I'm working at a start-up, and a first PMM hire; what KPIs should I own and not own?

First and foremost, don't commit to any metrics until you really understand the current customer, buying cycle, and GTM approach, and have a point of view on what needs to change. I'm making a few assumptions here that as a "first in" you're further along on your career journey and have a sense of where to start. (If that's not the case, quickly find someone through your VC who can provide some advice here relevant to your problem! First PMM problems are often more qualitative. Who's the real customer? How do we get to her? Why does she care about the problem we solve and our unique solution? But, there's always a way to measure impact of that. Some thoughts here, broken down by the usual "how do you capture revenue?" framework:

• Product-led growth: Trials started, Trials converted, Average Deal Size. The first two are straightforward (and shared with Demand), but critical to see "who's buying" and if they match your theoretical ideal customer profile. Average Deal size links to the PMM objective of increasing the value you capture from every customer.
• Sales-led growth: Demo requests, New Meetings Set, Opps Created. You're trying to learn who is interested, who takes action, and who you ultimately need to qualify into. These will tell you that pretty quickly (and if you have a disconnect in your path from consideration to sale).

Importantly, all these metrics will help YOU improve messaging and positioning. You're learning quickly who is engaging, who you really want to engage with, and if you have any non-personas (targets to avoid) or hidden personas (people you really should be talking to) in the mix already.

Great question. When working at a startup, and especially as the first PMM hire, you want to make sure you can add value in quantifiable ways, while not signing up for too much or making yourself vulnerable to scope creep and/or unreasonable expectations.

Clarity on what you own and what you can affect is critical to your success.

What you own:

• Executing successful product launches, complete with delivered bill of goods as stated, and on time.

  • This includes messaging primitives such as positioning, and messaging hierarchy for your product that are signed off and approved by your leadership. Think of these as essential launch checklist items and measurement is more management by objective--either you have them, or you don't (at your own risk and peril)

  • This also includes brokering agreement on what's in scope for the launch based on its importance to the business

    • e.g. delivery of the blog post, landing page, production supervision of hero video/hero images, garnering of customer quotes, enablement of sales etc, on time

• Depending on your scope and remit, this can also mean the pricing and packaging elements of the product

What you don't own

• The last-minute viral video, trend-jacking gambit that came to the CEO in a fever-dream that causes your messaging to shift overnight. If you're tasked with this, you should negotiate more time and resources or run for the hills.

• Product launch delays. Unless marketing items are holding things up, technical readiness is up to product and engineering. As a product marketer, however, you should always strive for commercial readiness.

• Investor expectations. Hopefully not a spicy take, but that's on your CEO.
  
  

What you can affect:

• How excited the product team is about your message to market. At Google, our formula was "know the user/know the magic/connect the two".

• How prepared the sales team feels about pitching your new product or launch moment

• How confident your other cross-functional marketing partners are in their ability to execute across their channels successfully, be it web, social, experiential
  
  

What you can't affect:

• Minimum viable product or MVP. That, again, is a product/eng thing. What you can shape however is "minimum viable positioning".

• How a customer or prospect will receive the initial pitch. However, in time, you can befriend early customers and run messaging by them. This worked for Marc Benioff in the early days of Salesforce, and is still something he does to this day.

• The resourcing/budgeting that the rest of the marketing team has to work with (unless you, as the PMM, hold the purse strings, which is not likely in an early startup scenario)