How does your platform and solutions PMMs collaborate with product-focused PMMs?

As a Director of Platform and Solution Marketing, my role is to be an expert in the jobs that are to be done for the different personas that buy or use Outreach and work horizontally with other PMMs to activate our messaging. I work with a team of PMMs that own specific platform capabilities and create messaging about their part of their platform that I use as input into Use Case Messaging that tells a story about how the Outreach Platform helps different types of users across persona-type/segme ...Read More

Your messaging hierarchy should guide how product, platform, and solution messaging/PMMs fit together. Platform Messaging: Platform Messaging should serve as a framework in which all product messaging fits. If I have a simple platform, then I encourage PMMs to create a storyline of the uber job-to-be-done, then have messaging pillars, no more than three to four, for each product. If you have more than four products, then group your products together into jobs-to-be-done, then create a messaging ...Read More

Think of your PMM team as an interface to the organizations they serve. Your org structure can vary from company to company, but I've often said that messaging, if done right, should be like an API across your organization. Same goes with your PMM organization. The more you can optimize for information flow between team members, the more "performant" your API will be. So when thinking about platform solutions PMMs vs product-focused PMMs I go back to the classic vertical vs horizontal services s ...Read More

This is a common model at enterprise focused companies. . I can share a bit from my experience at Microsoft and Qualtrics  First- the industry PMM is the subject matter expert on that industry. They know the industry buyers, trends, competitive dynamics, pain points, use cases uniquely well. They are closest to the industry's customers, in-charge of those industry specific advisory boards and case studies, spend more time with industry specific sales teams (assuming there is some specialization ...Read More

Regular catch-ups (1-on-1s): These are important opportunities for specific line-of-business (LOB) / product leads to share top priorities & initiatives with those who operate more cross-functionally across PMM, and vice versa. In addition to 1:1s, these can also be in the form of quarterly roadshows between partnering teams.  Regular readouts (1-to-many): Whether its giving visibility into the planned campaign calendar, or sharing recent research, finding a cadence and channel to regularly ...Read More

If you work on a PMM team that has specialized roles between Platform/Solution PMMs vs Product-Focused PMMs, this must mean that you have clear role definitions to distinguish between the two teams so there is no overlap in responsibilities. Assuming this has been established, the close collaboration is most critical in the following 3 areas: 1) Product roadmap planning: Platform/Solution PMMs are focused on specific audiences (by industry, geography, persona, use case) in a multi-product compan ...Read More

This starts with leadership alignment. Whoever leads Solutions marketing must be tightly locked with PMM leadership with shared goals and strategy. With visibility into that, Product PMMs and Solution PMMs know what’s coming when and how they should engage. Here are some ways we have achieved around that at Cisco:  Regular syncs & alignment on messaging: Ensure product PMMs understand how their product contributes to the overall solution/platform story. Shared go-to-market (GTM) motions: Wor ...Read More