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If you had to build out a team of PMMs from scratch, how would you organize your team and which roles would own what?

In other words, if you went from one to ten - what would the structure look like? 1 Director/team lead, 2-3 Senior PMMs, and 4 PMMs? Would the team be divided by audience segment? By product? By strategy vs. tactics (i.e. larger GTM vs product launch)?
Christine Sotelo-Dag
Christine Sotelo-Dag
ThoughtSpot Senior Director of Product MarketingFebruary 25

I've seen PMM teams organized in many many different ways, and there really doesn't appear to be any one right way. It seems to be highly dependent on the needs of the business, the business model, business size, etc.

That said, what I have personally seen work well is when PMMs are able to have end-to-end ownership over a key area. Whether it be a specific product, or vertical, or product area - that ownership is critical. It allows the PMM to align to a set of KPI's that will become their north star in how they plan their GTM strategies. It is also helpful if the ratio of PMM to PMs is managable - no more than 5 PMs to 1 PMM.

From my perspective, ideal PMM org has full stack PMMs aligned to the product side, a PMM owning partnerships, APIs and wider ecosystem, a PMM dedicated to Sales Enablement/Competitive landscape (usually in larger orgs), and a dedicated PMM for pricing & packaging.

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Candace Marshall
Candace Marshall
Zendesk Senior Director of AI Product Marketing | Formerly LinkedInMay 9

Sounds like your business is growing - how exciting! It's hard to answer this question without knowing how your business is structured but I'm happy to share common structures for 10 pmms. Structurally, a people manager or team lead should have at least 3-4 people; this is typically a good "pod" size and enables your people manager/team leads to scale. So with 10 pmms, you could have 1 Director with 2 people managers with 3-4 under them. When b2b businesses are growing, typically the focus for pmms are on product development and launch so typically I've seen pmms aligned to products/parts of the product portfolio. But this is very different for b2c where typically I've seen pmms aligned to audience segments (e.g. smb, comm, upper comm).

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