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

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 pillar for each job-to-be-done.

Product Messaging: Product messaging is a double click into a messaging pillar in your platform messaging. Messaging is usually focused on how it makes an individual's life easier. Ensure that you use a lot of the same language in your platform messaging pillar to ensure a connective thread to you product. Platform PMMs should look over product messaging to ensure the connection is made.

Solution Messaging: Solution messaging is a derivative of platform messaging. The goal is to make the platform messaging relevant for a specific persona, vertical, or use case. Platform and product PMMs should evaluate the messaging based on what's being emphasized in the messaging doc.

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/segments or industry achieve their specific goals and outcomes. I also work with the other Solution Marketers on my team to translate that messaging into Marketing Campaigns and Sales Plays.  Each Solution Marketer is mapped to one of our sales segments, creating resources that a specific segment needs to bring our platform to market. For example, our commercial segment has a shorter sales cycle, so they need a simplified pitch deck, demo, and enablement. In contrast, our enterprise segment has more complex deals. Hence, they need to be enabled to speak about our platform to a broader audience and need playbooks to help them collaborate with our customer success team to help expand customers beyond the initial purchase.

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: Work together on cross-product launch plans and sales enablement materials.

• Segmented content strategy: Product PMMs focus on product-specific differentiation, while platform PMMs tie it back to use cases or broader customer business outcomes.

• Joint customer references & use cases: Show how customers use multiple products together for a holistic solution.

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 style org chart.

Picture an org chart. Across it are what I'd call your vertical PMMs - the SMES across specific products or audience groups. Directly below them are your horizontal PMMs (think common/shared layers like program management, sales enablement, analyst relations, research and insights).

I'd push for Platform and Solutions to be part of that horizontal stack as it almost always ties back to specific products. On the Google Workspace team for example, I supported the APIs and SDKs across each core product like Drive, Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets. And while there was a dedicated, product-focused PMM or team of PMMs across each, my team would regularly interface with them so we could cross-pollinate our storytelling, refactor/remix content so as to be across key messaging moments. Crucially we all reported to the same manager at the top level. That enabled us to be across the same operating cadences and business rhythms in real-time, allowing for efficient information exchange and flow.

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 company so they're thinking about how different services and products can come together to solve broader challenges. Therefore they are responsible for articulating the customer pain points and challenges and bringing those market/customer insights into the product roadmap on what are the biggest problems to solve for. They are the experts in the customer's business and are product-agnostic. Product-Focused PMMs also need to focus on customer outcomes and on developing customer empathy, however they are the ones working most closely with PMs on insights from competitive intel, alpha/beta tests to drive product roadmap decisions.

2) Messaging development: Product-focused PMMs are responsible for communicating feature-level updates and capabilities from the product team to the rest of the GTM team. They are the product experts who should be able to provide deep-dive training, technical nuances, and documentation on features. The Platform/Solutions PMM should then be able to take their input and own the translation of those technical capabilities into solutions that speak to a broader use case, industry or persona. Therefore, messaging development takes place hand-in-hand with Platform/Solutions PMMs delivering the high-level messaging frameworks and solution-level positioning while Product-focused PMMs can refine it by providing feature-specific input by clarifying the nuances in the product's capabilities.

3) Product launch: Typically a Product-Focused PMM is responsible for the launch plan acting as the quarterback. In the case of a multi-product company with a Platform/Solution PMM, I think this person should own the launch plan and be the quarterback and work with all the Product-focused PMMs and drive all the outbound motions including working with Sales Enablement, Campaigns, Communications, Content, and Events on the GTM execution. This is a general rule, but it's nuanced and complex so you'll have to take into consideration resourcing and business prioritization.

The "how" in collaboration would be through regular syncs between the two PMM teams to align on shared goals, priorities, assets and timelines like any other collaboration model between teams. Be sure to establish a launch playbook so everyone on the team is working off of the same tools/templates/format for messaging frameworks, competitive intel, roadmap planning, etc. These two types of PMMs should be connected at the hip so I'd focus more on the similarities and in driving internal alignment with other cross-functional teams.

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 there). The entire company needs to recognize this expertise

Second- we built deep collaborative working sessions between industry PMMs and core product PMMs. Goal is for industry PMMs to understand product specific messaging/positioning/value prop/differentiators as well as an in-depth walk through of all messaging assets (pitch decks, demos, web pages etc.) by the PMMs. This would happen over a few sessions. 

These two pieces above- industry expertise and a depth understanding of product messaging- allowed industry PMMs to build the industry specific version of the solution messaging. And also identified the gaps in the solution storytelling (e.g. case studies, solution demos etc.). They would then work with the right teams to fill those gaps.  

We created multiple informal collaboration points between the two teams for proper knowledge transfer, mutual respect and feedback on each other's work. But most importantly - we gave the industry PMMs the full autonomy to own the assets for their audiences.

• 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 socialize the work being done across different teams within PMM helps cross-polinate ideas. These readouts serve as springboards to ensure consistency, optimize / expand on existing efforts, while avoiding duplication. 

TL;DR: It's a two-way street. Make a conscious effort to get plugged in. 

For every product launch, consider which solutions/segments to whom it's particularly applicable and invite those counterparts to share input as subject matter experts. 

In a similar vein, PMMs who work more horizontally across product marketing should proactively be plugging themselves into launch & campaign calendars to capitalize on the right opportunities and marketable moments. Challenge teams to be specific about the type(s) of good fit customers so you can tailor use-cases and examples to ensure positioning is even more relevant.