How do product marketing key stakeholders from other departments change as your company grows?

This is an awesome question and one that I've thought a ton about as we've scaled. I touched on this a bit in another answer (“When thinking about adding new talent to your team - how do you structure focus areas?”) but will reiterate and expand here. As our company has scaled, I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that our key stakeholders as a Product Marketing team have changed, per se—rather, I think of it more along the lines that our key partners in supporting those stakeholders have evo ...Read More

I can only speak to the change from ~1000 → 3000+. As a company grows, the number of stakeholders grows along with it. That shouldn’t be a surprise. What I’ve also learned is that as the number of stakeholders increase, so does the importance of collaboration skills, role clarity, and decision-making processes: Collaboration skills: With more people to align with, product marketers need to be especially flexible, picking the right battles to fight and letting things go that may not be worth the ...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

The short answer is that there are more, and the desires each stakeholder has become more specific! Essentially, as companies grow they have the opportunity to bring in more specialized talent. This could be teams in finance that are focused on products, specialized support organizations, strategy teams, program teams, or any number of others. The benefit is that you often have more hands on deck to ensure the success of a product. The downside is often coordination cost, and when it comes to pr ...Read More

I’m not certain the stakeholders and leverage have changed much in my experience with different company sizes, although resources clearly do. As you grow from startup to tween/teen and mature, the stakeholders diversify with the added resources that come from business growth. Sophia and I have generally watched pmm move from an individual contributor -- plugged in to a growth team, leading basic sales enablement, and driving core positioning through product -- to an enabler, helping other teams ...Read More

Regardless of the size of the organization, there will always be a marketing and a product leader. They are your critical partners. Even in very large organizations with a matrix structure, you will still typically have these leadership roles for each business segment. As the organization grows the founder or CEO will be further removed from day-to-day operations and you're less likely to work with them. At AppFolio we are ca. 1600 people at the moment and key stakeholders I connect frequently w ...Read More