What’s your biggest tip for embedding PMM into product teams?

To embed PMM into product teams, PMM should strive to do the following:

1. Build strong relationships with product partners by ensuring they know your objectives are aligned and demonstrating value add from the get-go. If you are not top of mind for your product partners, you won't get a seat at the table. So, set up those regular touchbases with your product partners, proactively bring data and customer insights to the table and raise your hand to support the team whenever you can. 
2. Act like an equal owner across the product development process and not just things that seem related to marketing. It's often easy to step back and assume certain discussions are not relevant to marketing but in order to be fully embedded into product teams, PMM should be equally invested in product decisions and discussions. This is not to say that PMM should be providing input on topics they have no understanding of but as the voice of the customer and as an invested partner, PMM should act like a fully vested owner and not limit their input to only marketing-related discussions. 

The details of embedding a Product Marketer into a product team will look very different depending on the size, type, and structure of your company. There are two information flows Product Marketers can use to build collaboration with their Product partners:

1. Be the voice of your customers. I strongly believe that Product Marketers should work to be customer experts. The common gap for product teams is understanding the social and emotional jobs-to-be-done of their customer. Product Marketers should bring this to the table in interactions with their product teams (not just by handing over a persona document).
2. Collaborate with product teams to answer the question: “How do we educate our audiences about this?”. The “this” in that statement could be any new development or change that would benefit your customers or prospects to know. More often that not, I use this exact question to start the conversation. Not only will this jump start the process for designing campaigns and content, but it will also create a frame of reference for what Product Marketing does.

Product is so important to Product Marketing, it is so important to establish those relationships early on. Schedule 1:1 with your direct product contact or with the full product team. Make sure you have open lines of communication, really try to dig in and understand the products they are working on. Partner with them to understand who your customer is and show a genuine interst in what they are doing.