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

GTM kickoff meeting: It is absolutely essential to get all the right stakeholders in the same room to get on the same page around what we're doing, why, by when, and with which owners. I like to have my team run these meetings roughly three months before a given launch and use them as an opportunity to share out a preliminary GTM strategy they've developed in partnership with the product manager. The goal of the meeting is to provide a concrete rough draft detailing strategy and assets and timel ...Read More

Communication: You simply must be a good communicator to be a stellar product marketer. So much of our discipline requires strong communication in order to provide clarity (both externally and internally) and develop and exercise influence. Strong communication to me spans written skills, presentation creation skills, public speaking skills, and executive presence.  Adaptability: The potential list of things you might work on as a product marketer is so incredibly long and diverse! Someone who i ...Read More

I think the best approach for PMM is to employ a mix of programmatic and opportunity specific approaches to aligning stakeholders around customer priorities. Programmatic approaches are best for clarifying improvement opportunities for the existing buyer and customer journeys. Tools like win/loss analysis, monitoring key sales pipeline metrics (closed won ratio, time to close, etc.) and investigating where any metric is underperforming, and customer advisory boards are all great ways to keep a f ...Read More

Oh man, this is a tricky one!  It's important to start by first identifying the source of tension. Is it due to leaders of those teams (or the leaders of those leaders) not seeing eye to eye and their conflict flowing downstream? Is it due to your predecessor being a jerk? Is it due to one team not following through on their commitments which in turn hurts the other team?  I'd recommend then asking "what's my scope for influencing the relationship?" If you're a relatively junior IC PMM, you have ...Read More

It sounds like the first issue that needs to be resolved at your company is the amount of resourcing on the PMM team. If you're barely staying on top of product launches, you have no capacity for the major projects and responsibilities that you see going to other teams -- leadership every time will care more about the work getting done than where the work gets done (and if that "where" has the right philosophical justification of ownership).  Your options are to either scope down the volume of p ...Read More