What functional work do you prioritize as a PMM? Anything you should NOT focus on initially?

A lot of this depends on the size, stage, and goals of the company, but here's how I suggest approaching prioritization. 

Create your PMM Charter

With the input of your boss and other leaders in the company, you'll first want to define what PMM looks like at your org. This helps set the guardrails for what product marketing is repsonsible for at your org and what your main objectives are. This will take into consideration what the top priorities are for company leadership.

Set out on a priority seeking mission

In your first month or so, you have the opportunity to have a ton of 1:1 conversations as a new employee. During these conversations, I ask everyone if they have any priorities or asks for product marketing. I use all of this to create a master list of all the internal priorities/projects that people would "like" my team to focus on.

I also like to do a content audit, focusing on all of the collateral that's leveraged throughout the sales cycle. I'll map the existing assets to the sales process and try to uncover gaps, or things that need updating.

After all of the steps above, you'll likely have a sizeable list of competing projects that you need to prioritize. Some factors to include in how you weight each project:

• What impact can this have on revenue and how soon?
• Is it tied to an existing deadline, like an upcoming product launch?
• Who is requesting it? Is the CEO asking for this, or is it a one-off request from a sales rep?
• Does it fall within your charter, or is it outside the scope of product marketing at your org?
• Where does it fit into your strategic objectives for that year, quarter, etc.

I would map this all out in a spreadsheet or project board and circulate it between a few key stakeholders in the company, ie. your boss, Head of Product, Head of Sales, Head of CS, the CEO, etc. You could even send them the raw list and ask them to rank it in terms of priority.

Using this feedback I'd create your final, prioritized project list. They key is to then make it available to everyone in your company so everyone can see where things fall and why.

Great question. I would tackle the PMM foundations first:

• Personas

• ICP

• Messaging Hierarchy

• Launch process with product

• Sales enablement needs

• Relationships internally and externally

• VoC work

What NOT to focus on?

• Items that don't map to company goals or priorities

• Shiny objects

• High-budget/glossy requests

I think the hardest part of being in PMM is prioritizing given we sit at the intersection of so many business lines - so make sure you keep guardrails on the most impactful tasks and map to outcomes. We are strategic players not a service desk!

PMMs often play a jack-of-all-trades role, so it's hard to say what things PMM should absolutely not do. Especially at earlier stage companies, PMMs are often brought in early for their ability to get close to the product strategy and business goals and translate them to effective GTM strategies. This can mean taking on audience research, site design and development, events, community management, and so on.

That said, I think it's typically least efficient/effective to have PMMs focus on the ongoing management and optimization of always-on channels like paid ads or brand awareness campaigns. It's important for PMMs to define the approach, targeting, and messaging, and run through the first few cycles. But after this, the time, focus, and expertise required will effectively mean the PMM is fully operating in a demand gen/channel marketing function, and will take away their capacity from doing core PMM work like competitive analysis, crafting narratives, etc. leaving a gap between Product/Eng and Marketing.