What is the best partnership process between product marketing and marketing when it comes to a product launch?

See answer below on “How do you think about the scope or deliverables for various launches?” Our Product Marketing org rolls into Product on the org chart, but we are every bit as part of the Marketing team too. For any launch, I think of Product Marketers as the quarterback for the rest of the marketing team. It’s the product marketer’s responsbility to be proactive and come up with the strategy, positioning, and messaging first. We usually kickoff the launch at a Marketing All-Hands. This is l ...Read More

Product Marketing should be hub and glue that brings all teams together. I usually create a brief for each product launch (see messaging framework question below to see what goes into the brief) and I think through what channels should push the feature. I use another framework for this, which clasifies features into "likely to attract new customers" vs "delights current users" and "innovating" vs "catching up". This creates 4 quadrants. Then I choose channels accordingly. I created a table where ...Read More

A critical yet simple tool that I’ve used to get cross-functional marketing teams aligned early and often is a crisply written marketing brief that outlines DRIs (directly responsible individuals) for each swimlane of work. This document can serve as the northstar for go-to-market efforts, not only distilling product context down to its core, but also detailing key elements of the overall marketing strategy such as KPIs, positioning and messaging, and the overall channel strategy. Once socialize ...Read More

Teamwork makes the dream work! But with large launches and lots of people eager to make it work, it can be confusing. I find that centering that teamwork on an agreed to “Bill of Materials” -- the list of all marketing content that will be produced - helps drive alignment, timelines, and accountability. Within that list identify who the “owner” is - the person that will drive the execution of the content and in some cases, identify key reviewers or collaborators. Set dates and call out contingen ...Read More

I would recommend first uncovering the root cause of the confusion. Is the confusion causing redundancy, disagreements over roles & responsibilities, are mismatched expectations of results? The best partnership between product marketing and marketing is when there are clear metrics that will make each team successful. Usually, this is pretty obvious for Tier 1 product launches given the level of resources and prioritization to warrant its own marketing campaign. The easiest way to outline ho ...Read More