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 to be many competing priorities and the need to do more with less. My best advice for how to advocate for more resources: 1) Address the pain points of your functional leaders in sales and product. "If I had one more person, this is what I'd be able to do for you and your team..." Having 2 functions go to a C-level advocating for a full-time hire is a lot easier than 1! 2) Address the pain points of the business. "Churn is a real problem at the company and here are the initiatives that product marketing can do to support that..." Speak in terms of overall business KPI's vs. tactics or functional responsibilities 

The first PMM must provide a ton of value for the company. Generally speaking, it's value measured by impact on revenue. They also need to get along with other stakeholders (sales, product, CS, marketing). Lastly, they need to have execuitve sponsorship. That's the trifecta all PMMs should strive for.

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 establish what the roles and responsibilities of this team should be /will be so that when you hire new people, there is no ambiguity in what they are responsible for.
• Create your ideal org chart, regardless of the headcount you do have, and then prioritize the roles that are the most critical and focus on hiring those first. This will vary for each org and depend on the current priorities of your organization, but it's important to have an idea of how you want to structure the team, and how they will work with each other as well.

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 developing your PMM’s into full stack ones who can then hire and train junior ones.

If you know you will be hiring several headcount and scaling quickly, hire your senior roles first so that they can help hire your junior roles. It is harder to hire your junior role first, then put a senior person between you both. Also, if you have junior and senior JD’s (job descriptions) out at the same time, everyone is going to want to apply to the senior role.

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 might need customer research to support product development, pricing, or go-to-market support when the product is ready to launch. 
• Is there a product or feature that is struggling to get adoption? Is your sales team aware of their target customer? Are they enabled with product and feature knowledge that helps them communicate the value? 

You can start with looking for the gaps in the organization that PMMs are uniquely positioned to fill and fill them. Or, look for goals that aren't being met and try to deliver on them. Or, find a growth opporunity that the business may want to double down on and support that growth Anytime you can add value to an organziation, your team will likely scale. 

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, implement a new campaign strategy". Great, you have all of these key initiatives that you have connected with key business goals. Now, who on your team will do that? If you only have one person reporting to you, there's only so much you two can do. The next step then is to explicitly call out what you will NOT be able to do. A good idea is to put your plan on a page with items that are your high priority and items that fall "below the line", i.e. not enough resources to execute.

As you share this with your boss and the rest of the executive team at your company, one of two things will happen. You will either be told OK, we understand there are things you won't be able to do and we don't have the budget to get you more help; or you will then be told OK, we see that you need more people to help execute! 

So getting back to the question about scaling the team, I believe that if you are able to make a case for more resources and you get the budget to hire one, two, three, or more people for your team you gotta think about them in terms of what key priorities they will have so that you can look for the right skills to hire. Make sure that as your team scales your contribution to the business grows proportionally and you will be able to scale the right way.

Make sure every early hire you go for has a clear "mission" - what are you going to get from that person. What problem are you going to target them at. Once you start to get past hiring to solve specific problems - refer to my other answer about how you think about coverage of market / product intersections, that's where you start to get scale.

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 multiple buyers) or to focus on value pillars (good when the solution is more complex). That gives a blueprint for how to start to organize your team. 

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 to a technical audience?

• How is your product team structured?

The answers to these questions can help guide your PMM hiring strategy and also determine appropriate timing.

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 launches (sales content, enablement, external facing collateral). This provides PMs, Sales, and Marketing confidence in having an SME and provides the PMM a clear path of ownership.

2) For products where the functionality is less complex, but the customer language and application is nuanced, it often makes more sense to have a PMMs owning different audiences. For example, this could be a product that is used for different use cases across multiple verticals or LOBs.

3) The third way to organize is to have "internal" (most typically R&D/PM world) and "external" facing PMMs (GTM / customer facing). This approach blends a bit of the above strategies -- where you set up PMMs as product specialists with PMs/eng/UX as their primary stakeholders and other GTM specialist PMMs whose primary stakeholders are Sales/Sales Enablement/Marketing. Each still keeps the customer close -- PMM product specialists typically reference user research/beta testing while GTM specialists will have anecdotes directly from Sales, Marketing, and customers. Here, swim lanes are going to be split in a couple ways but I've seen PMM product specialists work with the R&D side to get the product/feature to be fully viable for launch (building customer profiles, presenting at internal committees with PMs at key developmental milestones, building content for GTM etc) and PMM GTM specialists working to launch the product (events, campaigns, building content for GTM, Sales enablement, etc) and beyond.

These three set-ups are what I've seen across my experience, and at the most mature organizations I've worked within, at Salesforce and Docusign, they will have a highly-matrixed version where all three exist though the department the role lives within might not be strictly PMM. However, that being said, it is often clear what is being prioritized -- Sales/GTM motions or product innovation/adoption -- with regards to the bottom line and business impact.

While there's no "one size fits all" way to scale, I recommend considering the following questions to help you prioritize what is the most important to your organization and your approach to scale:

-- How specialized is the product? How long will it take someone to full onboard to the product?

-- How specialized is the customer audience/message? Does nuanced customer messaging require someone from that industry/LOB to fully understand/empathize with the customer? Do PMs/Sales need a point person to build stronger customer perspective?

-- What resources does your organization have right now to support product development vs GTM? What is the larger priority adoption vs new sales/up-selling?

Bonus thoughtful manager considerations: What does my current PMM resource want to do more of, less of, and are there things s/he/they would like to own if things were structured different?

Hope this helps!