How do you deal with product managers who don't think marketing provides value or isn't technical?

Persistence? :) That's a tough one and something that I've experienced many times in my career. I've always approached that as a challenge that I strongly desire to overcome. Similar to a question I answered above, I always start by building a great working relationship with Product by clearly showing the expertise and value that I uniquely bring into the partnership. As a PMM expert, you want to be seen as the central hub for a lot of critical information regarding not only your customers, but ...Read More

First, make a concious decision to give them respect without demanding any in return. You don't really "deal" with them. Instead, you learn to foster a healthy and productive working relationship.   Now, treat PMs like a customer who you have to understand so you can win over. Enter into their world. Follow them on social media and read everything they repost. Ask them what books or podcasts they would recommend. Follow through by actually reading and then reporting back to them what you thought ...Read More

To influence the roadmap, PMMs should bring valuable insights about the market, competition and customer to the table. With a more technical product, it is possible that a deeper technical expertise is needed to have a valuable perspective on moving the roadmap forward. In my experience, user and customer input (sometimes it’s a technical persona) can be just powerful to drive the product roadmap decision. Some examples of this could be: Sales call clips that mention a specific problem, which ca ...Read More

I would first try to understand where the product manager is coming from, i.e. what knowledge or perceptions are they starting with about Marketing? What context might they need? What pain points might they have experienced in the past with other marketers? Starting from a place of empathy can help you determine what information would be most helpful to share with them to bring them along as a partner and gain their support. Once you have that baseline, I'd then craft a deck or document that pro ...Read More

Silicon Valley is littered with failed products that were technically excellent but totally failed to win their markets.  Time and again technical founders and product people find that they've run out of market runway, gone head first into a strong incumbent and have not understood buyer's mind or the "forest from techincal trees".  You have to present to them the state of the market so that product strategy decisions can be made in cognizance of the market. This is not a one time presentation b ...Read More