How do you structure your Product Marketing team?

Great question! I think about this one a lot...First off, it’s important to callout that there is no perfect org structure :)  In general, you have to identify what you’re optimizing towards and what structure will give you the highest chance to get there. When I was at Uber Eats, we always kept a fairly tight PMM to PM relationship, so we mapped PMMs directly to their Product counterparts.  Product is broken down by audience - ie., Consumer, Restaurant, Delivery Person so we have leads within e ...Read More

Airtable’s product marketing team has a bit of a unique structure in that we don’t have one “Head of Product Marketing”, we have two. Myself (Self-Serve PMM lead) and my counterpart (Enterprise PMM lead) are responsible for the two sides of our business and both report into our CMO. The other thing to note is that product marketing is a fairly nascent function at Airtable. The company has seen really impressive growth and success over the last few years with only a few dedicated marketing folks ...Read More

My PMM team is built like a funnel. Our focus is to land new customers, which we only count when those customers start to pay. Therefore, the job of my PMM team ranges from raising awareness of our brand to getting new customers to upgrade to our paid editions. I have three groups focused on the following parts of the funnel: Buyer Journey: This team focuses on connecting our marketing efforts at the top of the funnel through to the product. This team is goaled on Day1-6 Daily Active Instances t ...Read More

I think PMM orgs go through phases. When I started in this role we were strictly by product, but our portfolio quickly became too complicated. We moved to more of a segment or sub-portfolio model. At the same time, the rest of the organizations' PMM teams were sub-dividing by objective. In order to match with the rest of that org we had 'ambassadors' to the objective-based teams. Given that PMM stakeholders are typically PM and Sales, I think the best approach is to best align your PMMs with the ...Read More

The structure of the PMM team is usually a function of the size of the company and it’s GTM model. The “typical” SaaS PMM team has a set of Core PMMs that are focused on product, and usually a sister PMM team in the form of Industry/Solutions Marketing that is focused on solutions for specific verticals or segments.At Atlassian, since we have a flywheel model, PMMs have a lot more focus on activities that deal with acquisition (self-serve), cross-sell, and upsell. So while our PMM teams are orga ...Read More

The structure of any team needs to be driven by the success criteria for that team. At Atlassian, we typically look at KPIs like # of paid users and pipeline (MQLs) for PMM. Enterprise-focused PMM teams typically have a couple more things they need to solve for: Sales enablement, and account-based programs (which can vary from events to ABM campaigns to EDR programs). Currently, my team is a mix of core PMM who own the GTM for specific products, as well as “horizontal” PMMs who own programs (lik ...Read More

I've done it in so many different ways! Few quick pointers:  The most important thing is to ensure every team member has a good swim lane and growth path.  Take your revenue goal and slice that evenly across the team to see what makes the most sense — product line, segment, or objective.  If you have a big product organization, try aligning your team with leaders. This will help you ensure PM-PMM alignment for a stronger product strategy.  If you have several SKUs/product lines, it might be wort ...Read More

My team is responsible for product messaging & positioning for Salesforce's core solutions for small businesses across our high-growth industries and customer & community marketing initiatives. On my team:  One PMM per key Salesforce solution for SMBs  One PMM leading our high-growth SMB Industry verticals One PMM leading our customer and community marketing initiatives  One technical PMM  This helps us align team members with the right revenue goals, balances the work on the team while ...Read More

At DocuSign, there are product marketers across our main product categories, as well as industry and audience teams. Every company I've ever worked at has grouped their teams differently, so I tend to consider new roles based on mapping skills to company needs. If the largest TAM is in a vertical that is specialized, perhaps you'll need an industry PMM. If the biggest gap in company need is relative to product launch materials, maybe you need someone focused on building a great bill of materials ...Read More

A lot of it depends on the types of products you're marketing. Some teams can be easily organized into solution-based pods, so if you have a lot of products in your portfolio, you might have product marketers who focus on individual products reporting up to a solutions marketer, who represents a broader category.  At Box, our products are more horizontal, so we have a team of product-focused marketers who work closely with the product and engineering teams, and then a team of solutions marketers ...Read More

Team structure is always a hot topic in product marketing, and there's a lot of different ways of doing it. The product marketing team at Iterable recently re-organized into 5 groups: Release Marketing, Solutions Marketing, Pricing & Packaging, Platform Marketing, and Market Intelligence. Each group has a specific charter and KPIs that align up to company initiatives and OKRs as well. Briefly, the mission of each team is: Release Marketing: Tell Iterable's innovation story, and effectively c ...Read More

At Retool, we've evolved our structure around the product-led and sales-led sides of our business. About half of our team is focused on sales-led growth, partnering closely with demand generation and GTM teams on everything from integrated campaigns, analyst relations, enablement, and more. The other half is focused on our product-led growth. Retool sells to developers, so at our company that means partnering closely with growth and content marketing, as well as product, on everything from SEO t ...Read More

I have led several product marketing teams throughout my career and it is certainly not one size fits all. A couple of models that have worked well: Mirroring Product In an environment where roadmaps are tightly aligned with product and where deep context is a must, I like to set up my team as a mirror image (or close to it) of Product. That way each person on my team has a counterpart that they are accountable to and vice versa. They are subject matter experts on the product and can clearly art ...Read More

The right team structure is going to be highly dependent on your business, so there's no one right answer. I've been on teams that have been organized by product, vertical, customer segment, and GTM motion (self-serve vs. sales assisted) with equal success and equal lack of success. Company-level priorities can provide a great North Star to align your team's structure and accountability to. For example, if one of your top goals is to improve NPS by 10 points this year, you might do well to have ...Read More

Rather than by product line or aligned to how the product team is organized, I structure product marketing teams by customer groupings (or buying centers). So if your company has distinct customer groups (either by vertical industry, like Financial Services or Gaming, or horizontal role type, like CIO/IT, CISO/Security or CTO/Development), I set up teams that closely align with each group that pull through relevant products and services, irrespective of how the product team is organized. A few t ...Read More

This all comes down to how is the rest of the business organized. If you're organizing in a way that's incongrous to everyone else in the org, you will not be setup for success. With smaller nimble teams it's likely just based on bandwith and who has room to take things on. With larger teams, or as a team is being built out, it's best to align with your core cross-functional partners such as Product. There is usually overlap with PMMs working with 2-3 PMs. I've organized teams by product area in ...Read More

The PMM team structure depends on the size of the company, how technical the product is, and the GTM model. Company Size: As the company grows and scales, PMM tends to fall under the Marketing org and they may segmented by Core Product PMMs where they focus on the overall messaging and positioning, Industry/Solution PMMs that focus use cases for those specific industries ,and solution areas, and there may be PMMs that will focus solely on sales enablement, competitive intelligence, or pricing. F ...Read More

In general, PMM roles at Intercom are more of the 'full stack' variety - i.e we cover the whole journey from feeding into the roadmap to launch, including competitive research, buyer/persona/market research, GTM strategy, positioning and messaging, enablement, launch planning etc.Our team sits in marketing and reports into a Senior Director of PMM. Our team structure has shifted several times in the time I've been here, based on changes to the company strategy, product team structure and where w ...Read More