AMA: Zendesk Former Sr. Director of Product Marketing, Katherine Kelly on Product Marketing Stakeholder Management

There's really no perfect way. I'm not sure if you're asking at a broader level, how do you prioritize product's needs against sales or marketing needs, or if you mean on a granular level. I think the first step is understanding what is a short-term ask vs. something that should be owned, and then lookng at your team structure and making sure that you are staffed to have owners of the key responsibilities you are signed up to. Sorry that isn't more granular but this is a question you could take ...Read More

When you launch as quickly and regularly as we do, as soon as possible! :) But to be more descriptive - the goal is for these teams to have some visibility and control over planning for their workload, and for you to have all the resources you need for a launch. So I think it's helpful to look at it across a couple of horizons: Annual - work with product to give people a sense of the biggest launches coming for the year, at the beginning of the year. This should be something you and product lead ...Read More

This is a great question that varies by company size. In a smaller company it may be appropriate to present recent wins in an all-hands from time to time. But at a medium - large company, just like all product marketing, you have to think about your audience first and then plan the message and delivery that works for each. Here are a couple of ways my team and I do this at Zendesk: Regional syncs: we have monthly meetings with Sales and Marketing leaders in each region. We structure the meeting ...Read More

Empathy is incredibly important for stakeholder management. The more you understand what your stakeholders need, can talk to them in their language, take feedback and get better at predicting and proactively providing the information they need the more trust you will earn from them. I don't think that means you need to know how to do their job, they are the expert and your trust in their ability to do it and to be the expert on that job is one half of the relationship. But really listen to them ...Read More

Such an interesting question because I actually think it doesn't change that much. My last role was a company that was ~150 employees, Zendesk is now ~3,000 I think. In both companies, my biggest stakeholders were: CEO Head of Product CMO Head of Sales Often it feels like the job of product marketing at the stakeholder level is to help translate between these people and their teams to keep everyone aligned. If the product marketing leadership in your team has a seat at the table with these execu ...Read More