What are the biggest surprises when going from a company where product marketing was established to one where you have to establish product marketing?

One of the biggest surprises is that the vast majority of people at smaller companies have little idea of what product marketing is. Your new colleagues may have never worked directly — or even indirectly — with product marketers before. This means that you as the new head of PMM have a much bigger leadership challenge ahead of you than when working at a larger company that likely has had a fairly defined PMM function for years. Further complicating the challenge is that product marketing looks ...Read More

I’ve been the first PMM at two startups now. It's been pleasantly surprising how impactful some of the basic PMM tools are when applied for the first time, and how quickly you can see their impact. Things as foundational as customer interviews, launch trackers, and announcement tiers have an oversized impact at a company that’s likely never done it before. While these were likely table-stakes in your previous roles, don’t underestimate how much they help discipline and quality to the team's GTM ...Read More

It's not so much surprises, as it is the scope of opportunities to improve sales and marketing effectiveness. PMM generally brings stability and consistency to messaging, so where I have built the organization from the ground up, PMM has played a crucial role in helping Sales better replicate success and scale revenue. The website often needs a redesign to realign with crisper positioning and messaging, Demand Gen may need to be redirected on who (and where) they are targeting, and you'll almost ...Read More

The biggest surprise is that even though product marketing may not exist as a function, the company is already doing product marketing: launching new products, pricing and packaging, creating messaging and positioning, etc. The challenge is that this work likely doesn't have a clear owner and is distributed across many teams.  As the first product marketing hire at Sourcegraph, I spent time in the beginning meeting with product, sales, engineering, marketing, design, etc. to understand what had ...Read More

I remain surprised by how many digital professionals or companies with outsized product footprints are still unfamiliar with the specialty of "product marketing." When your the first hire of this kind, I'd recommend being prepared to talk about the scope of product marketing and take the opportunity to help crystalize where your initial focus area will be. It's also helpful to walk through the types of projects and impacts that you've worked on in the past and how they can translate or be depoly ...Read More

I've had to build out product marketing at both a large organization (4,000 employees) and a growing organization (150 employees), and I would say the biggest surprise/challenge is creating the right working relationships.  Product: Defining who owns what since PMs may have been managing many of the product marketing activities themselves. Another challenge is communication and visibility. It seems fairly obvious to bring in product marketing early into the development lifecycle but when a compa ...Read More

My experience was actually the other way round - I went from a company where I was the first PMM and helped establish the PMM team, to a company where there was already an established PMM team (and PMM already had 'a seat at the table'). Some of the learnings from that experience: It's much easier to create effective messaging for a launch when you were involved in the development of the feature in the first place (i.e. giving input on the customer pain points, inputting into scoping decisions e ...Read More