As a Product Marketer, you get things done through other people. Also, you won’t have formal authority over most of the people working with you. In this scenario, your ability to connect with and influence people (especially peers) is crucial to succeed in the role.
Given this situation, I believe having a sense of how other teams work is key to increase your influence across the organization. To do this properly, there are three things you should learn about each area you collaborate with: what is driving their decisions, how they work and how you can influence them.
What is driving their decisions
You first need to understand their business, operational and personal goals. This is going to drive their decision making and you can leverage that do ensure you are suggesting (or asking for) for help on tasks that are connected to the goals they are pursuing.
A few examples of goals for the Marketing team could be:
- Business goal: increase loyalty (e.g., increase the number of customers that buy more than once)
- Operational goal: send more e-mails to current clients to increase repurchase rates by 4pp
- Personal goal: learn how to write more targeted copy
When you understand their goals, you can focus on pulling three levers:
-Clearly stating how your request is connected to the goals they are trying to achieve
- Directly helping your peer achieve their goals (to strengthen your relationship)
- Pushing the organization to change their goals (takes longer, but could be the right approach)
How do they work
Next, after you learn their goals, it is important to learn how they work. Here, you should deep dive into high-level processes and workflows.
You should learn how key process work (as they could become bottlenecks for your projects in the future):
- How are the teams prioritizing their work? When are they doing that?
- How frequently they meet to discuss goals and rethink strategy and/or tactics?
- What is the process and how long it takes for Marketing Ops to run an analysis?
- How early you must request a social media post? Is the process different for email marketing?
When you learn the processes each team is running, it is easier to collaborate and request things at the right time and using the right format. Also, pushing to understand it shows that you care, and caring is the fastest path for a great relationship with your peers.
How you can influence them
Now, you understand their goals and motivations and learned the process they follow to get things done inside the organization.
Through this process, you are going to build credibility and trust, key elements for any successful peer-to-peer relationship. With your newly built trust, you can start pulling the lever I mentioned on the first block of this answer.
Risk: understanding too much
As it is clear from my answer, I believe that understanding what your peers are doing is crucial to succeed in this role. However, there is a risk in knowing too much about other people’s role: you can become too opinionated and step on other people’s toes.
Therefore, it is important to find a balance between understanding what they are doing to increase your influence vs. to tell them what to do.