How do you update stakeholders, and the company as a whole, on the recent activities and achievements of product marketing?

This is a great question that varies by company size. In a smaller company it may be appropriate to present recent wins in an all-hands from time to time. But at a medium - large company, just like all product marketing, you have to think about your audience first and then plan the message and delivery that works for each. Here are a couple of ways my team and I do this at Zendesk:

• Regional syncs: we have monthly meetings with Sales and Marketing leaders in each region. We structure the meeting with hot discussion topics for the region at the top, recent / on-going programs, and finally heads up on major launches and programs coming over the next 3-6 months. This format means we ensure they are hearing from us regularly, but because it's a meeting we also hear from them and have a chance to answer questions and get feedback.
• All sales: we work with our enablement team for training and updates as needed throughout the month. But every month we send a newsletter that is segmented by type of information (new launch, new content, etc) why it's relevant and what they should do with it.
• Marketing / executive leadership: we work with product on a quarterly GTM <> Product Sync where we update on where we're at and what's planned for the coming quarter. We also do organizational quarterly business reviews which are useful for sharing achievements and learnings.

A variety of mediums, depending on the level of update we're providing:

- Announcements in Slack channels across practices

- Sales trainings & enablement sessions

- Various internal all-hands presentations

- Campaign/initiative decks that list out the strategy (targeting/positioning), assets/content/activities, and results

See this answer for how we work as a 100% distributed company. We work a lot in "public."

As for updates, the entire company publishes bi-weekly updates on a special p2/site that's meant to aggregate the most important updates from each team or division across the company. This is the opportunity for the team to highlight wins, lessons learned, or changes the rest of the company shouldn't miss. And it's great to be able to link to specific project, research, or test results for more details without overwhelming the person reading.

One of my favorite parts of being a Product Marketer is that a lot of the work that we do is highly visible and can affect completely different parts of the organization. For example: buyer personas of course help sales sell your product, but they also help your engineering team figure out who they’re actually building the product for. Or competitive landscapes - this is a project that everyone at the company from your IT team to HR to Leadership is hungry for - everyone wants to know where you stand against the competition!

All of this to say, use this unique aspect of our function to make your work visible across the company and help build your product marketing team’s brand. Figure out existing communication platforms to plug into, like newsletters or all-hands, but also figure out the right cadence and methods to update key stakeholders on a more one-off basis. I’ve found dropping into team meetings on a monthly basis, monthly or bi-weekly 1:1s with your key stakeholders, roundup posts on slack or chatter, and even short loom videos work well - especially in a remote environment. When doing any of this, it’s important to make sure you’re not only promoting what you’ve produced or achieved as a product marketing team, but also why others in the company should care and how they can benefit from the work you’re doing.

We built a system in Coda that enables XFN stakeholders to self-serve needs asynchronously. Coda also allows us to automate email updates to relevant parts of the business. Finally, we've implemented a cadence of regular team presentations and updates on important XFN topics, e.g., market landscape read-outs, win-rates, AR strategy. 

The thing I don't do is a weekly/monthly team-based newsletter. I find that these generally take a ton of work, aren't read by many people (we're all busy!), and can too easily veer into a kind of self-promotion that can build resentment within other teams.

Instead, we generally focus on cross-functional project updates -- status emails for major launches, announcement emails when the big launches go out, and project-based presentations at exec meetings and company or departmental all-hands meetings. These highlight the cross-functional strength of our work while also highlighting the invaluable partnership from other teams across the org.

Great question! This is so important. Because product marketing is often the "glue", it’s easy to miss how critical it is to driving company alignment and growth. Make sure that you have a regular cadence of updates and clear/measurable metrics reported to your CMO and Executive team. Being proactive about advocating for your function is part of being a great marketer!

I think a monthly email update, or Slack update sent to the entire company is a great way to update the rest of the organization on the activities and achievements of PMM. 

Generally speaking, there is so much noise with all the channels of communication people have to deal with today that something that gets "sent" to the company in some way, shape or form is much more effective than anything that would require someone to seek out such info.

So if you put all of PMMs achievements on a page in a company portal, very few will end up looking at it in my opinion.