How have you scaled and organized your product marketing team? ( by function, product line etc.) What works and what downsides have you experienced?

In earlier stage companies, small teams of generalists tend to drive great results with their expansive understanding that comes from being in the weeds of product alignment, customer insight, research, and campaign execution and sales enablement. As the company grows, and progresses into multi-product, that starts to break down as teams get bigger and the work becomes more specialized.

1. Initial Phase (Small Team):

   • Structure: Generalists who handle multiple functions, such as market research, content creation, and sales enablement.

   • Focus: Building foundational marketing strategies, establishing brand messaging, and supporting product launches.

2. Growth Phase (Medium Team):

   • Structure: Specialists for key functions like market analysis, product positioning, and campaign management.

   • Focus: Developing detailed market segmentation, optimizing go-to-market strategies, and enhancing sales support.

3. Mature Phase (Large Team):

   • Structure: Organize by product lines or customer segments with dedicated product marketing managers for each line or segment.

   • Focus: Deep expertise in each product line, tailored marketing strategies, and robust cross-functional collaboration.

Great question. I’ve worked in and led PMM teams with a number of different structures throughout my career (and in different functional organizations: Product vs. Marketing). At the end of the day, the best team structure is the one that’s aligned with your product and business goals.

If you have one or few products that appeal to many buyers, or are trying to expand your business by attracting customers in new or specific verticals, it might make sense to organize at least part of your team by vertical so that you’re developing experts in the customers and problem spaces you’re trying to connect with. We have a PMM team at SurveyMonkey that is dedicated to this, with team members laser-focused on the needs of HR buyers, market researchers, and so on, who have autonomy over messaging and GTM strategy targeting those buyers. One product, many messages to articulate its benefits as they apply to buyers with different needs.

If, on the other hand, you have a large portfolio of products that each address a distinct audience, and your growth model is based on introducing new solutions and improving existing ones (i.e. the suite model), you might align your team by product or product line. Early in my career, when I was in the consumer applications marketing group at Apple, the team was organized by product suite (iWork, iLife, etc.) and there was a PMM for each application within the suite who was an expert in that product space, and PMMs would work together with their team lead to develop suite-level messaging and GTM strategy. This made great sense for a set of creative applications that each targeted different audiences and use cases: aspiring musicians, photographers, filmmakers, etc.

Think about your product offering(s), target audience(s), and growth strategy — and this will lead you to the best team structure. And don’t be afraid to shake things up as your offerings and organization evolve.

I have always ensured that the alignment and the size/scale (or at least the requested heads etc) were very tightly aligned to the needs of the business. I once inherited a Product Marketing team that was disproportionally large compared to the product range and complexity as well as in comparison to other cross functional teams we worked with. It created a lot of friction as well as inefficiencies as we had duplication in roles and responsibilities with no clear distinction on 'who does what' etc. It turned out that the prior organisation had been overly ambitious on building out an 'enterprise grade' product marketing org but was way ahead of the needs of the business. We ended up downsizing and moving a few of the heads over to the broader marketing organisation and into sales enablement both of who were severely under staffed and had huge expectations from the business. We then 're' documented the roles and responsibilities of the remaining PMM's inline with the key business objectives as it pertained to solutions. Once that was completed we did a socialisation exercise across the entire business with this 'revamped' PMM team and it ended up being immediately more impactful (and thus successful)!