How do you prioritize the variety of requests and responsibilities that fall on the Product Marketing Manager?

There's really no perfect way. I'm not sure if you're asking at a broader level, how do you prioritize product's needs against sales or marketing needs, or if you mean on a granular level. I think the first step is understanding what is a short-term ask vs. something that should be owned, and then lookng at your team structure and making sure that you are staffed to have owners of the key responsibilities you are signed up to. Sorry that isn't more granular but this is a question you could take a lot of directions, hope it helps!

This will continue to be an ongoing challenge for those in Product Marketing. Because this role sits at the nexus of all the functional teams within the organization, its easy to get pulled into the "problem du jour" and try to address it.

It starts with defining the mission of the PMM team within the organization, the key areas the team will own, and areas where it can be an advisor but not a driver. Define the key priorities for the PMM team (this can be KPIs or OKRs) and get alignment across key functional leaders. Ideally, these priorities map to the company goals/objectives. 

Anything net new that comes in with be assessed and ranked against the priorities. If it doesn't map to the priorities, then it's not something the PMM will prioritize. 

We have a prioritization matrix that helps us prioritize updates from Product. We basically look at how much of a differentiator is this for us? By how big of a revenue opportunity is it? High rev and high differentiation = a tier one launch. Low for both and it's a Tier 3 (lowest). Each tier comes with a menu of communications, launch, and campaign options. It's a nice way to prioritize, especially if your PMM team is smaller than PM team like ours. 

We recently implemented a similar framework and it is game-changing. Grouping features into a larger story make for a stronger message when going to market. Also, it makes the life of the PMM much easier because you know exactly what category the launch will be and can plan for those in advance; as opposed to bringing 25 features to market (creating white noise) instead, build a *few* cohesive, powerful stories.

We use a sort of backlog sheet where we add all the requests / works that we have on our roadmap and other ones that come our way. During our weekly planning meeting we review all the requests and we decide which ones to move into our to do list based on the following questions:

• How urgent [ short-term vs. long-term] is the request?

• What is the time and effort level the request will take?

• How many dependencies do we have?

• What is the impact?

There will always be last minute requests, to make the right balance leave ~20% of your time open for such requests / projects.