What is your framework to lead and communicate what Product Marketing is?

I like to start by defining what is Product Marketing, what we care about, and why it matters.

What is Product Marketing?

Product Marketing lives and breathes everything surrounding our target audiences. We deeply understand and empathize with audiences internally and externally, creating differentiated positioning based on our products and messaging that resonates. Product Marketers are masters of storytelling, strategy, and structure. We quarterback across product, marketing, sales, and other teams to drive a cohesive and winning approach to customers and the market.

What does Product Marketing care about?

Initially, we care about whether the messaging we provide to the organization and market is resonating. That includes looking at messaging adoption, clarity, and effectiveness.

Ultimately, we care about whether we’re driving revenue and customer success for the business. We particularly monitor win rates to understand whether our positioning is effective. We also care about how messaging impacts lead generation, product adoption, and customer retention and upsell.

Why does this matter?

A strong Product Marketing function drives clear and consistent messaging and a GTM approach that’s more likely to win in the market.

This is a really hard question to answer because PMM differs at every company and also in many ways PMM is the most valuable and least understood function in tech. I've seen Venn diagrams that show that PMM serves as an interface between product and sales, organizational charts that have PMM in product, marketing, and even once design. Across the three startups where I stood up PMM as a function, talking to friends at other companies and now at Adobe, I have learned that the best way to lead and communicate what PMM is requires showing not telling. Some ways I've done this in my first 90 days are:

• A competitive landscape teardown with insights and recommendations

• A positioning workshop across functions

• Synthesizing customer conversations for product and executive teams

• Executing a small launch and driving results

I welcome examples in the comments for ways others have shown what PMM is.

• A simple presentation is a good starting point to articulate who you are and what are your priorities.

  • What are the business goals -> what are shared OKRs -> what metrics demonstrate value?

• OKRs are instrumental in gaining clarity across product, sales and marketing.

  • Every quarter end, sit down with key stakeholders - sales, product n marketing and align on the next quarter's focus and priorities

crafting the right PMM OKR