AMA: Upwork Director, Product and Solution Marketing, Maria Jiang on Establishing Product Marketing

A SaaS startup's first marketing hire should be a generalist who can wear multiple hats across different functions of marketing and has a founder mentality to move fast. Whether you hire someone who is more senior or a junior executor will depend on the skills of the founding team, the size of the marketing budget and the playbook you want to execute. Assuming your startup has reached some level of product-market-fit, you'll want to hire someone who has digital marketing experience and knows how to run a campaign to engage an online audience and make people take actions online (start a free trial, watch a demo, etc). You'll also want someone who is a solid writer as it's fundamental to everything we do in marketing (writing a website, blog, ads, etc). Last but not least, you'll want to hire someone who is data-driven and willing to test and learn. There will be a lot of iterations to find out which marketing channels work best for your audience and where you need to double-down to maximize marketing ROI.

I would start by meeting 1:1 with your leadership team (CEO, Founder, CMO) to understand each leader's interpretations of the PMM function. You can probe with questions like, "How would you describe PMM's primary role within our company today? What does success look like for you? What are your most important metrics that PMM can own and influence?" You want this to be a conversation so be ready to listen, but also be prepared to offer your POV based on your personal experiences and different types of PMM teams you've seen at other companies. After these conversations, I would work on a team charter and then go back to your leadership team to align on the expectations. If you're trying to change perception of what PMM should be working on (e.g., more inbound research to influence the product roadmap), then it would be important to assess which teams is leading the charge (perhaps this work is done primarily by PMs or UXRs) and align with those stakeholders on how PMM can support and start building those relationships to start getting involved in the work and adding value. Changing perception will not happen overnight and it will take time, but the first step would be to establish it clearly in writing and then start showing concrete examples. You can then reinforce the team charter by going back to your leadership team with deliverables and business results.

Owning a product launch would be a great to get started in setting up the role of product marketing and defining the responsibilities of that role. By bringing together different x-functional stakeholders across sales, product, customer success and the rest of the marketing towards a launch date would be a concrete way to show the value of PMM. If you don't have a new product to launch, you could also simply create a launch moment of a product that's already been in market to boost its performance. Perhaps it's not a brand new product, but there's something new worth announcing externally (or even just internally) that you could use to bring the teams together by giving the sales and customer success teams an opportunity to reconnect with existing customers or reach out to prospects.

There's a couple of tactical ways in which you can start building trust with PMs. It all starts with knowing the product. I would get to know the product intimately by using the product and talking to customers to understand how they are using it. Armed with this knowledge, I would offer these insights to PMs and give them ideas of what are the features that customers love, point out where there might be product confusion/friction, and offer up ideas based on asks/requests for new features or functionalities (use customer quotes and be specific about your source). Another tactical way is to be proactive about doing the competitive research and then bringing those insights to your PMs on what new products / features your competitors have launched. By adding value in these ways, you can start to build relationship and rapport with PMs so that they'll start relying on you as a thought partner to brainstorm, ideate and plan what to build based on your unique POV of customer wants/needs and market dynamics.