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Stakeholder Management

If product marketing is a relatively new function at your company (relative to product), what advice do you have on becoming a strategic partner and more involved earlier in the product roadmap development process?

5 Answers

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • August 12

I’m glad you are asking this question because this is exactly the right mindset you should have in a young Product Marketing org to avoid becoming solely a GTM service function. The path to this is through a mixture of education and showing value to the Product team. Something you should find ou......Read More

1038 Views

How do you build better relationships with product? I feel like this is the most complicated relationship out of all cross-functional partners. How do you constantly stay aligned?

5 Answers

Holly Watson

Amazon Product Marketing SME, AWS • February 10

Yes, great question. This relationship can be so valuable to both the PM and PMM, but also to the rest of the organization. For this relationship, I encourage each team to spend time understanding each others roles and responsibilities as well as having a discussion to align on what responsibilit......Read More

808 Views

As a product marketer, how do you handle design disagreements on something you're working on with your designer?

4 Answers

Akshay Kerkar

Stripe Head of Product Marketing, Emerging Products • December 23

I must admit that design disagreements have been rare in my experience. The best way to ensure alignment is to really think of your design partner as a true partner (vs. just a service role), bring them in early and upfront, provide them with context (e.g. maybe even have them be part of planning......Read More

921 Views

Knowing that people in different functions and different levels of leadership often need different approaches to storytelling in decks, docs, and shareouts for key strategic projects, do you have any tricks for thinking through whether it's worth the work to "reskin" docs and decks for these diverse stakeholders?

I suppose with executive level comms, it's more obvious, but how do you manage work that's in-flight that requires as many as 5 PMs, in addition to analysts, designers, marketers, and more? How do you keep people "in the loop" at the right level of fidelity without opening up a can of worms and adding complexity? A DACI model is great, but has its limits.

3 Answers

Harish Peri

Okta SVP Product Marketing • December 14

Not necessarily. The goal is to ensure that for whatever initiative (launch, pricing, campaign etc) youre leading, the north star is clear, expectations from each member (or group) are clear, and the communication is very clear. The only group that usually 'needs' their own reskinned decks and do......Read More

1381 Views

How can I use external experience (sales for example) to bring different opinions to the table to gain influence and persuade other teams?

3 Answers

Jackie Palmer

Demandbase VP Product and Industry Marketing • August 23

Getting a variety of feedback from a variety of people is the best thing you can do to influence and persuade teams. I always like to poll multiple teams and different levels of people to ensure that I have as many examples as possible. Make sure you ask internal teams - sales (including pre-sale......Read More

408 Views

What has been the greatest accomplishment made when you’ve had to influence others without authority and did it make things easier for you when you needed buy in on other projects?

2 Answers

Daniel Waas

AppFolio Vice President Product Marketing • April 7

My biggest accomplishment was in a prior role at a different company for a SaaS product. I was able to persuade the product and executive leadership team to invest in a redesign of the user experience of a product that had become stale compared to new entrants in the space. Redesigns can be a har......Read More

296 Views

How often and when do you typically get feedback on collateral from the teams that will use it?

I've found that it's valuable to get feedback from 1-3 reps on a high-quality first draft, and sometimes, even the final version to ensure it will work for the team it's using it, but it often takes more time than I'd like

1 Answer

Jackie Palmer

Demandbase VP Product and Industry Marketing • August 23

Getting feedback on assets and collateral from stakeholders is a key part of Product Marketing's job. What I like to do is create a tiger team of people you can count on. This could differ of course depending on the asset but should likely include a mix of salespeople (pre-sales, AEs/reps, SDRs, ......Read More

425 Views

How do you structure your Product Marketing team?

7 Answers

Jasmine Jaume

Intercom Director, Product Marketing • November 11

In general, PMM roles at Intercom are more of the 'full stack' variety - i.e we cover the whole journey from feeding into the roadmap to launch, including competitive research, buyer/persona/market research, GTM strategy, positioning and messaging, enablement, launch planning etc. Our team sits ......Read More

1696 Views

How can you influence the immediate product roadmap if the pre-launch customer research revealed to you that the MVP would not add significant value to your customers?

5 Answers

Sunny Manivannan

Braze Vice President & GM, Global SMB • June 17

The first time this happens at your company (assuming the MVP is already built), you have to let the product launch and (likely) fail in the market. There's likely too much internal momentum around this MVP and you won't be able to stop the runaway train, no matter how loudly you yell. Now, you s......Read More

1115 Views

How do you approach an environment where there has been no formal launch process and make sure you get the buy-in from engineering and product management?

This is especially a problem in smaller, owner-led companies who don't realize they need product marketing and/or an official launch process. Thanks!

1 Answer

Katherine Kelly

Benchling Head of Product Marketing • July 31

I actually don't have much experience with this, I'm sorry! I wonder if you should just start rolling out / following a lightweight launch process to show-not-tell how it can help? I'm getting an error that my answer is to short so I am typing more but again, I haven't really experienced pushback......Read More

778 Views