How to convince your product team to create shared OKR's with PMM?

When it comes to aligning the goals of your product and PMM teams, it's important to first look at your company's overarching OKRs--which should act as a guiding star for your entire organization.

Once you have a clear understanding of these company-level OKRs, you can start to align your product and product marketing teams around a shared goal. This can be achieved by breaking down the company-level objectives into smaller, more specific goals that are relevant to your product and marketing strategies.

As an example, let's say your company objective is to increase revenue by 20%. Your product team has likely honed in on a handful of new features or improvements that will help to hit that target. And on the marketing side, PMM will focus on promoting and driving the adoption of those new features.

Things can get a bit challenging when there are conflicting priorities. It's important to maintain open lines of communication when it comes to how each team is thinking about prioritization and how we believe the work will ladder into the bigger picture. At Wistia, we look at our OKRs on a tri-annual basis to make sure we're still aligned and focused on the right things that will move the needle for the business.

When it comes to aligning the goals of your product and PMM teams, it's important to first look at your company's overarching OKRs--which should act as a guiding star for your entire organization.

Once you have a clear understanding of these company-level OKRs, you can start to align your product and product marketing teams around a shared goal. This can be achieved by breaking down the company-level objectives into smaller, more specific goals that are relevant to your product and marketing strategies.

As an example, let's say your company objective is to increase revenue by 20%. Your product team has likely honed in on a handful of new features or improvements that will help to hit that target. And on the marketing side, PMM will focus on promoting and driving the adoption of those new features.

It's likely that there still might be some conflicting priorities. It's important to maintain open lines of communication when it comes to how each team is thinking about prioritization and how we believe the work will ladder into the bigger picture. At Wistia, we look at our OKRs on a tri-annual basis to make sure we're still aligned and focused on the right things that will move the needle for the business.

This is about strategic alignment. It starts at the top. I've used a number of goal-setting frameworks including OKRs and my POV is that the framework itself is irrelevant. Success is most often the result of focus and alignment. When done right, product marketers and product managers should be tasked with working toward the same goal oriented around product/feature delivery and adoption.

That being said, I understand not everybody is set up for success that way. Here are some tips for improving things:

Invest in your PM relationships. I mentioned this in another post, but meet very regularly, always bring something of value to share, ask for their input on what you're doing, etc. Establish trust. Get aligned on what you two think is most important; what you think success looks like (set aside leadership's directives for a moment).

Once aligned, work together to create your case for more formally aligned OKRs. Given the lack of alignment you mentioned, I'm assuming PM and PMM report into different functional leaders (ie VP Product, VP Marketing). Invite both of them to a meeting and make your case together. If your case aligns to high-level company objectives and your VPs are at all reasonable, they'll be psyched to see such strong collaboration and ownership, and I bet you get a heck of a lot closer to that shared OKR.