AMA: Unity Vice President Product Marketing, Jon Rooney on Establishing Product Marketing

To prepare your yourself to manage other PMMs as a Director, make sure you gain plenty of experience managing large-cross functional projects where success depends on your ability to lead through influence vs. leading through authority or team structure. It could be a positioning exercise, a major product launch or leading the submission of a major analyst report like a Gartner Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave. There's no telling how much cat herding you'll have to do to pull something like that off, and a highly visible, successful outcome should set you up for the next step in your PMM career. Also, make sure you do everything you can do to help early career or more junior folks across different teams. As a PMM, you're a major hub and if you build a reputation internally of not only getting stuff done but helping lift up other people along the way, you'll be well set up to be a manager (and people will want to work for you). Lastly, and this kind of goes without saying, but make sure you're really buttoned up in managing your own deliverables. If you consistently meet deadlines, effectively socialize your work and make sure basic things like internal discoverability of key assets (if people need to Slack you to get a deck or brief, you're doing it wrong) are neat and tidy, that sends a strong signal that you're ready to step up and manage a team. If you can't manage your work product really well, why should anyone think you can manage anyone else?

Setting up a new (or a renewed) PMM function inside an org is fraught with all sorts of challenges. If a company made it to a certain point without PMM, there could be teams who feel like the company doesn't need PMM to grow. If you're brought in to reboot PMM, you're going to have to win over a bunch of teams who felt like the previous regime was ineffective and maybe doubt the need for PMM altogether. Overall, you're likely going into a situation where few, if any, of your key stakeholders know what good PMM looks like so it's up to you to show them. Here are some things to watch for and how to navigate: * Don't show up as an expert on the company's product or customers on day 1. Even if you come from the space (maybe even from a more successful competitor), go in to listen and learn. Your inclinations from day 1 might be right, but do the groundwork to earn credibility first. * As a PMM, you should not only understand your product but use it - a lot - as the foundation for anything you do in role. If there's training or certification for technical customer-facing roles like sales engineer, take it and pass it. Set aside time every week to dig into your product and, if possible, use your competitors products so you know what's better and what's worse. Product folks, in particular, can be skeptical and grumpy about some "marketing person" telling them about what their customers need or what the product should do. The better your understand your product, the better your messaging, positioning, enablement, etc will be and the more readily product will listen to your ideas. * Similarly with sales, don't go off and build enablement and sales assets you think they need and throw them over the fence. That's a recipe for digital shelf-ware that will only embolden any PMM skeptics in the company. Earn trust by getting in the customer trenches with account teams and see what it takes to win a deal (and what happens when you lose a deal). Do a fair amount of this first before building a bunch of content you think the sales team needs to scale. * Finally, be mindful of what work or responsibilities PMM might be taking away from other teams. That doesn't mean PMM should cede ownership over positioning, messaging, launches, enablement or other key deliverables, it just means you're going to have to work with whatever teams were covering those things before PMM came on the scene. Don't just yank work away from teams - even if they're complaining about being overworked. Transition work to PMM over time and don't take on anything just because "PMM should own this" in theory. Only transition what you can do way better than it's being done today, such that everyone will be glad you're now here to uplevel PMM.

The short, not super helpful answer to "How do you work with the cross functional teams?" is really closely and really well :) PMM is at the center of so much important work that, if you don't have strong relationships with key stakeholders like Sales, Product, Customer Success and the rest of marketing, you'll end up either being a short order cook or, even worse, getting sidelined altogether. Each of those functions has a different role, a different focus and, in my experience, requires you to show up a little differently as a PMM. For Sales, it's all about showing up in person to help close a deal or help a key customer understand how a product can help them. Do that kind of work to build the trust you need to be a partner rather than a service provider or an "ivory tower" person from HQ who's generally ignored. Sales goals are refreshingly simple: they have a number to hit every 13 weeks and you're either helping them hit that number or you're not. Don't just throw frameworks over the fence at sales and expect a seat at the table - build trust, get your hands dirty with an account team to close a deal and then figure out what they need from PMM (enablement, sales pitch decks, demos, leave behinds) to make their number. Don't over-complicate it, but if you can do that then you can set up a virtuous cycle so your team gets insight into what's working get to closed won opportunities and what's leading to closed lost. CSM is similar, except they pick up post-sales and need to make sure customers successfully use what they bought so that they renew and expand the use of their product. Anything PMM can product in terms of content, demos or programs to help onboard customers, drive adoption, and lead to "ah ha" moments for customers will get you on board with CSM. Again, don't just throw content over the fence - dig in with a CSM, understand what they're facing and dig in to help get a customer up and running. That begets it's own virtuous cycle, because the more you understand about what works to get customers adopt, the more effective your content and programs become. The rest of marketing needs PMM to build out the core messaging and value props to drive the org. If PMM shows up with a clear, understandable "we need to reach this audience with this message to get them to do this thing" than the rest of marketing will be able to move quickly and confidently. The more complicated and convoluted the hand off is, the weaker the relationship with the rest of marketing. At companies where the product is highly technical targeting highly technical users, most people in marketing will really struggle to understand what they're marketing to whom. Your job as a PMM is to make that easier for them. Finally, Product is trying to build things that customers use and will make the company money. Without understanding all the mechanics of marketing, Product relies on PMM to get the product out in the market and in front of prospects such that they want to try and buy it. Build clear, detailed plans of who's doing what by when and share it out broadly with product. They'll want to see it and weigh in. But make sure it's not a one-way street with product - as a PMM you need a detailed breakdown of "we're building this thing to address these use cases for these target audiences and we think it's better than other offerings because XYZ" from PM to do you're job well. Without it, you're building on sand and product market fit will be awfully hard to come by.

If you end up in a situation where leadership has a fundamentally different idea of the PMM function than you do, you're facing an uphill road but you have a path to change perceptions. First, build content and programs that customers not only love but also openly express how much they love those things. Whether you look at CSAT, YouTube comments or ad hoc quotes from a key customer meeting, let happy customers be your advocates internally. Chances are, if your model for PMM churns out work that customers love, leadership will stand down so you can do more of it. Likewise, set up Sales to advocate for your vision of PMM by doing things that help them close deals at a higher rate, faster and with larger average deal sizes. It doesn't have to all be world-changing, but something where a rep can speak up in a QBR about how a thing PMM did made their job easier and their customer loved can earn you the right to guide PMM a certain way. Don't just try to win over leadership with abstract or academic arguments about the role of PMM. Show it with customers and sales to let that success be your ticket.

One of the main things I look for when interviewing PMM candidates is how they well they communicate their past experience - namely how they describe not just their roles but also what the company does, what problems they solve for whom, why they win against competitors, etc. Candidates who've stood out to me have been able to tell me a story about their former/current company in such a way that I get super interested and excited, especially it's in a space where I have no expertise or context (like, say, medical devices or semiconductors). Conversely, my biggest whatchouts are unclear, confusing or purely inside out explanations of what a company does and what a candidate did in a previous role. When I ask "so what does Company X, do? Who are your customers and what problems are they looking to solve?" and a candidate starts in on explaining the tech stack in great detail, those interviews don't tend to work out.

For series A or any early-stage start-up, I'd hyper-focus on really nailing product market fit (PMF) through deep engagement with customers who are actively using your products as part of their everyday workflow. In my experience, early stage start-ups have some early tech, a handful of early adopter customers (make sure you freshen up on Crossing the Chasm to not fall into early adopter traps) and a bunch of hypothesis that need proving (see the pitch deck for the A round). The first PMM at the company should work hand-in-hand with sales and product to obsessively, objectively validate what's real, what's defensible and what's repeatable. Don't take sales or product's word for it, see it in action for yourself. And don't go in with a bias to confirm internal hypotheses - assume the team is (at least partially) wrong, because statistically you are. And that's ok - keep working with customers until you see real patterns in what customers do post-sales with your product and what leads to renewals and expansion. Then write it down to see if you can to web copy or a pitch deck that can replicate the "so what" for a specific persona trying for a specific use case. Think one foot in front of the other rather than scaling out early signals - chances are you'll hit roadblocks that will force you to trace your steps back to a new set of customers using your product that'll require you to rework your web copy and pitch deck. PMMs at later-stage start-ups or enterprises need to focus on scaling out and simplifying a complex mix of products, audiences and use cases. If you're a (or the) PMM at an early stage start-up your job is much more hands-on and hand-crafted.