When building a new PMM organization, what are the most important things to focus on when getting started?

Two things:  Build company narrative: If you are just starting the PMM function in the company, this would be one of the first things to focus on. Most likely the existing narrative was built out by the founding team but bringing expert perspective and start building out a differentiated narrative for your company. A good framework is a 3 Why funnel. I recall reading a blog about 3 Whys funnel (Apologies that I don't recall who wrote it). Why the problem you are solving is critical, Why they sho ...Read More

IMPACT. So often product marketing teams get snowed under by trying to do all the things. They focus on completeness. They want to have every box checked. But they have no idea if any of it is working. Every other team in the business will have endless needs - endless requests - of PMM, but you have to get good at calling out what metric you're focused on and how you think you can ladder into it. Get good at talking to the metrics of the business and get good at thinking about how what you do la ...Read More

It definitely depends on the company stage/goals. So I start there - get alignment from exec leadership on what the company North Stars are and begin building a crawl, walk, run strategy to cover departmental growth. In parallel to strategic alignment with leadership/executive team - you must, I stress MUST, complete listening tours. Meet with your customers Meet with your prospects Meet with your sales team Meet with your customer success team Meet with your product team Listen to how they talk ...Read More

To build a new product marketing team or strategy for a company, can be challenging, especially if this is the first time you are taking this journey. Here a some tips that could help navigate this process Identify and Educate your main stakeholders: It might sound silly, but you will need to do some teaching if you want anyone to buy into your idea. Explain preferably with business cases and examples how product marketing teams had successfully created value for other companies in the past. The ...Read More

In my experience, the most important thing to do to support focus is assess organizational alignment and capabilities when you arrive at the decision to build a PMM team. It's not very common for organizations to invest heavily in building whole Product Marketing teams, but when they do, it's to support growth through more effective market expansion or better profitability. The trick is to understand what the real objective is, which means getting to the heart of the corporate strategy. You need ...Read More