What are the biggest frustrations you have as a product marketing manager?

I’m going to split my answer here because the additional question details suggest you may be feeling frustrated that PMM has become more strategic, but for me, the strategic work in product marketing is a large part of why I love the function so much :). I’m hoping I can still be helpful to you in my response if I just separate those pieces.

In my experience, I’ve actually always seen the role of PMM to be quite strategic and I think that’s really driven by the function sitting at such a critical place within a company, in the middle of Marketing, Product and Sales. We’re usually taking a strategic leadership role when we’re driving initiatives that involve those groups, and ultimately, if anything can’t get done or a team needs help, I think product marketing is often the one that should step in to make it happen.

If you do not like the strategic work within product marketing though, purely from my personal experience, I found when I was on a PMM team that reported into Product, our direct work was a bit less strategic. It felt like we were more of a support function and often were executing on strategy driven more by Product. Take this with a huge grain of salt though because that’s literally just one data point and I’ve definitely heard the counter perspective too. We also had a very small PMM team there so the ratio of PMM:PM was very skewed from what I typically see, so that likely was a factor too.

Going back to your question about what frustrates me about product marketing, I would say the primary thing for me is just how challenging it is to truly measure the impact of our work. There are of course a lot of metrics that we use, but they’re often very high-level and shared across so many different teams. This makes it very difficult to actually measure the efficacy of our direct PMM impact. Having personally started my career in much more analytical roles where my and my team’s performance was directly tied to certain targets, I’m always trying to find a way to better quantify PMM’s impact. If anyone has any ideas on clearer PMM metrics to use, I would love to hear them!

One of the pillars of Product Marketing at Snow Software – where I work – is that we should “Be the glue between Marketing, Product, and Sales Enablement”. 

While this sounds great, it is hard. 

A rock star PMM serves the needs of these three customers equally. However, for most of us it’s really hard to have an A+ relationship with these three groups at the same time. 

For most of us, if we have an A+ with Marketing, then we’re usually managing a B+ with both Product and Enablement. In my view, it’s helpful to focus on getting everything right with one group and understanding that while you’re doing that some gaps may occur in one of the other two. 

My frustration with this is that I want to be an A+ for everyone all the time. It's just not possible and that frankly frustrates me endlessly.

Any frustrations I have are either a reflection of my ego getting in the way, or a failure on my part to communicate expectations or demonstrate value. 

Some examples:

• Sometimes it's frustrating when sales comes up with their own messaging, and slideware. However, if they're doing that it's because what they have isn't working, or they haven't been properly enabled, or they're not convinced of the results existing content can produce. This can actually GOOD to some extent, because you're getting continuous testing of new messaging. 
• Sometimes it's frustrating when product doesn't partner closely on new launches. However, if there's a clear launch playbook to follow (that PMM can create), then collaboration becomes a necessity—just a series of accountabilities split across the two groups.
• Sometimes it's frustrating when folks at the organization want to start at the message and back into position and product: "This is how I would explain what we do—we should have this tagline!" But, if you have a plan to revisit positioning, and test messaging, the answer just becomes, "let's find out!" instead of "no that's a baseless suggestion."

I absolutely agree with the response above. I believe the "Craft of product marketing" is many companies is relegated to "content" but in order to product content, people don't realise that you have to first understand the industry, customer, problem, solution, why different, why now, how etc. Craft a solid messaging and positioning brief that senior leadership has also understood well enough, the message resonates and the pillars are aligned. Any good content writer / agency should be able to than create brochure, website content etc. PMM's can contribute to the roadmap discussion, market analysis, meeting customers, find ways to work with sales and more. The whole end-to-end of the 4 Ps of marketing. 

Hiring! My big challenge right now, to quote our head of sales, is that there's not enough of me to go around. That's not meant to be self-congratulatory--when the need for your function exceeds your resources, it's a challenge and frustration! You have to be relentless in your prioritization and accept that you will not do things that people need sometimes.

All the other challenges are the type that a person is lucky to have in their job. A lot of PMMs find that other leaders in the business want to get involved in or even takeover things they do, but it's almost always because what we do is intellectually interesting, strategically valuable, and highly visibile. Having a job that others want is a good thing in my book.

For me right now - it's that the craft of Product Marketing isn't fully realized by both people in Product Marketing and companies. There is a pretty stark difference between someone who markets products and someone who is a product marketer. I find that people who market products are heavily focused on the top of the funnel only, which comes with a lot of content/headline writing, while product marketers are looking at the entire buying process from end to end. And while I write and produce a lot of content, it's still a small portion of my overall responsibilities. In fact, the most scalable model of PMM is to not have to write everything yourself - we should be able to hand messaging briefs/guides/docs to any content writer/agency, and they can produce a smooth narrative and campaign without our review. Our value is understanding everything that goes into that content (market, buying centers, personas, buying processes, segments, verticals, etc), while also leveraging that information to help PMs make informed roadmap decisions and Sales carry the conversation throughout the sales process.

And the reason that is a frustration is in hiring/finding good talent like Marie pointed out, but also in getting other departments to see the true value that our role brings to a company. Also when talking to other PMMs from other companies, I have found it difficult to find a lot of people that really get it.