How do you manage the transition from being the sole person responsible for product marketing activities to now having someone else who can share the burden?

This is a really great question, and something I think a lot of poeple struggle with. 

I've found this article from First Round Review really helpful. It's based on Molly Graham's concept of "Giving Away Your Legos." 

A quote from Molly – "If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months."

They interviewed Molly on an episode of the In Depth Podcast as well. 

The most important thing during this process is to clearly outline roles and responsibilities for both yourself and the new person on your team, I am a huge fan of RACI models for driving that clarity.

Secondly, you want to clearly understand each of your strengths and key areas of growth for your new hire - so that you can make sure you are leveraging them for the right type of work where they can make a big impact while giving them the opportunity to work on projects where they can learn and grow.

It can be uncomfortable for some people to give up that sense of "control" when you are used to doing everything as an IC - but in order for your own growth as a leader, it's important to make that mind-shift and realize that you are now responsible for someone else's growth and its important to give them room to fail and learn - even if things are done exactly in the way you'd get them done!

One of the things I love to do is lead by example. Show what good looks like and then give your team room to learn and deliver!

The best part of being in product marketing is sharing the burden - there's always something to do in the messy middle ;)

I think a simple and pragmatic way to share the load is adopting a framework like the Eisenhower Matrix to help prioritize and delegate efficiently. The Eisenhower Matrix is a productivity, prioritization, and time-management framework designed to help professionals prioritize a list of tasks or agenda items by first categorizing those items according to their urgency and importance.

This approach consists of drawing a four-box square with an x-axis labeled Urgent and Not Urgent, and the y-axis labeled Important and Not Important. Then, group the items on your list into one of the four boxes, with the Urgent-and-Important box in the upper left requiring your immediate action. Here's what I mean:

• First Quadrant (upper left): urgent and important

  • These items are important and require your attention at once - DO THEM

• Second Quadrant (upper right): important but not urgent

  • These are essential items that require more time - DECIDE ON THEM

• Third Quadrant (lower left): not important, but urgent

  • These are are rogue pop-ups that require immediate attention but are not urgent - DELEGATE THEM

• Fourth Quadrant (lower right): neither important nor urgent

  • These items are a tax on you and your teams time - DELETE THEM

If you made it this far, the TL;DR is to prioritize a productivity framework and get comfortable with delegating (third bullet) and saying no. Protect your Yes's by Saying No.

Delegating is extremely important as you grow! It can feel unnatural when you’re getting started, so here are some tips if you’re doing it for the first time:

Scope for the person: Try to understand your new teammate and what they bring to the table. Try to understand their strengths and where they may need coaching. Based on their unique skills, define a workstream that plays to their strengths and allows them to stretch their skills, while limiting the downsides if they don’t ramp up right away. As you better understand your colleague over time, you can adjust and provide additional responsibilities or coaching.

Explain why: Provide as much context as you can to your team. Since everyone is busy, there’s a temptation to just ask a new teammate to do something tactical. While this is faster in the short run, it makes it more difficult for the new person to ramp up. Try to get into the habit of overexplaining context for projects and workstreams at the beginning. This is a good investment in helping your team to become more self-sufficient over time.

Align on a check-in cadence: Discuss with your colleague how frequently they should check-in. Are there specific milestones that you want to align on? Are check-ins done on a recurring basis? What deliverables require sign-off from yourself or any other members of the team? In setting the cadence, find something that drives alignment on critical decisions, without creating too much overhead. Also keep an open door for questions that come up, especially as new team members ramp up.

Let go: Many first-time managers have trouble letting go of the work that they used to have full control of. Try to stay disciplined and stick with the check-in cadence that you defined with your new teammate. Only step in when critical projects start to go off the rails. Remember that your new colleague is initially unlikely to be as efficient as you and will likely make more mistakes than you would. If you scope the right projects, you can let your team make small mistakes to learn and become more effective over time. Keep an open door for feedback in both directions so that you can learn from each other and adapt over time.

Take time to ramp up: Your new team member will not be fully effective on day 1. In fact, you may even find yourself with less capacity than before since you now need to help your colleague. Remember not to expect your team’s capacity to double overnight, and managing a team will always require some of your time. That’s okay! A team of 1 will always be limited by your personal abilities. Growing your team is extremely rewarding personally and professionally and will help you scale your own efforts over time.    

I think one of the hardest things to do when transitioning from being the first/sole PMM to bringing on a team is sharing the foundational knowledge around the audience, market, product, and business that have allowed you to operate efficiently—from being able to make great decisions quickly to nailing voice/tone of messaging.

One way to go about this is to onboard your new PMMs in two ways:

1. Have them work on something that will let them go deep on how your target audience thinks and behaves—how they make decisions on what solutions they need, where they learn about products like yours, what their ultimate motivations are—and help them understand the competitive landscape and where your company plays. This could be customer interviews and message testing to inform a new feature launch, sizing a new market you're looking to enter, etc.

2. Have them learn how to operate efficiently within the org through an initiative that you've done many times and is well-defined enough to transition—this could be a typical product launch, a site refresh, a new piece of content, etc.