AMA: VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market, Joshua Lory on Product Marketing vs Product Management

A few questions to ask yourself: Do you want to be the mini-CEO of the product? Do you have enough experience to appreciate how engineering operates to build a product? Are you comfortable making major tradeoffs between direct customer requests and company strategic priorities? Are you savvy enough to navigate tough decisions when requirements or quality are cut to meet deadlines? Are you excited about documenting product strategy, epics, users stories and low level requirements? If you answered yes to a majority of these, by all means seek out a role in PM.

Product marketers should leave there stamp outside and inside the product. What I mean is that traditional marketing always takes place outside of the product i.e. sales enablement, blogs, technical demos, tools etc . Now with the advent of SaaS PMMs can market inside the product as well. By having a pulse on the customers end to end journey PMM can shine a light on where the experience can be improved by highlighting moments that matter. PMM should also co-own consumption targets like MAU and DAU and help PM / engineering drive product experience improvements to increase usage. There are tools Pendo that provide rich data on user activity and your platform while allowing you to create in-product experiences with guidance without engineering work. Here are some examples where PMM can use customer and product data to make a real difference in the product roadmap: * Trail experience and in-product guidance * Onboarding experience and in-product guidance * Most popular feature(s) guidance * New release experience and in-product guidance * Renewal experience and in-product guidance

Some best practices that helped my teams create a collaborate cross pollinating environment are: * Standing 1:1 with PM and PMM leads to discuss major open actions with full disclosure * PM contributes or leads customer feedback in regular product backlog grooming sessions * PMM develops self service customer intelligence that PM can use to steer product strategy * PMM leads customer advocacy efforts and invites PM and Eng leads to participate "hear from the horses mouth" * PM is included in Product PI planning process with PM and Eng

Think of a restaurant with front and back of the house. Back of house is prepping, cooking and organizing the food for front of the house to position, serve and engage the customers. Another way to look at this is front of the house understands what the customers want, thier expecations, reactions and provides feedback to back of the house to prioritze what food is being prepared. This symboitic relationship is anlogous to PMM (front of house), PM (liason between front and back of house) and engineer (back of house). PMM needs to understand the customer persona, market and positioning. PM should understand how the personas, market and positioning impacts the product strategy while prioritizing what engineering works on and verifies if product is meeting requirements. 

Here are some OKRs my teams track for product launches: Awareness - Web, social and blog activity (impressions, engagements and link clicks) Sales if not self-serve - MQLs and SQLs Time to value - how long does it take a customer to onboard and get value? Consumption - How often are new features being used (DAU / MAU) Renewals - NRR

In my opinion, PMM has a better vantage of customer needs and command of customer voice to produce best in app copy, product naming nomenclature and in-product guidance. This responsibility can be shared with UX and PM to ensure everyone is on the same page. Engineering and PM usually need a lot of help in this department as it is not their forte.