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

If you work on a PMM team that has specialized roles between Platform/Solution PMMs vs Product-Focused PMMs, this must mean that you have clear role definitions to distinguish between the two teams so there is no overlap in responsibilities. Assuming this has been established, the close collaboration is most critical in the following 3 areas: 1) Product roadmap planning: Platform/Solution PMMs are focused on specific audiences (by industry, geography, persona, use case) in a multi-product company so they're thinking about how different services and products can come together to solve broader challenges. Therefore they are responsible for articulating the customer pain points and challenges and bringing those market/customer insights into the product roadmap on what are the biggest problems to solve for. They are the experts in the customer's business and are product-agnostic. Product-Focused PMMs also need to focus on customer outcomes and on developing customer empathy, however they are the ones working most closely with PMs on insights from competitive intel, alpha/beta tests to drive product roadmap decisions. 2) Messaging development: Product-focused PMMs are responsible for communicating feature-level updates and capabilities from the product team to the rest of the GTM team. They are the product experts who should be able to provide deep-dive training, technical nuances, and documentation on features. The Platform/Solutions PMM should then be able to take their input and own the translation of those technical capabilities into solutions that speak to a broader use case, industry or persona. Therefore, messaging development takes place hand-in-hand with Platform/Solutions PMMs delivering the high-level messaging frameworks and solution-level positioning while Product-focused PMMs can refine it by providing feature-specific input by clarifying the nuances in the product's capabilities. 3) Product launch: Typically a Product-Focused PMM is responsible for the launch plan acting as the quarterback. In the case of a multi-product company with a Platform/Solution PMM, I think this person should own the launch plan and be the quarterback and work with all the Product-focused PMMs and drive all the outbound motions including working with Sales Enablement, Campaigns, Communications, Content, and Events on the GTM execution. This is a general rule, but it's nuanced and complex so you'll have to take into consideration resourcing and business prioritization. The "how" in collaboration would be through regular syncs between the two PMM teams to align on shared goals, priorities, assets and timelines like any other collaboration model between teams. Be sure to establish a launch playbook so everyone on the team is working off of the same tools/templates/format for messaging frameworks, competitive intel, roadmap planning, etc. These two types of PMMs should be connected at the hip so I'd focus more on the similarities and in driving internal alignment with other cross-functional teams.

Creating a new category is hard, and not sure that a channel strategy is what comes first to mind when creating a new category. More often than not, category creation involves breakthrough product or a breakthrough business model. In other words, it can't be up to the marketing team to create a new category by giving them a large budget. Study "category kings" like Gong, Gainsight, Slack, Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot. One mistake I see many seasoned marketers make in their quest to create a new category is to invest in analyst relations. Analysts do NOT create categories, it's the customers that do. And from there, it's a bit like a game of luck when you need the perfect storm or buzzword to catch on fire. The whole company needs to be in it from the beginning, and no "channel" is really going to get you there.

At multi-product companies I've worked at (Salesforce, Meta, Zendesk), the best practice was to bundle product releases into big communication moments to increase market impact. As such, we had to align on ALL the features that had a customer-facing element so in order to stay organized and aligned, we used a massive spreadsheet with links to a large repository of internal messaging documents with the benefits/value proposition for EACH feature. All of these features laddered up to the core platform (e.g., Salesforce Sales Cloud Einstein) so the core platform had its own messaging hierarchy doc that answered the core questions on the top message, supporting pillars, use case, customer examples, business value, etc. The key to make this a success is to religiously maintain the link of all internal messaging docs to the core platform positioning doc and to keep them updated. You can see how it would be a bit of admin work to keep all the docs updated across multiple PMMs, but so important to stay organized as it can get messy quickly when you have hundreds of features that tie into a product which make up part of a solution to which ties back to the core platform!

Prioritizing your messaging hierarchy comes down to starting with your target audience/persona i.e. the people you are speaking to with your messaging. If your platform does many things, you should prioritize on the biggest problem you're solving for. Your platform may do many, many things and solve for many, many problems so you need to figure out what your target customer cares about the most and focus on that as the CORE message. If you don't know the answer, then you need to test and validate your messaging through customer / prospect interviews on what resonates the most with your audience. Don't forget about your internal teams who can serve as a proxy -- customer-facing team members like BDRs, AEs, SCs, CSMs, also will have insights into this and have a good pulse as they talk with customers all day, everyday. Last but not least, form a Sales Council, a structured group nominated by sales leaders, so you have a formal and recurring forum to gather this type of feedback loop from your colleagues.