When building a team, how would you ideally split responsibilities? By product line? By PMM function (CI, enablement, GTM, etc)?

DO IT ALL -> FUNCTIONAL -> BY PRODUCT -> GRID It depends on the size of your team and the maturity of the company. Typically what I have seen is that -  With 1-2 PMMs - it's "do it all" approach. These PMMs take on all responsibilities - Positioning, Messaging, Launches, Product GTM, Competitive, and Market Intel. However, that is doable at that size of the company beacuse PMM counterparts are doing the same. Sales will be a small team, the sales team won't wait for sales enablement to ...Read More

I love this question – and I am going to take a different approach to my answer here. One of the things I think product marketers can struggle with is responsibility versus authority. To be effective in their role, product marketers must be highly collaborative, lead and influence people who don’t report to them, and engage a wide group of stakeholders – especially for large go-to-market moments. I like to structure my teams to give product marketers the most autonomy possible, so they can have ...Read More

My ideal PMM team is split on both dimensions. There are vertical PMMs who are aligned by product/segment/audience. Then there are ‘horizontal’ PMMs who lead launches, CI, enablement, campaigns, etc. supporting all products and audiences In reality, you may not have the resources to build this ‘ideal’ team. In this case, focus on ‘majors’ and ‘minors’. Maybe someone is owning a new, fledgling product as their ‘Major’ while also covering enablement for all products as their ‘Minor’ If you are tru ...Read More

PMM Org design really depends on a few different variables. You want to consider: the maturity of your product You GTM strategy How your cross-functional teams are structured What the biggest company objectives are for the next 12 months If you have multiple products or a complex, mature or sophisticated product/platform: you might consider aligning closely to the product org If you have dual GTM motions: Product-led and Sales-led: you might consider splitting responsibilities that way If you wo ...Read More

This is a great question and I would say one that depends entirely on what your product line is comprised of. Larger SaaS with multiple products: For a larger company that has multiple product lines, splitting PMMs up by product line is going to be the most successful. This will allow individuals to become SMEs in their area while covering the scope of the role from end to end. Of course, if you're able to have multiple PMMs supporting each product-line (which can often be the case) you can star ...Read More

I won’t say there is an ideal way to split responsibilities, it will depends on a number of variables related to the current situation of your company (size of the company,  number of products and general capabilities of your workforce) The two ways you refered to are the most common ones and each can work depending on the situation, here some ideas that can help you choose: Product line structure: Could work better with companies that serve many products and that have highly knowledgeable speci ...Read More