that will provide useful guardrails for messaging, launches and campaign design. Also, this also e ...Read More

The analogy I like to use for folks new to Product Marketing is that it's like archery on horseback. The role requires two very different skills sets that are hard enough to develop separately. A good PMM is an expert marketing/communicator/getter-of-stuff-done while at the same time a curious, fearless technical practitioner who's bent on learning as much about a certain customer/domain/technology as possible to be credible in the marketing work they do. So my general advice is that there's no ...Read More

Any business case for expanding PMM should be built around the expansion of target use cases or audiences. If your company is selling new stuff to existing customer types OR existing stuff to new customer types OR new stuff to new customer types, chances are you'll need more PMM coverage to cover messaging, positioning, launches, sales enablement, campaign design, analyst relations, etc. When modeling, tie additional headcount to projected net new projected revenue, aligning that investment to n ...Read More

I try to have as much of the recruiting, interviewing and offer process planned as possible before the role is opened and posted. Keep a repository of job descriptions (JDs) that I've either written before or seen over the years that I keep in a file so I'm not starting from a blank page when it's time to pull one together. Map out the panel of interviewers including who's asking a candidate about which skills/topics as well as both primary and secondary panelists so the schedule doesn't get slo ...Read More