In your eyes, what's product marketing's role in the launch? What's key to ensure it's smooth?

Every company has a different PMM philosophy so it's really important to dig deep into this whenever you're interviewing.  On my team, where I run core product marketing for RingCentral's flagship, I view product marketing's role as the nucleus for messaging strategy. Here are the 4 areas of where I ask my PMMs to spend their time and energy on. Everything outside of this falls as either a favor, gap, or distraction. Research (PMM is owner)These are activities that are designed to generate insig ...Read More

I hate to use a cliche, but Product Marketing is the glue that holds everything together. We're the central point of contact, part project manager, part strategist. We create the Go-To-Market (GTM) plan based on research and product-market fit, and then we kick it into gear. It's about rallying all the teams—marketing, customer service, sales, partners, product—to make it happen. It's like conducting a symphony of efforts to turn our strategy into a real, successful product launch.  I've talked ...Read More

I’ve heard two terms used before to describe product marketing’s role in a launch that really resonate with me and I think accurately sum up what we do. The first is “launch captain” and the second is “momentum maker” (credit to @Marcus Andrews for that one). Product marketing is the “captain” that brings all of the other cross-functional teams together to bring a launch to life. We sit in the middle of Product, Marketing and Sales and are the bridge between them to determine how we can best mar ...Read More

I've heard it described a few different ways: product marketer is the CEO of the launch, since you have to wear so many hats preparding for a launch, or you're the quarterback since you have to pass the ball, run the ball and organize with so many other people.  The role really is ownership of the launch though. Because someone has to own it completely, it can't be done correctly by committee (from my experience at least). So what that ends up meaning is you have to do a bunch of jobs: communica ...Read More