What are the key strategies to start with if I am the first Product Marketing Manager in a rapidly scaling-up business?

There are a few things you'll want to establish and get alignment on right out of the gates. 

1. Establish a tiering framework. Define what a large product launch looks like (tier 1) and what would qualify a product / feature to be a tier 1 - and what activities would be aligned to it. Do the same for the smaller launch tiers as well, and make sure your product counterparts are aligned. This will help set expectations and ensure launches are aligned to specific gaols. 

2. Define the jobs your product enables customers to do (JTBD). This will help define positioning and messaging and audience - all the things that are essential for bringing your product to market. It will help how you tell your product story. 

3. Build a relationship with your product org. Find out the ways in which you can bring value - market insights, competitive teardowns, be the voice of the customer, represent sales orgs, etc. As the first PMM, these are some foundations you can lay to help scale more effeciently. 

As the first PMM in any company you have a critical role, particularly because you will be under a lot of pressure to report growth from your area. 

There are 3 thing I would make sure to have as a baseline for my strategy:

1. Know your customers.  Sounds obvious, but it is also necessary as a first step to understand your customer needs and pain points. I would suggest spending enough resources in this part, it is usually overlooked but getting this part right could mean a lot of savings in time and money for the next steps.

2. Create a strong Value Proposition. It is another basic but necessary step. You must be able to explain in 2 sentences what makes your product unique from competitors and what value you are bringing to consumers. Pro Tip: don’t overthink it, make it clear, concise and easy to understand.

3. Define a clear go-to-market strategy: make sure to have a step by step plan on how to get your product to your right target. Include: pricing, messaging, paid media strategy, organic social media, and channel distribution if applicable.

As a new PMM in a rapidly expanding business, it's important to prioritize the following:

1. Build the foundation: Lay the groundwork by conducting thorough market and customer research. This is the key to refining the positioning of the product and crafting compelling messaging that resonates with the target audience.

2. Focus on "one-to-many" deliverables: Leverage your skills to create scalable marketing programs and strategies that can effectively reach and engage with various stakeholders simultaneously as the business expands.

3. Ruthlessly prioritize: Recognize the importance of prioritizing tasks. It's unrealistic to tackle everything at once. By prioritizing, you can ensure that the most critical initiatives are given the attention they deserve.

4. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good: In this rapid-growth scenario, you don't have the luxury of time. Quick and dirty solutions will often suffice. It's important to set expectations with your manager and key stakeholders, but you'll often realize that good is good enough.

I think just leaning in to the business and key stakeholders and ensuring you have clarity on their priorities is a really key part of getting started. What is the business trying to accomplish and where do you see gaps from a PMM standpoint? You need to find the right balance of what they might expect from product marketing with where you think strategies are needed that would benefit the business in the most impactful way. Over time this can help build trust/confidence from other leaders and open up opportunities to ideally add more PMM's but also to show what is possible with more resources! Be sure to get some 'wins on the board' to help build the foundations first. These wins might come in the way of tactical things (product decks, 1-pagers, webinars etc) but these will help lay the building blocks to more 'strategic' items later down the track.