What's the earliest stage a startup should consider hiring a Product Marketing Manager?

The two startups I joined as the first PMM were ~100 employees and both were for technical software products. In this space, my perspective is the founding and technical teams should be maniacally focused on building for a target customer or segment. Once they’ve established those early adopters, PMM can be the one to help that product-market-fit scale to the next customer or next segment. I think PMMs are more impactful at a smaller organization, simply because you own a bigger portion of the G ...Read More

At most startups, the business founder is the first product marketer. This makes sense bc the founder knows the problem deeply, as well as the market, the product vision, and the opportunity ahead, and is willing to do the work to get those first sales across the line. The challenge is, knowing the landscape and the challenges is VERY different from knowing how to action your knowledge into playbooks, so very quickly, not having PMM to scale the story and GTM process causes problems. What I typi ...Read More

Startups need to hire product marketing managersbutwhen hiring for PMM roles in a high-growth environment, it's critical to pay attention to the PMM's soft skills. My favorite must-have soft skills for PMM in a fast-growing startup:💛 Hight user empathy.PMM should absolutely love talking to users. In most startups, personas, ICPs, value props, messaging, product features need to be constantly improved. This is normal to search for the best users to provide your features, with the best value prop ...Read More

I'm biased of course, but I believe PMMs should be one of your first marketing hires. The insight PMMs can bring in terms of product-market fit, positioning and messaging are just as valuable, if not moreso, at a smaller org as in a big one. Having a PMM early on will help you set the foundations for the future, and help ensure you have the right product, the right target audience, and them messaging that's going to resonate with them before you start spending a ton of money and resources on mar ...Read More

Earliest stage: soon as you have a product in customers hands, you could use product marketing. That's not always realistic... sales, engineering, product resources take priority. And there's always that question in leadership, why do you need PMM so early if you have product management? But the ealier you have someone learning, building a knowledge base of customer insights that'll help the GTM teams excel like bringing new features to your early adopters, establishing an understanding of where ...Read More

A PMM can contribute to an organization that has already found an element of product-market fit, but it'd be important not to confuse them to be the first product marketer.  Often, the first 'product marketer' in an early stage company is the CEO, Head of Sales or Head of Marketing, depending on who wears which hat.  Subsequently a PMM hire is important when the company has 'nailed it' and now wants to 'scale it'. It could be above a $1M, $2M, or $5M run rate. The key thing is to establish a som ...Read More

For an early-stage company, it is of the utmost importance to differentiate between hiring a product marketing title and hiring product marketing skills. Regarding someone with that title, the answer is a universal: It depends. On lots of things. And I'll leave it at that. The skills question is more interesting, given how often people (seemingly) answer it wrong. The right answer is: Yesterday. The most fundamental thing that product marketers do is absorb information and use it to build busine ...Read More