Should a product marketing manager be a SaaS startup's first hire, and why?

I agree that a product marketing-minded person is very helpful in the early days of a startup. PMMs tend to be good generalists because we own messaging and go to market planning. We also need to deeply understand the market, product, and customer base. In the early days as the first marketer, you need to not only make the plan but deliver the plan completely on your own. From writing content to creating emails and ads, it’s all on you. Having a strategic mindset for customer needs, market conte ...Read More

PMM experience do make for great first marketing hires, especially in B2B. They tend to have a broad T-shape skill set. Depending on your goals and business, try to understand where your product marketing hire has "gone deep". They will likely have some focus on 2-3 of the following: packaging and pricing, content, core messaging and positioning, sales enablement, product-led demand gen, marketing research and segmentation (not best profile for first hire). Profiles I look for... Product marketi ...Read More

I wouldn't recommend a PMM first, specifically. The first hire should be someone who can help to test and then execute effective methods of generating demand. This could be a PMM with demand generation interest and experience, or it could be a demand gen/growth marketer with a strong understanding of product. Most important is that the first hire understands what it means to be a first hire, and have the right flexibility. You need to hire in the middle, someone who can grow a team under them an ...Read More

A SaaS startup's first marketing hire should be a generalist who can wear multiple hats across different functions of marketing and has a founder mentality to move fast. Whether you hire someone who is more senior or a junior executor will depend on the skills of the founding team, the size of the marketing budget and the playbook you want to execute. Assuming your startup has reached some level of product-market-fit, you'll want to hire someone who has digital marketing experience and knows how ...Read More

Whether someone with a PMM title should be the initial marketing hire depends on a lot of things. However, I will say this: Absolutely, positively, without a doubt, someone with strong PMM skills should be one of the first non-technical hires, regardless of what their title will be. This person knows what questions to ask in order to ensure that you are selling the right thing, to the right audience, and conducting the right primary research to validate that.  Case in point: I did product market ...Read More