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. For Eats PMM, we’ve always kept a fairly tight PMM to PM relationship, so we map PMMs directly to their Product counterparts. 

Product is broken down by audience - ie., Consumer, Restaurant, Delivery Person so we have leads within each audience and typically, sub-groups within that focus on either Growth (getting users from 0 → 1 trip), “Experience” (Ordering + Receiving Food) or Engagement + Loyalty.

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 we most need to focus resources. Currently, we're split into 3 'groups' based primarily around product areas:

• Solutions (a Group PMM + 3 PMMs): Each PMM is focused on one of (or part of) the 3 solutions/audiences we position Intercom for specific solution. Each PMM owns positioning, messaging and GTM for their solutions, and partner with the relevant product managers for their solutions and product areas.
• Platform and Core (that's my group - me plus 3 PMMs) - we look after overarching/high level positioning and messaging, and cross-solution features such as the Messenger, data platform, and our partner ecosystem (incl. apps and integrations). We often partner with solution PMMs on things like launches for platform features. We also partner closely with the platform group in R&D, as well as the Business Development team on partnerships. 
• Pricing and packaging (a principal PMM) - fairly self explanatory, owns pricing and packaging strategy/decisions, as well as buyer personas and research

In terms of measurement, it varies according to focus area and the projects we're working on. We currently don't have specific metrics for each role but we look at launch metrics (depending on the goal - adoption, upsells etc), feedback from cross-functional stakeholders and so on. For the partnerships part of my group, we also look at metrics such as co-selling revenue (in partnership with BD), growth in the no of partners, and app adoption.

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 we most need to focus resources,. Currently, we're split into 3 'groups' based primarily around product areas and segment:

• Solutions (a Group PMM + 3 PMMs): Each PMM is focused on one of (or part of) the 3 solutions/audiences we position Intercom for specific solution. Each PMM owns positioning, messaging and GTM for their solutions, and partner with the relevant product managers for their solutions and product areas.
  
• Platform and Core (that's my group - me plus 3 PMMs) - we look after overarching/high level positioning and messaging, and cross-solution features such as the Messenger, data platform, and our partner ecosystem (incl. apps and integrations). We often partner with solution PMMs on things like launches for platform features. We also partner closely with the platform group in R&D, as well as the Business Development team on partnerships.
  
• Pricing and packaging (a principal PMM) - fairly self explanatory, owns pricing and packaging strategy/decisions, as well as buyer personas and research

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 - which was one of the things that was most attractive to me when I was interviewing. Because PMM is so new, the structure we have today will probably look wildly different than the structure we’ll have next year.

The self-serve PMM team is a scrappy 2 people right now (myself included) with three additional open headcount. I’m actively hiring and would love to have some great PMMs join my team, so if you’re reading this and interested in helping us build out PMM please reach out :) Our Enterprise/Platform PMM team is a team of 4 folks with two open headcount as well. So all told, our PMM organization should have 11 people (with 2 leads included) by end of year. Who knows what it will look like in 2021. It'll depend on the needs of the business but I can pretty much guarantee it will continue to grow.

Each person’s role is focused on a specific focus area (ex: we have a PMM full time focused on activation, another PMM focused full time on our platform) and their role is tied to specific product usage, ARR, or internal metrics to gauge success. A PMM's sucess at Airtable is determined by the metrics they're responsible for, the impact of the programs, processes, and initiatives they run, the feedback they recieve from their cross-functional partners, and their skill at core PMM competencies like messaging and positioning. 

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 organized by product (e.g. Jira, Confluence, etc.) individual PMMs on a product team can focus on core product vs. monetization vs. enablement vs. upsell to drive the overall KPIs for the business.

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 (like campaigns, enablement, content) that stripe across all products.

The structure of the team will evolve over time based on factors like the Sales team structure, new product rollouts, etc.

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 creating individual growth paths for each team member. Its all about the revenue for us and that's a shared responsibility between my team and our campaigns/demand gen teams. 

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 who work more closely with the go-to-market teams like sales and customer success. These teams are like two sides of a coin and work really closely together.

One other quick point: It's common for product marketing to mirror the product management team structure, but these two teams often have different mandates. For example, a technically complex product that requires a lot of product management and engineering resources might actually be a table-stakes capability or competitive neutralizer rather than a differentiated value driver for customers. I'd encourage product marketing leaders to look beyond PM-to-PMM ratios and think critically about what will really drive value for customers, then staff their teams that way.

Our team is structured by audience type and discipline. We have one part of the team focused on our end users and prospects, another part of the team is focused on our partners, and a third on market research and market strategy. That said, I strongly believe it's important for PMM teams at hypergrowth companies to be nimble in terms of their structure and be willing to redefine roles and responsibilities as company strategy and the needs of the business shift over time.

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. Etc. 

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 communicate launches to the market through our launch strategy.
• Solutions Marketing: Tell Iterable's value story for specific verticals and segments of the market, and work cross-functionally across GTM teams (Marketing, Sales, CS, Etc) to effectively power campaigns and content that resonates.
• Pricing & Packaging: This one speaks for itself, but drivings strategic initiatives connected to how we price and package our solution.
• Platform Marketing: Responsible for telling our "better together" story with technology partners.
• Market Intelligence: Collect market insights to power company strategy, roadmap, positioning/messaging, campaigns, and more.

The team right now is approaching 10, and will be growing signficiantly in the coming months. 

The above isn't the only way to structure a team -- and structure can be aligned to product, function, segment, and more. As your company grows it's important to think about how product marketing can strategically support the business. I'm happy to chat 1:1 on how this can come to fruition as well.

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 worthwhile to have a person or a team dedicated to overall messaging and narrative to ensure consistency. 
• Depending on how PMMs are defined in your organization, you can create teams for every aspect of the customer journey. 

Sendbird is an in-app conversations platform, where we help improve customer retention and conversion through chat, voice, video, and livestream APIs. Our team is structured as follows:

• GTM excellence
• Market intelligence
• Customer marketing

Within GTM, there are 3 solutions and a PMM owns each of the solutions. Each solution may include up to 3 products or major areas of functionality. Each solution also has a key performance indicator (KPI) or customer metric it's meant to drive.

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 stakeholder objectives. In most organizations that's by product line or segment.

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 to ensure high-quality sign-ups come into our funnel and they are happy when they get there. The teams' activities include running marketing paid campaigns, SEO, website optimizations, messaging & onboarding.

• Core product: This team focuses on keeping our customers informed of new product releases, updating our core product messaging, and partnering closely with our product counterparts on product & GTM strategy.

• Monetization & Expansion: This team is focused on driving our upsell motions within the product experience, driving customers from free to paid licenses, and cross-sell driving users to try and use other products and apps in our ecosystem.
  

It's important to note that my team is primarily focused on SMB self-serve motions.

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 articulate value to a user. In this model, everyone is more of a product marketing generalist and looks after the entire scope of the craft for a particular product or product area.

Organizing by Function

• In an environment where product context is less important, setting up your team by function can be a good move. Some PMM's focus on upstream work/research, some on GTM and launches, some on growth & demand generation, some on sales enablement etc. This model stretches the PMM across all products/product areas but allows them to hone in on a particular function of the craft. As PMM teams scale - this model becomes more practical for PMM's, but also more efficient for different stakeholder groups like sales, partnerships, etc. that need a single point of contact.

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 to developer marketing to build alongs and more.

Both sides of the team lead product launches, run competitive/customer programs, and work on foundational ICP/customer research. But this structure helps us give PMMs more focus and clearer success metrics to align their work with.

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 times I've created a more horizontal Platform PMM team to drive core work like messaging, positioning, launches and demos for products that span customer groups.

Invariably, this type of structure ends up aligning closely with sales, which offers the teams a leg up in terms of enablement, customer stories and a better sense of what's happening in market vs. what's happening inside the company. That's the key - take an "outside-in" or buyer-back view to everything vs. an "inside-out" or product-forward perspective. “Inside out” thinking is deadly, but decidedly easy to fall into. We can convince ourselves of all sorts of things if we think we have the answers, which we don’t. The answers live with customers.

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 a PMM whose job it is to think about customer engagement and retention strategies.

One thing that's been very successful on my team is bringing on a PMM dedicated to competitive intelligence, which is not a role that sits on a lot of product marketing teams. Our observation was that even though competitive insights are a core part of our job responsibility, PMMs get so busy we they really only go in-depth when a project or launch requires it. We wanted to drive more ongoing competitive visibility across the org, but also to be more agile in our response to competitive threats, so placing that role at the intersection of product influence, internal enablement, and GTM execution has really accelerated impact.

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 the past which aligned well to how Product was organized. 

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. For smaller companies, PMM teams will play a more 'full stack' PMM role. For example, AWS has different PMM roles (Adoption, Engagement, Advocacy) to adopt net-new customers, increase usage within existing customers, and increase customer proofpoints. 
• Product Technicality: PMM may roll into PM org if the product is very technical and PMMs may serve as front-end PMs but still work very closely with the Marketing team. In my past experience, this doesn't change the role but gives the PMM team better insight and knowledge on the product to enable the marketing and sales teams. 
• GTM Model: This point correlates to the size of the company. If you are in a larger company where there are multiple product lines or portfolio of products, the PMM team may focus on a set of products or a specific portfolio. This will cover breadth but not depth into the product so you'd rely more on the PMs. However, it helps with messaging and positioning of a core set of products rather than specific products. For example, at one point IBM had PMM roles as Portfolio Marketing Managers that focus on specific messaging, positioning and GTM for specific portfolio of products. 

At Clari, my team has a dual mapping:

• by product line

• by functional area (AR, market intel etc)

Previous gigs I would align the team by function or by product line. Segment (upmarket., MM etc) can also be a good option!