What tips do you have to manage unrealistic expectations with stakeholders and say no in the right way?

I think the most important thing is to be clear with your key cross functional stakeholders at the top of the quarter what your OKRs or key priorities are. If your company doesn't have an OKR process that are "waterfalled" (aka company priorities inform --> dept priorities inform--> function priorities info --> your individual priorities) you can still set goals for yourself for the quarter.

I share these with all key stakeholders at the top of a quarter as a way to facilitate trade off conversations to outline what are the most important/urgent things to solve. This helps to reduce the number of asks that come in-quarter that may be unrealistic. If you're proactive about what your goals are, people are less likely to ask you to change them.

However, markets change, customers change, new events happen, new metrics show new problems, - its always good to be open to changes to your priorities in the quarter. But having initial goals helps you have a 'trade off' conversation vs. just adding new priorities to your list.

Product marketing gets a ton of requests from other teams -- it's because we're very cross functional and on the positive side, valuable! However, you should always be prioritizing impact and quality over ad hoc work and quantity. Your time and skill set are valuable, so always protect it.

Here are some ways to manage unrealistic expectations, move aways from ad hoc work, and get comfortable saying no:

• Managing unrealistic expectations: This depends on the situation and whether it's because the stakeholder doesn't understand your role/responsibilities or doesn't respect them. In the first case, whenever you start a new role or even if you've been at a org for a while, it's always good to remind people your goals and priorities. Set up a call and walk them through your plan (do it annually or quarterly if needed). Welcome their feedback and share how what you're working on will support their goals and team. If it's the second case, remind them what you're focused on and why. Tie your work to corporate objectives. Be willing to flex, if based on the conversation you decide something else should take priority. But also stand your ground if you know your priorities are right. Communicate to your stakeholders on why these are top priorities and bring qualitative and quantitative data to help back it up.

• Moving away from ad hoc work: The endless Slack messages and requests can eat away at focus time and projects with larger impact. Several ways my team and I manage this are -- if it's an ask that we have current content for, I direct them to Seismic, our enablement/content platform that hosts everything. There's not reason you need to find it for them if it's there. If it's a piece of content we don't have or needs updating -- we direct them to our PMM Request Form, where they fill out the request, reason, and impact and we determine whether we execute on it or not based on current priorities.

• Get comfortable with saying no: This is where having goals and priorities outlined upfront is helpful because you can always point them back to that. If you're uncomfortable telling them why you need to prioritize other work at the moment, you can say something along the lines of "I have several urgent priorities I'm working on at the moment for ___, let me see if this aligns with one of those" or "I will need to align with my manager on whether we should shift priorities for this request, and I will get back to you." This gives you some time to think about how to approach it without coming off curt. In addition, if you have a PMM Request Form, direct them to that form.