What are tips for maintaining open lines of communication amongst other product and marketing priorities?
At HackerOne we have open lines of communications across teams, everyone has visibility into each department's OKRs and we have a weekly company-wide AMAs where anyone can ask anything about the business to any employee. The AMAs are also structured with a weekly agenda outlining 2-4 topics that will be presented. We implement bi-weekly meetings with functional teams so everyone is clear on priorities. We've also implemented "squad meetings" where in a given time there are key stakeholders reponsible for a given project (i.e. product launch, webinar porgram, Fed GTM, etc.). Then if there are specific questions across the company, squad leads can address them or defer to others in the team to address the questions/or inquiries. This keeps the comunications lines not only open but provides visibility across the org.
Time and resource allocation helps me think about this. If I know I have 40 hours of work already lined up and a new project pops up, it helps me to talk to product about when we'll be able to support a new workstream if I can detail whats currently open. That helps us jointly prioritize so that we can spend time on P0s, hopefully get to P1s, and keep P2s alive until there is time. Having a running document (deck with project plans or spreadsheet/gantt chart) helps to visualize this. Though the conversation here is probably appropriate at an equal level. So PMM team lead can chat about resource availability with PM team lead and IC PMM can chat about current projects with IC PM. This as a matrix convo across levels in different functions feels like an easy way for participants to stop paying attention.
Ensure you are part of the product roadmap discussions - weekly / bi-weekly meetings. If there is a "gate" process for each stage of development, have a seat at the table for each gate with a "vote".
Invite product management to marketing meetings.
Open/monthly catchups
Have them review messaging and walk them through content strategy, time it takes to create content and marketing budgets etc for launches, campaigns
Create awareness that Marketing is also aligned with sales by creating open /regular cadence with sales leaders.
Newsletters / email updates on new marketing content available
Just a few quick ideas.
Here are a couple of the ways we ensure that PDE and Product Marketing are always aligned:
1. Product marketing is included in all of the long term roadmap discussion meetings with each PDE team.
2. Each product marketer has a product/solution area they focus on and set up either monthly or quarterly meetings to go over marketing material alignment and GTM work.
3. The Product Marketing team sits in every stakeholder review each month to see and hear about the status of what is being developed during the release, expectations and potential hiccups.
4. We are the voice of the PDE team for the entire Marketing group, and report back in weekly meetings to the broader marketing department to make sure PR, events, creative, etc. are all aligned and informed.