How do you prioritize launch work among other core PMM responsibilities, such as market research, competitive intel, messaging & positioning, etc.?

I generally think PMM responsibilities fall into three buckets:

• Inbound - shape what is build and how it’s talked about 

• Launch - announcing new products and features 

• Outbound - driving adoption and revenue of products and features 

How time is allocated across these buckets depends on:

• Business context: time allocation for PMMs depends on the ‘season’ the team is in. Is the team relaunching the core product? Is the bi-annual launch event upcoming? Is the product and eng team staffing up so velocity is slower? Did the team recently launch a suite of new products and now adoption and cross sell is the priority? Where is the momentum and urgency for the product team? 

• Launch impact: is it a tier 1 launch meant to reposition the company? Or is it a tier 3/4 launch that serves a subset of existing customers? 

Based on the above, it would dictate how I would prioritize team resources across these buckets and communicating these priorities to XFN partners. 

The best way to assess the priorities of core PMM responsibilities against larger go-to-market launch efforts is to understand the business objectives and how these activities map to those objectives. Ideally you have clearly defined OKRs or measurable business outcomes that your activities support.

For example:

• Run the business initiatives have the OKRs of $XX in revenue, $ARR, or MAU, etc. - your core PMM responsibilities should ladder into this. Understand how competitive intel, research, messaging and positioning support all the specific work that directly connects to those run the business OKRs

• On the flip side, launch efforts like have additional grow the business OKRs - such as increase new customer adoption by x% or grow trials by y%. It may also ladder into a revenue target as well.

By understanding the relative impact of these PMM-lead activities and how they contribute to the business objectives and key results, you can start to assess how to prioritize the work. Ideally, you have a team that is aligned to the different responsibilities which allows for complete coverage across both new launch activity and core PMM/run the business activity.

When prioritizing launch work vs other core PMM responsibilities, you'll have to look to see how each task aligns with your company's overall goals. If you've already built out the other PMM activities, they should be in maintenance mode, so you should have more time to focus on the launch. However, you put everything on the back burner for the launch.

This is where time blocking comes in. Set an hour or two aside each week to focus on a few of the core PMM tasks. As you get closer to the launch date (especially if it's a tier 1 launch), you may need to scale back the time devoted to the core tasks.