Product Marketing vs Product Management

There is no one-size-fits-all response to this answer. At Snow Software, where I lead Product Marketing and Operations, pricing falls under me. Prior to my arrival, pricing fell under Product Management. I had an interest in owning pricing and the Product Management lead did not, so it was a quite simple decision. We recently hired a Pricing Manager who works closely with Sales Operations and partners with PM and PMM on pricing strategy. When Product Management owns pricing, I would see the role of the PMM as providing feedback on pricing via Win-Loss Analysis. Pricing is one of the 4Ps of...

I've always felt like this question felt a bit like, "who owns features, engineering or product?" Both teams are responsible for different points in the lifecycle.  In my ideal version of the world, pricing overhauls (a new pricing strategy like moving from seats to usage), is managed by a project management team. It's a lot of chasing folks for research, input, and decisions.  PMM should play the role of: * Understanding market comparisons (how complementary and competitive solutions price) * Feature value ranking—to inform what value customers derive from the product in ord...

Hiring! My big challenge right now, to quote our head of sales, is that there's not enough of me to go around. That's not meant to be self-congratulatory--when the need for your function exceeds your resources, it's a challenge and frustration! You have to be relentless in your prioritization and accept that you will not do things that people need sometimes. All the other challenges are the type that a person is lucky to have in their job. A lot of PMMs find that other leaders in the business want to get involved in or even takeover things they do, but it's almost always because what we ...

For me right now - it's that the craft of Product Marketing isn't fully realized by both people in Product Marketing and companies. There is a pretty stark difference between someone who markets products and someone who is a product marketer. I find that people who market products are heavily focused on the top of the funnel only, which comes with a lot of content/headline writing, while product marketers are looking at the entire buying process from end to end. And while I write and produce a lot of content, it's still a small portion of my overall responsibilities. In fact, the most scala...

I absolutely agree with the response above. I believe the "Craft of product marketing" is many companies is relegated to "content" but in order to product content, people don't realise that you have to first understand the industry, customer, problem, solution, why different, why now, how etc. Craft a solid messaging and positioning brief that senior leadership has also understood well enough, the message resonates and the pillars are aligned. Any good content writer / agency should be able to than create brochure, website content etc. PMM's can contribute to the roadmap discussion, market ...

I’m going to split my answer here because the additional question details suggest you may be feeling frustrated that PMM has become more strategic, but for me, the strategic work in product marketing is a large part of why I love the function so much :). I’m hoping I can still be helpful to you in my response if I just separate those pieces. In my experience, I’ve actually always seen the role of PMM to be quite strategic and I think that’s really driven by the function sitting at such a critical place within a company, in the middle of Marketing, Product and Sales. We’re usually taking a ...

One of the pillars of Product Marketing at Snow Software – where I work – is that we should “Be the glue between Marketing, Product, and Sales Enablement”.  While this sounds great, it is hard.  A rock star PMM serves the needs of these three customers equally. However, for most of us it’s really hard to have an A+ relationship with these three groups at the same time.  For most of us, if we have an A+ with Marketing, then we’re usually managing a B+ with both Product and Enablement. In my view, it’s helpful to focus on getting everything right with one group and understanding that...

Any frustrations I have are either a reflection of my ego getting in the way, or a failure on my part to communicate expectations or demonstrate value.  Some examples: * Sometimes it's frustrating when sales comes up with their own messaging, and slideware. However, if they're doing that it's because what they have isn't working, or they haven't been properly enabled, or they're not convinced of the results existing content can produce. This can actually GOOD to some extent, because you're getting continuous testing of new messaging.  * Sometimes it's frustrating when prod...

I've heard before that product marketing KPIs can be squishy—that it's hard to quantify the value of what we do. I don't agree! I have a few KPIs that are unique to PMM, and a few that are tackled with PM, just from a different angle. I'll focus mostly on the shared KPIs: Shared: Feature adoption. Self-serve or Sales-led/assisted - PM would be responsible for continuous feature use over the lifecycle of an account (is the thing we built actually useful and intuitively designed?) - PMM is responsible for adoption within the first ~30 days (did we get the right message in front of the r...

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