What's the best way to split up responsibilities in a Product Marketing team within an Enterprise company?

I've seen a bit of everything when it comes to the split of Product Marketing teams. At some companies it is done by product line, at others by industry, and some by customer segment. And I don't think there's a 'best' way to do it, honestly.

It all depends on what makes sense for your company. I do think you can ask the following questions to get enough data to make good judgement call on this:

1. Do you have one or more products? And if more than one product, do each have their own distinct buyer and user personas?

2. Is your product(s) horizontal, cutting across all industries the same, or vertical, i.e. different use cases for different industries?

3. Do companies of all sizes use your product? Do you target the SMB and the Enterprise space? Do you plan to?

4. Are your buyer personas the same across regions? Are your competitors the same? Are the needs of your users and the use cases the same or they change based on geo location?

I think that getting data to answer these questions will help you make an informed decision. Also, the needs of your company may change, in fact I guarantee they will, and you will have to adjust how you organize the PMM team to match the new goals and growth targets for the business. 

One other thing to keep in mind, is that as the owner of the Go-To-Market, this is something you should be always thinking about. If the PMM team organized in such a way that is helping our company reach our target buyers and grow? What, if anything, would boost our growth and is modifying how PMMs are currently structured one way of accelerating it?

It depends on a few different factors: 

• How big is the PMM team? 
• How are other teams (sales and product) organized?
• What are the most important business needs and priorities?
• What are your team members good at (if they have already been hired)?

Something else to consider is how you want to balance the type of work individuals on the team are doing. For example, many people enjoy having one or two areas of "expertise" where they are owning a project or program and can demonstrate progress over time. If this is an important element to keep the team engaged, but they are always working on small short term projects, that might be less fulfilling for them. 

Here was my experience at Lyra Health, where I was the first PMM and helped scale the team to 13+. 

•  1 PMM - I did everything as well as covered other roles such as event marketing, customer marketing, sales enablement, and corporate marketing :) 
•  Small team - When we first expanded the PMM team, each team member supported particular sales teams (we organized sales by account size), and on top of that, each team member was an expert on certain products. This was manageable with a smaller product suite. 
•  Med team - As our sales team grew and our product team grew, we grew our PMM team as well. This time around, we split the team up. One PMM team (Product PMM) focused on our products and services. Each team member in this group owns certain product categories and strategic product initiatives. Another team called GTM PMM focused on continuing to align on our sales and partnership teams. We also established a market research team within PMM to support across PMM and the broader organization. 

When working in an Enterprise company's Product Marketing team, it is important to have a clear understanding of how to split up responsibilities. One approach is to divide PMMs (Product Marketing Managers) based on the products they handle. This allows each PMM to focus solely on their product and become an expert in it. Another approach is to split PMMs based on regions. This can be useful if the company operates in multiple regions and requires localized marketing efforts.

Alternatively, PMMs can be split up based on projects they work on. This approach can be useful if there are several projects running simultaneously, as it allows each PMM to focus on a specific project and give it their full attention. Another approach is to divide PMMs based on teams, which can be beneficial if the company has multiple teams each working on different aspects of the product.

Ultimately, the best approach may be a mixture of these methods. It is important to consider the needs of the company and the product when deciding on the best way to divide responsibilities within the Product Marketing team.

I've always structured my PMM teams around customer segments/audiences (a "buyer back" approach), which is an outside-in vs. an inside-out view that better aligns to sales and is less subject to product-first, inside-the-building myopia. This structure forces your teams to take a customer view first - what problems am I trying to solve? what are my goals? what am I doing today and what's lacking? - that will provide useful guardrails for messaging, launches and campaign design. Also, this also encourages more industry and role-specific empathy and understanding. If, for example, your company sells primarily to Financial Services companies and the Federal Government, those are two totally different types of customers who talk differently, think of things in different ways, hang out in different watering holes and even buy differently. If your audiences are more segmented by roles, for example, Cybersecurity folks and DevOps engineers share a lot of the same technical knowledge but have real, meaningful differences (including rolling into different budgets).

This is an evolution depending on the complexity and scope of the Product and GTM motion. But usually it follows this path (additive):

1. Aligned to individual products
2. Aligned to product groupings (solutions, use cases, needs, JTBD etc)
3. Aligned to customer segments
4. Aligned to industries
5. Aligned to regions
6. Adding in supporting functions--> competitive, AR