What is product marketing's role in a product-led growth company?

The focus is on product education and differentiation, essentially helping your customers understand why they should continuously choose your product over others throughout the customer lifecycle — from acquisition through retention. Without Sales as a touch point, PMMs need to figure out how to communicate product value through various touch points and ensure messaging stays consistent. You likely will be leveraging a lot of different communication channels (e.g. landing pages, email sequences, in-product communications, content, help center) so it’s crucial both the narrative and experience are consistent across different formats. PMMs should also work more closely with Product to design the self-serve and upgrade experience, making sure you are aligned on your knowledge of the audience and the customers’ product onboarding path, and tailoring the in-product experience to each persona. When your customers get into your product, they need to be able to derive your value proposition through interaction. To get to that, PMMs at a PLG company need to be intimately familiar with the product features.

I try to think of our role as Contextual Educators. We’re responsible for providing the best first impression through content and being able to communicate the value of our product well enough to encourage someone to sign up or start a trial. That means testing messaging at scale across multiple audiences, evaluating and owning onboarding email sequences, and analyzing funnel metrics to update/build the ideal onboarding flow to ensure a new or existing customer is successful in achieving their jobs to be done.

But our role doesn’t end at conversion, we need to educate continuously. I work closely with our business operations and data teams to find segments of customers that are using the product in certain ways that indicate they may not know about newer capabilities. Based on that research, we figure out how to engage with those customers through channels like email or in-app messaging to let them know there’s a better way.

PMM focuses on landing and expanding while Sales focuses on helping those customers scale and standardize on your service.

In a product-led growth company, PMM needs to prove the product value and push for the next steps - like getting contact and lead information, securing a demo, or setting up a meeting for example. 

With that in mind, always make sure your marketing assets & content are putting the customer first instead of boasting about features and functions. It's easy to fall into that trap. Know that your content is likely going to be the customer's first time interacting with the product rather than a conversation with a sales rep right off the bat. Their success is your success.