AMA: Zapier Former Head of Product Marketing, Gregg Miller on Establishing Product Marketing

At Zapier I approached this by starting with a mission statement to describe why our team exists and the work we aim to uniquely do for the company: “PMM exists to maximize Zapier’s market opportunities by (1) clarifying where we win and (2) driving GTM strategy for product success.” I then defined responsibilities that align to (1) like TAM, market segmentation, personas, positioning, competitive analysis, etc. and separately to (2) like working with Product validate market opportunities, designing and executing betas that ensure product/market fit, and of course planning and executing launches. Lastly, I made sure to socialize this charter around the org to ensure awareness and buy-in that this was the direction we were heading as a team. This is a very different scope from what PMM was doing when I joined — I often talk about it as charting a course from PMM 1.0 to PMM 2.0 with the expectation that getting to the full potential of PMM 2.0 will take quarters if not years. Thus when it comes to prioritization, I’m always asking myself “where do I see a combination of ripe business context, willing partners/stakeholders, and PMM team capacity for us to tackle an initiative that will take us more in the direction of PMM 2.0?” This requires hard prioritization conversations with stakeholder teams where we say no to some requests that come in in order to create the space for the bigger, more strategic efforts that pay long-term dividends. But without those tough conversations, the team wouldn’t ever get to PMM 2.0.

There’s two main drivers I think about with respect to org structure. Important caveat on the below being I primarily have worked at smaller organizations where org structures across the company are often highly nimble. 1. How established the function is - When the PMM function is new, oftentimes you might be the only Product Marketer or have just one report. In that scenario I think it’s important to keep yourself and your report as generalists and prioritize the most important projects across the business as opposed to specializing by product/persona/etc. This enables you to learn the business much faster and build a lot of credibility by adding value on the most pressing opportunities — both essential precursors to being able to figure out the longer-term org structure and advocate for growing your team since you know where the need is. As the function becomes more established, I like to add in a Market/Customer Insights function within PMM and start aligning the rest of the team around business strategy. 2. Business strategy - Org structure should reflect the direction the business is going, not the other way around (this is true outside of PMM, too!). Sometimes that means I’ll have one PMM staffed to each core product, other times it might be audience focused (e.g. SMB vs. ENT; partners vs. customers), and still other times it might be based on a strategic priority like expanding into a new self-serve transaction GTM channel. I’ll also be clear with my team or candidates I’m interviewing how the competencies required differ based on which part of the business strategy they align against where there might be more or less focus on things like upstream market opportunity validation vs. messaging and launches vs. growth marketing.

There’s definitely core management competencies you have to focus on that are true of any role which I won’t go into (e.g. developing your people, advocating for them and backing them up, etc.). But I think something we as product marketing leaders need to focus on is making the job exciting and fulfilling. Oftentimes at meetups or conferences — back when those were a thing — you’ll hear a lot of familiar questions: * How do I influence the product roadmap? * How do I get out of a reactive position where I’m just constantly launching features all the time? * How do I get our customers to care about our launches? As function leaders, it’s our job to make sure our team doesn’t get so focused on “doing the work, and doing it well” that we don’t make sure that we’re working on the right things and with the right prioritization — including saying no to some things so there’s time/resources for the important stuff! It’s important for us to stay maniacally focused on actually answering those questions above when they pop up rather than viewing them as out of our control or as important but something we don’t have time for. Product marketing is honestly such a magical specialty when you’re able to create the space to do it in a more strategic and meaningful way; if we can unlock that magic for our teams, it’s much easier to keep good people.

One of the biggest surprises is that the vast majority of people at smaller companies have little idea of what product marketing is. Your new colleagues may have never worked directly — or even indirectly — with product marketers before. This means that you as the new head of PMM have a much bigger leadership challenge ahead of you than when working at a larger company that likely has had a fairly defined PMM function for years. Further complicating the challenge is that product marketing looks so different at so many different organizations. It’s super important to meet this challenge head on by proactively answering questions like: * What value do I think product marketing should contribute to this company? Why do we matter? * What is the appropriate balance of tactical vs. strategic and short-term vs. long-term work for my team? * How should we prioritize and manage the myriad projects PMM could potentially lead (i.e. sales enablement vs. market segmentation vs. market opportunity exploration/validation vs...) * What tools, frameworks, and processes can help my team work successfully cross-functionally? * How should all of the above evolve as both the team and the organization grow? It’s tempting to just dive into the work, but I’ve found it to be super helpful to explicitly define these types of questions and get the buy-in of both leadership and cross-functional leaders on my team’s scope. Given how fluid/undefined PMM can be, taking these steps gives you a better shot of being able to sit firmly in the driver’s seat and steer your team’s destiny.

30 days: Balance being an absolute sponge and learning by doing. Be a sponge by reading every doc you can get your hands on (enablement materials, case studies, team quarterly/annual plans, research studies, etc.), talking to as many prospects and customers as possible, and scheduling 1:1s with both stakeholders and company leadership. Learn by doing by getting involved in low-risk, low-hanging fruit activities where a PMM touch is needed but perhaps don’t require a ton of context. 60 days: Hopefully you’ve gained enough context by 30 days to start to get an idea of what the big challenges and opportunities are at the company. My goal is to have identified a couple of “base hits” that I can deliver by days 60-90 that can demonstrate tangible results against things that a key stakeholder cares about like the CMO, a Sales VP, or a product manager/leader who is a respected influencer within the product org. Identifying and delivering these base hits gives you an early platform within the organization of visible results and relationships that can open doors and give you the room you need to set an ambitious vision and plan for the function. 90 days: Delivering a POV on both the role you want to carve out for the PMM function (see my answer on surprises about moving to a smaller organization) and the initiatives you hope to tackle in the coming quarter. If you’ve done the homework of gaining context as a sponge, delivering one or two meaningful base hits, and winning the trust and endorsement of a couple influential stakeholders, you’re much more likely to get buy-in on your plan/POV and the latitude to actually start getting to work on building the PMM function as opposed to just executing on stuff people throw your way.

I’m assuming this question is about moving from a focus on the “last mile” of the go-to-market process entailing sales enablement and product launches to more “upstream” go-to-market strategy activities like identifying market opportunities, defining target segments in the market, partnering with product earlier in the development process, etc. There are many ways to navigate this transition, but a fairly common thread I’ve seen enabling those various paths is insights — insights on customers, competitors, or the market. Your task as a PMM leader is to “earn the right” to participate in those “upstream” activities by demonstrating your team can add value and be a thought leader in those conversations. Start small with things like win/loss analysis, customers interviews, or mystery shopper exercises with your competitors. You can take things a step further by launching a customer advisory board, especially if you’re in enterprise SaaS where it’s challenging to generate quant insights given the small audience of buyers you’re targeting so qual insights from a council of customers can be game-changing for getting feedback on your company’s product roadmap, messaging, or other forward-looking plans. And if you want to be really ambitious, you can formally establish an insights function within your team so that you have the resources to constantly produce a steady stream of insights that give your team a really strong seat at the table as the voice of market/voice of the customer. This last route of an insights function could take numerous forms with two potential examples being dedicating 50% of one PMM's time toward insights exploration or hiring a dedicated Market Researcher.

Regardless of role, there's a universal tradeoff between small and large companies and it's about what kind of impact you find most motivating. Would you rather have broader impact across the business and more autonomy/flexibility in the scope of where you focus, or would have rather have a deeper impact on a narrower slice of the business but at a scale that touches millions or even billions of customers/users? This is just as true of product marketing. Typically you'll have a much more structured, much more narrowly scoped remit at a larger company but the scale of revenue/customers will be drastically larger -- and you'll also have much more resourcing to draw upon (e.g. agencies, GTM budget, cross-functional teams to assist you, etc.).