Interview Question: How should I answer when someone says how do you measure your own ROI in your current role as a product marketer?

Good question. As PMMs, our roles touch so many aspects of the company that ROI could be hard to define. My advice to every PMM is to think through the impact of their work, and the process of measuring their impact --- on a day to day basis, and not after the activity. So when the question does come up, you have a response ready. 

ROI can be measured both in terms of quantifiable business metrics as well as your impact on people, on the company brand, on the product roadmap or the company strategy

For business metrics, be clear about metrics that your work directly influences. It could be awareness metrics (share of voice, brand awareness, brand perception), acquisition metrics (leads, MQLs, pipeline), conversion metrics (win-rates, conversion rates, sales velocity) , retention metrics (churn/expansion, upsell/cross-sell rates), adoption metrics (30/60/90 day adoption by features or personas), or overall business metrics (revenue, ARR)

e.g. “Since we launched the new messaging, our sales win rates have increased by 20%. Some of this is due to better training and onboarding of our reps, but a lot of that is our emphasis on competitive differentiators in the new messaging and the quality of enablement that I led” is a great response if your work centers around sales enablement

Or “My work on setting up our launch engine is leading to better, more timely communication of our feature updates to both customers and partners. The social buzz around our launches is high, and we are seeing our users come back and use the product more. The cohorted weekly active user count is up and we are exceeding the 30-day adoption targets for every single feature launched last year. Our renewal rates are also up by 5 points and a lot of it is due to our launch and innovation momentum that is directly impacted by my work “ is also a good response

It is possible that you work in an organization where the linkage between your work and business success isn’t clear. Or it’s not something that your current manager has ever cared about. This is where you have to do the hard work of working with someone in ops/BI and trying to quantify that impact. It doesn’t have to be perfect. But you need to demonstrate the process of thinking through impact.

If it’s not abundantly clear what metric you are looking to solve and how that correlates to ROI, then there’s probably an opportunity to better define goals.

Generally, when I’ve seen PMMs struggle with this question, it means their projects are drifting from business value, and they need to take a step back to better understand the “why” of what they are tackling, and reprioritize if that “why” isn’t immediately obvious.

I started out my career as a medicinal chemist doing research on breast cancer. There was only one success metric for me - did the novel compound I synthesized kill the cancer cells without killing healthy ones? Success was incredibly complex to achieve but quite straightforward to measure. 

Conversely, as marketers, we often fall into a trap of measuring operational metrics that don’t actually measure outcomes. We get so wrapped up in reach and frequency that we often fail to answer whether we actually achieved our goal.

Just like a medicinal chemist is held to an extremely high standard of success based on scientific outcomes, a product marketer’s success should be based on business outcomes. Depending on your original goal, it might be ARR, greater closed-win rate, reduced churn, lowered CAC, market share, etc. It’s not about how many people downloaded your white paper but how many deals were closed because of it. There is your ROI.