What's the most effective way to scale a Product Marketing team beyond the first Product Marketing Manager?

The first 2 PMM's are going to wear many hats and serve many masters. There's unfortunately no way around that given the breadth of the function. The biggest tension is striking the balance between supporting product, supporting sales, and establishing an operational cadence for go-to-market (GTM) within the organization. I believe that a pod of 3-4 PMMs is really when the team can start hitting its stride by working across insights, GTM, and sales enablement. Until then, there are always going ...Read More

To scale any team you want to do it thoughtfully, and have a clear plan in place before you go on a hiring binge.  Have the right foundation in place before you bring on more PMMs. For instance, have the basic tools or processes in place because once you scale your team, it's much harder to define those. For instance, a GTM process, a basic messaging framework, etc. You also want to make sure that the role of PMM in your org is clearly defined and communicated throughout. It's important to first ...Read More

I believe that adding more people to your team needs to follow the needs of the business. This means making sure you can break down the goals or OKRs that you, as a PMM leader, is responsible for and outlining the key initiatives that will help you achieve them. Part of this exercise is to also identify what you can and what you cannot do with the current team. For example, you may list out things such as "create competitor battle cards, conduct win/loss analysis, write 3 new whitepapers, implem ...Read More

One effective way to scale a PMM team is to understand what the business needs and align PMMs to support those needs or goals. But, what a business needs can range from gaps in employee skill sets to stalling revenue growth.  For example, Is your business investing in entering a new vertical? Maybe they need PMM support in understanding the market dynamics and consumer behaviors in that industry or space  Is your Product team building new feature bundles or entirely new product suites? They migh ...Read More

Hire contractors to fill in gaps as they pop up and if they are rockstars and you find yourself with open head count, convert them to full time. Know what your weaknesses are and hire PMMs who balance those. Hire PMMs with different superpowers – you want a well rounded team. PMM teams are in constant reorg pending what our marketing, product or sales teams are doing, given we support them all. You will want PMMs with different skill sets to be able to dive in quickly when needed. Spend time dev ...Read More

This depends a lot on the companies business goals. In the beginning you'll be on the hook to support the GTM with assets so focus on content creation. It's pointless trying to be too strategic in the early stages. Look to the exec team for priorities and focus on the most important use cases and value drivers your GTM needs help with.  As the team grows think about the best way to support your messaging and positioning. Is if easier to focus on the personas for your product (good when there are ...Read More

PMM should be scaled in a way that makes sense for the business. Some questions that you can think about to help guide your growth plan: Is your business B2B, B2C, or somewhere in between? Is your GTM motion inbound, outbound, or both? Do you benefit from product-led growth, sales-led growth, or both? Do you have one target audience or multiple target audiences? Do you have one product or multiple products? Is there a difference in personas between your buyers and your users? Are you marketing t ...Read More

When growing out my teams, it's easiest to look at what problems need addressing, but also the different ways PMM orgs can be organized. Every company I've worked in has approached PMM differently based 1) how much of a product expert PMMs need to be, 2) how much support customer audiences need, 3) how your GTM teams are organized.1) For highly-technical products, it often makes more sense to have a single PMM own everything from product roadmapping with PM all the way through owning the launche ...Read More