Can you share any lessons learned or best practices for improving the alignment between product marketing and demand generation?

Get the teams to recognize that they need each other to succeed. Sure, marketing has grown and become more specialized over the years where there are many teams within a marketing org or department (which at times cause internal competition), but at the end of the day, the north star KPI or OKR is to grow the business through leads, pipeline, and/or revenue.

If team members culturally or structurally cannot collaborate and align, some tactics that have forced at least an understanding and empathy of what the other team is experiencing:

• Include demand gen in product launches; product launches aren't just a PM<>PMM thing anymore, get Demand Gen and Marketing Ops involved early and often

• Include all of marketing, including demand gen and content & SEO, in enablement sessions; ensure that demand gen can do the basic first pitch just like any SDR or AE can; every marketer can do their jobs better with better understanding and context of the product, not the other way around

• Even if the Demand Gen team is org'ed by region or channel, assign each member a product, area of functionality, or some such to be the Demand Gen subject matter expert, so they have a vested interest in learning about and keeping updated about what you're selling, which incentivizes frequent syncs with PMM

As a PMM, you'll need to make many impactful, cross-functional relationships in your organization. Demand Generation (or Growth) is one of them. PMM relies on demand generation to provide data on how ads/messaging are performing, while demand generation relies on PMM to target messaging and personas.

Being in constant communication with them is key. At a previous organization, the head of growth and I collaborated on almost everything. You may not always see eye-to-eye, and that's okay. Have an open dialog, be willing to see where they are coming from, and be willing to share your take. My former head of growth marketing and I didn't always agree on strategies, but we would discuss our ideas and either come to an agreement or we would AB test.

Have a weekly sync (more if needed) where you discuss what is going on, where you need help, and what you're learning in the market or other departments, and then ask that they share insights on how metrics. Ask them what they are working on. You can even use the time as a brainstorming session.