Product marketing doesn’t exist yet at my company and we’ve done little to no market research yet. I’m currently building the business case to own this within my function. Any advice?

Market research is 100% necessary, both from a product perspective and marketing perspective, so you're making the right moves! From my experience, most organizations have market research owned by it's own separate team or the product team, but depending on the size of your org, it could make sense to live within product marketing since it serves both sides. For example, market research allows PMs to develop features that retain users while also serving the marketing team in knowing how to best sell the product.

The business case is simple—with many companies tightening budgets in the past couple years, it's a huge money and time saver to test out product ideas and campaign slogans before they go live. Plus, product marketers are storytellers—and that includes for internal comms as well. With market research living within your function, you can make sure all teams, from product to marketing to design etc, have the information they need to make the best decisions for their functions based on the insights you uncover.

Fun! That's how I got into product marketing. I realized that that's where I wanted to pivot my career (from content marketing). Fortunately for me, my manager at the time was a former PMM at another company, so during a 1:1, I asked if she could mentor me. She took me under her wing and became my biggest champion (as all managers should).

What I'd say is:

• Find internal champions: Sales could benefit from playbooks, battle cards, and enablement. The product wants help bringing features to market, and marketing wants to make sure they are saying the right things. Ask around, figure out who's worked with PMMs before, and get them to be your champion.

• Start small: When I transitioned from content marketer to PMM, I started writing the release emails. This gave me a seat in product discussions where I could ask questions and help refine the story. Over time, the product team regularly asked me for help on random things outside of positioning.

• Plug into PMM communities: The best thing for me was networking. I joined the Product Marketers of Austin meetup group and attended as many sessions as I could. Then, I joined PMA and Sharebird. I networked with peers and again asked for advice.