If product marketing is a new function (relative to product), how do you become a strategic partner and more involved earlier in the product roadmap development process?

This is a great question and a situation that many PMMs will find themselves in at some point in time! A few thoughts here: Building trust takes time: Before you can be seen as a strategic partner, you need to build trust with the team and demonstrate you know and understand what they are trying to achieve. As quickly as you can, become an expert in the product, and your customers. You need to know both of them inside out in order to do the work to connect the amazing product being built to the ...Read More

This happens a lot, PMMs are brought in quite frantically once a team already has a very specific way of working and it's on the PMM to figure out how to slot themselves in. I think the first thing that needs to happen is to clearly delineate and articulate team members' roles and responsibilities - Atlassian actually has a great guided playbook you can run with your team to do just this! Doing the above ^ creates a space for the team to better articulate and understand their own roles and those ...Read More

I’m glad you are asking this question because this is exactly the right mindset you should have in a young Product Marketing org to avoid becoming solely a GTM service function. The path to this is through a mixture of education and showing value to the Product team. Something you should find out is why the Product Marketing team was created and who was the driver behind the creation. If the momentum came from outside of the Product team, the PMs likely won’t know how to work with Product Market ...Read More

Very simply become a credible source of synthesized market and competitive intelligence. I'm being very deliberate about the word "synthesized", because in understanding the target market, we must understand and convey customer needs at large, not just echoing the loudest customer or citing the most recent competitive loss, customer meeting, or analyst conversation. That was probably already happening before Product Marketing showed up! Then as a trusted source of market and competitive insights ...Read More

Whether PMM is new or established, the relationship with Product is key! I'll repeat my response from one of the other questions as I think it applies here as well: The relationship between Product Marketing and Product Management is often the most important relationship you can have as a product marketer. The best thing to do here is build up a buddy system and make sure you are bringing value to the relationship. I like to have my PMMs partner up with PMs 1:1 as much as possible. And I like to ...Read More

Your relationship with your PM is key here. You need to earn credibility and trust with them in order to stand a chance of being involved earlier in the roadmap development process. We are not "given" any right here as. PMM; you need to earn it. You build credibility and trust by: Being strategic - you understand the market dynamics, you are tracking competitors across both product and marketing, and you are offering insights 1:1 and in group settings Being customer-oriented - you represent the ...Read More