Organization structures for the PMM team vary depending on your companies’ stage, customer base, and product suite. There are 4 basic approaches for designing PMM teams: 1) functional (i.e. sales enablement, monetization, GTM, product strategy), 2) product lines (i.e. subscriptions, retail), 3) customer segments (i.e. enterprise, small business, consumer), or 4) Lifecycle (i.e. acquisition, engagement, retention.)
When determining a new PMM team org structure, I think about these 3 questions:
1) What drives distinction in the sales/conversion cycle? For some companies that will be customer-based, such as selling to enterprise clients versus small business or business versus consumer for marketplaces. For others, the product drives the most distinction, such as a consumer subscription service versus consumer a la carte/retail. For other companies with smaller product suites and a less complex client base, it may be best to align against areas of the funnel (i.e. acquisition, engagement, retention). Lastly, depending on the functional areas that PMM teams are responsible for it may make sense to organize against these areas to recruit for specific skill sets.
2) What domain knowledge will be most important to develop and maintain within the team? Which team members will benefit most from collaboration? This again is often tied to the answer in question one. Sometimes deep expertise on one customer segment will be critical relative to deep expertise on one specific product or vice versa.
3) How are your stakeholder teams organized? Aligning closely with product management teams will smooth the team’s ability to become trusted and consistent partners with that team.
As PMM organizations become larger and more complex, I have often combined two of the organizational approaches for maximum impact. For example, organizing my PMM teams by product lines, but having dedicated functional PMM roles underneath each product line team.