What is your advice for someone who is a product marketing consultant for a startup, who works 90% remotely?

With the increase in remote work overall, it is becoming much more the norm for functions like PMM to be remote as well whereas even 5 years ago it was less common to have a PMM role based remotely. With any remote based role, I think making a greater effort to connect with your stakeholders becomes super important, this is especially true of PMM. So much of a PMM’s role is driving alignment across key stakeholders like Product & Sales, and it becomes more challenging if you don’t have a solid relationship to build upon. Making a greater effort to adapt your work processes, communication style, ensuring you deliver on commitments & meet expectations, over communicate and let people get to know you are all ways to build that connection!

Build confidence and context with your team. The book “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyers relates a person’s communication styles and how to gain their trust. It’s a great read for working with other cultures, and explains business norms, especially around feedback delivery, very well. Also it will help you read people and see how you can build context and trust earlier. It's key for you to be trusted so you can deliver strong results. Schedule informal "coffees" with folks so that you get time to build banter. It's important that people see you as a 3-D person, not a head on a screen.

Ask for a culture where the team mission is greater than individual success. All teammates will be incentivized to stay connected with the team and drive progress on their global initiative. For example, every person on my team has a global objective that ladders into our main mission for the 6 month goals that every region must execute a plan around. It helps drive personal impact and communication back and forth. If you feel like you're on an island, you will be on an island. Try to find ways for your work to integrate in with the teams. 

Eliminate hallway decisions. Nothing will frustrate you more than decisions being made outside of the core team meetings or in silos that you can't attend. Make sure the decisions in the meetings stick if you can.  

Meeting 3-Rs - Record meetings, Re-cap with notes and actions, Re-iterate major takeaways in other communications (team meetings, etc). Also, many folks on your team may have different language fluencies, having multiple mediums available will allow them to learn on their means. Then re-iterate. 

Once trust is built (and if you're on another timezone) ask them to meet you in your timezone. The team should switch off, even if it’s for one person. (We do it bi-weekly. Every month I either wake up at 5a or stay up until 8p for a team meeting.) It will bring empathy to the team, and allow every person to have their opinions show up when they’re at prime brain activity. 

Product Marketing is an incredibly cross-functional role, and your success depends on the success of others. So building relationships and ensuring alignment with your key cross-functional partners, like Sales, CS, Demand Gen and Product are absolutely crucial. However, in a post-pandemic world, working remotely is more of the norm and you’ll find that many of the people you work with will also be working fully or partially remote. So staying connected while remote shouldn’t be as difficult as it may have been 2+ years ago.

My advice for a mostly remote consultant is very similiar to that for any product marketer, on or offsite. First and foremost, make it a top priority to invest and build relationships with your key working partners and stakeholders. Create a regular reoccuring cadence for 1:1's or working meetings and make the time to dialogue on the vision, goals, and strategy of the things you are working on. Early on in your consultancy, ask a lot of questions so you can start to build out your own point of view and frame what it is that your stakeholders are prioritizing. I'd also recommend that early on you establish the practice of bringing insights and a point of view reguarly to your partners, so that you establish yourself as a resource and expert that they can rely on- ie. voice of customer, competitive research, messaging, etc.