How do you communicate product marketing updates and activities to the rest of the company?

We match internal promotion based on the level of the product announcement. Small updates are little features that mostly existing customers are excited about. Medium updates are larger changes that potentially open up a small new audience or unlock new revenue potential. Large updates are major product changes or brand new products that require significantly adjusting our go to market strategy. 

Small updates: Monthly email to sales, slack message to success
Medium updates: ^ + dedicated email to sales/success + all company slack channel + join sales all hands recurring meeting to train
Large updates: ^ + dedicated trainings per Account Executives, Sales/Success Engineers, CSMs, Marketing Team, present at the company all hands, create certification for sales, retrain after launch

Internal comms is sometimes undervalued, but in my opinion, it is one of the most important parts of a PMM's role, especially because product marketing is one of the very few roles that are extremely cross-functional and sits between multiple teams. Here are few ways I've seen it work best:

• For major XF projects, have regular update emails so that you can make sure you are bringing everyone along the journey and it does not feel like you are working in a black box.
• Internal newsletters (whatever cadence works for your org). We partner with the product team on a monthly newsletter where we talk about updates from both teams, but also talk about what's coming next. This goes to the entire company because we are still a small team but for bigger orgs you want to select your audience.
• Whether you use Slack or Teams or something else, make sure you have communication channels where you are regularly posting updates on key projects.
• At the beginning of every quarter, I draft a plan and share it with all cross-functional teams to make sure they are aware of our goals and priorities - but also give them a chance to give you feedback so that you can make sure you are prioritizing the most important initiatives. 

Internal newsletters, revenue org all-hands, relevant slack channels, and team-specific meetings.

Of course, not every activity is shared through every channel. Depending on the "size" of the project or deliverable, we choose which channels to broadcast through. Thankfully we have a well-organized enablement team that manages these channel logistics, so we're able to efficiently streamline internal comms.

On a personal level, it's critical that I provide key executives and other team leads with visibility of what's coming, so that they get their teams' attention and start a network effect for PMMs. Frankly, communicating across & up is something that I (and any leader) can be better about. Ultimately, you can broadcast every which way, but ensuring that recipients are attentively listening is the bigger challenge.

I think this depends largely on the size of an update - and the audience. 

For our largest releases, they are communicated early and often - to drum up excitement. Through company all hands, sales trainings, slack channels, etc. 

For mid-sized and smaller updates, we'll leverage the internal channels that make the most sense for the internal audience. If its sales, we'll update via our bi-weekly newsletter, slack channels, internal knoweldgebase docs on what to know, as one example. Each internal audience has their own channels and communication styles they prefer - and usually we work within their preferences. 

We are a slack heavy company. So we have our own announcement channel for all things Marketing that I actually started so that we could share our updates! 

We also do quarterly roadmaps and retros where PM + PMMs present their upcoming roadmap and a retro on their activities from the past quarter. All of Product and PMM go - and we invite our key stakeholders across the business, including the leaders from other areas of Marketing. 

Why do you want to communicate updates and activities?

If the goal is to communicate just the work the team has been doing, then I don't think that you should be communicating this to a large audience. This may be a good weekly summary email to your manager (Also, why would your manager need it?, the manager should already know it and it should be in your 1:1 doc), anyway, my point is communicating just WHAT you or your team is working on is waste of time for you and the reader.

I would rather communicate the impact and how other teams could leverage the work your team has done. This can be done in different forums. For sales, that could be training. For product teams, that could a roadmap review meeting, for gtm teams, that can be launch messaging and GTM meeting. For demand gen and the rest of the marketing team, you can help them by sharing how they could roll out your work in the market to drive more demand. 

We use different forums - sometimes it's 1:1 with other functional leaders, sometimes we plug our work into existing enablement programs, sometimes we create a new training, we participate in campaigns planning process, we join team meetings for other teams to share how they can leverage our work.

The key here is consistency. Find a channel that works and stick to it. Else it becomes to fractured and fragmented. You can use a slack channel, you can have a dedicated section in your sales enablement platform, you can issue regular emails with links to content. Just make sure you stick to an appraoch so your GTM teams get conditioned to the process.

Communicating product marketing updates and activities effectively to the rest of the company is crucial for ensuring alignment and support across different departments. There are a few different ways:

• Slack, obviously! We have a channel for everything, so once we wrap up a project/launch/event - we share updates on the right channels.

• We also do a monthly recap of all marketing activities to all the key stakeholders. The key here is being concise and metrics-centric. You lose the audience quickly, so focus mainly on the big-impact activities.

• We also do a quarterly business review with key stakeholders. This is a great opportunity to look back and see what we've done and can do better next quarter.

Your first step is to identify the key stakeholders for your business — marketing, product, sales, UX, etc. Once you have that, establish a rhythm that works for you — weekly, monthly, quarterly — but be extremely consistent about it.

It depends on the size of your company. This will become more challenging as the size of the company scales. At a company with less than 200 employees it is pretty easy to maintain relationships with executive leadership to keep them in the loop via regular meetings, Slack, and internal newsletters. No matter what the size of your company is, make sure you are spending enough time educating others on your value, contributions, and successes. Don't try to hide your failures, though. Nobody is perfect. Be honest about your lessons learned and help others learn from them as well. 

I'm a huge fan of slack messages. I usually create a public slack channel and add key stakeholders to it. I'll bookmark resources to the top for easy self-serve access. Then, I'll post an update once a week to inform others of progress, wins, blockers, etc. 

In launch retros I've done in the past, this has been the #1 thing everyone points out as being a huge contribution to the success of the launch. It's so simple but I can't recommend it enough!