How have you found success building influence as a PMM?

The three biggest things that have helped me build influence as a product marketer have been:

1) Understanding the big picture workings of the business, including how you grow, earn, and retain revenue.

2) Building up strong credibility as a user advocate based on data and first-hand research.

3) Taking ownership and stake in the success metrics that matter most to your product, design, and engineering counterparts. This means, pitching in to get results!

• Strong business understanding:

  • The reason that broad business understanding can be so helpful is PMMs often work across several PMs or product areas. Seek to be an asset and a partner who sees connections across orgs and products. In doing this, you can save your PDE partners time by providing more information to make better more integrated decisions. Making connections across a business can be a strategic superpower. 

  • Business understanding is also essential to building up your credibility. We listen more to people who we think know what they are talking about.

• Voice of the customer:

  • Being an awesome user advocate is also a multiplier. The closer you can be to understanding what your users value, the better you can add value in the product development process. If you aren’t already finding ways to conduct both qual and quant research on a quarterly basis, I highly encourage you to. The input you give will be taken 10x more seriously when your peers know you as someone who listens to users and synthesizes their problems, desires, and context.

  • The more contextual knowledge you build about your customer base, the easier it will be to hone your product intuition, as well. 

• Take ownership over metrics that matter:

  • Every company is different, but try to align closely with your product, design, and engineering partners in OKR setting. Make sure that you show that you’re “on the same team” and taking enough ownership for your product groups’ results.  Even if you only have directly influence over a part of that picture, show that you are thinking about all the tradeoffs throughout the funnel.

  • If you can, show that you’re willing to be a team player and pitch in on parts of your colleagues’ work in interest of the whole team’s success. Make sure to protect your time if you do this so you don’t overextend or take on longterm scope creep.

  • Don’t discount the value of truly being in your colleagues’ corner. This is how partnership is built!