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

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.

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.

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. 

I would not say it is wildly different from a PMM's role in a more traditional sales-led company -- you still need a deep understanding of your customer, market, and product. You still are partnering closely with your product and demand gen teams to drive pipeline and support sales. However, you may have different channels for activation of those messages: unlike a traditional sales-led company, where you (hopefully!) are spending a substantive portion of your time on field enablement, you will now need to leverage direct channels (likely via your digital / demand gen teams) to help prospects progress through their journey.

To be successful, spend even more time understanding your customer's communities -- what are their digital 'watering holes'? Where do they go for sources of insight? Ideally these are already on your radar, but with PLG motions, you rely more heavily on the product selling itself, which means you want to understand exactly which problems each prospect wants to solve, work with demand gen to surface your solutions in those relevant spaces, and, when they land in your product, ensure they can see how to achieve that mission.

In a product-led company, the role of a PMM encompasses the following:

• Subject matter expert

• GTM specialist

• Growth marketer

The emphasis of PMM shifts from bringing products to market to guiding the Product team in creating an experience that drives revenue.

While you may collaborate closely with the marketing team to generate leads for sign-up pages, the primary objective is to deliver substantial value to customers within their initial interactions.

As a PMM, your responsibilities are adaptable, allowing you to concentrate on the aspect of PMM that requires the most support. In a product-led growth (PLG) environment, the primary focus is on rapidly delivering value and ensuring a deep understanding of customer needs, with effective communication of this information internally.

You should proactively interact with customers, conduct tests for sign-up, onboarding, and adoption campaigns, and collaborate with the Product team to implement improvements targeting key metrics. While this may deviate slightly from traditional PMM responsibilities, you are still leveraging the same skill set.

Product marketing in a product-led growth company plays a pivotal role in aligning the product with market needs. This means encouraging product adoption, stickiness, and expansion with compelling user experiences and driving growth through seamless buyer experiences.

This means that PMMs:

• Still need to be deeply familiar with the market and users - ensure that the product aligns with the customer needs and market trends.

• Align and develop GTM strategies (e.g. defining target segments, pricing, messaging) with the self-service nature of the product

• Contribute to the development of user onboarding flows, by communicating the product's value prop and guiding them to their first 'aha' moment

• Create concise and easily digestible messaging - even more so in PLG orgs

• Create educational and engaging content that enables users to self-serve

• Work on strategies to keep users engaged & drive upsells/cross-sells with customer success programs, targeted offers, and email campaigns

• Need to understand user data deeply to measure their efforts

Depending on the culture of the org, PMMs may be involved in user advocacy and evangelism - identifying power users and promoting them.