How do you coordinate and work cross functionally with the product team to create commonly shared KPIs?

Good question. I am sure you have heard this statement many times - “PM and PMMs are like two sides of the same coin”. It’s absolutely true, and work wise I see the roles to have a Venn diagram. There are things each team leads and drives by themselves and then there are overlap areas. The overlap areas usually are: Product strategy Product roadmap Target markets Positioning and messaging Sales enablement (includes launches) The first step to building joint KPIs is building a trusted, valued and ...Read More

My advice would be to build this into your regular team processes. If your company has an OKR setting process, this would be the right time to cross-functionally align with product partners on shared KRs or KPIs at a high level. Beyond that, I would suggest gaining this alignment at the PRD and GTM plan stages of the product lifecycle. In an ideal world, PMs, PMMs and Tech Leads collaborate on launch objectives (financial, product, marketing, risk), which make up the shared launch KPIs. Data Sci ...Read More

Broadly, alignment with Product should happen in an OKR or goals planning process at some regular interval. That's the real moment to align with you product partners on what problems you're trying to solve and what success means for a number of initiatives.  More specifically, I push that Product Marketing co-owns Product goals (to ensure alignment) and that they're the responsible party for product adoption metrics. What % of the audience has tried XYZ product is a strong measure of adoption an ...Read More

Great question! A lot of collaboration can come from shared KPIs, so it's great to align where possible. I'll divide this into two groups, on-going and launches. On-going KPIs: These should largely be goals you can both impact over time. Things like adoption, revenue (particularly if there's a freemium, or PLG motion at your company), retention, NPS.  For example, with adoption there are product changes that can likely be made as well as dedicated marketing done to drive success. At Iterable, we ...Read More

This idea of cross-functional KPIs is core to what makes PMM the most interesting and the most challenging function to quantify. But, you can do it! Two things I believe strongly:  Cross-functional (or shared) KPIs are the most powerful KPIs any business or team can measure, because they're qualitative and quantitative and they force alignment across teams.  Product Marketing exists to amplify the impact of other teams. If you don't have shared metrics, you're probably amplifying only yourself, ...Read More

Great call to have commonly shared KPIs with the product team - this is the best way to ensure mutual success. When it comes to product launches, it depends a bit on what you're launching. If your company has a "core" product and you're launching a new SKU or a product with a separate revenue stream, a great shared goal is attach rate: percentage of customers that have purchased the product. You'll want to look at the overall attach rate as well as the attach rate for new deals (out of all the d ...Read More

Product teams should view PMMs as their distribution channel. What are their needs/wants? Typically to drive awareness and usage of features. For more self-serve products, perhaps that includes revenue goals as well. So how can PMM help them and where? I'd say, awareness, adoption and pipeline is the right funnel to build to measure product and pmm performance against. Tactically, I've found holding weekly or bi-weekly sessions depending on how imminent the launch is to ensure that the launch pl ...Read More

Super important question 🙌 Cross-functional collaboration happens much easier when teams have shared KPIs, OKRs, or North Stars. To be honest, those goal-setting frameworks really work when they are adapted across all of the organization. This means that everyone is motivated to solve the company’s challenges, instead of working in silos on their individual projects.  For this setup to work, it’s important to understand the Objectives of other teams. Here is how it can work with setting up commo ...Read More