Product Marketers often get pulled in several directions and everything feels urgent. How do we work with our CMO and Exec team to help narrow down what we focus on?

Product marketing is so often misunderstood, and a lot of CMO’s didn’t grow up with it so they don’t particularly understand it. Still other CMO’s struggle with the PMM orgs that seem to spend more time on things they can’t see or aren’t held accountable for inside their own marketing org. And, like you said, while pmm plays a cross-org glue role, it can leave it stretched way too thin as a result. I think having a charter for your team is a really important place to start. It should last you a ...Read More

In order to narrow down what PMM works on as to not be pulled in a million directions and get stuck being short order cooks for every random initiative, you need to invest heavily in understanding and internalizing the company's priorities and goals, as communicated via OKRs, KPIs or however your company manages these things. Chances are there's a list of things, in priority order, that sit at the CEO level that your work needs to ladder up to. Once you REALLY understand where the company is try ...Read More

Make sure you set clear goals or OKRS during planning and share them with your XF stakeholders to get buy in Make sure you present data on what initiatives you think will have the biggest ROI or drive the biggest impact - and try to quantify that in some way Ask for feedback regularly and discuss priorities at the executive level Continue to also update the CMO/Exec team as things shift, because they always do - and constantly realign - its an ongoing process Be transparent with whats working an ...Read More

I love this question because I think prioritization is a crucial aspect of business success (not just PMM). Ultimately, it comes down to communication. If you think of the PMM plan as a product roadmap, then you continually need to communicate and re-align on it. While the repetition feels like overkill, it will keep your work top of mind and create a constant reminder of the trade-offs that would need to be made to re-prioritize. A few tips to help: Agree early (and often) - Build the plan, soc ...Read More

Your executive team and CMO should be looking to you to prioritize your workload.If you wait for someone to prioritize your workload for you, you'll end up working on things that skew completely in the wrong direction or may be overindexed on a particular metric. PMM has many stakeholders and its important to balance priorities across sales, CS, product, and marketing. Always defer back to the company-wide objectives. How can you best serve those objectives and drive impact? How can you make a m ...Read More