Consumer Product Marketing

What an exciting opportunity this is for you! I’m thrilled that you’ve earned this chance. When I joined Hims & Hers, I was in this exact position where I got to build out the Product Marketing team from scratch. It was one of the most valuable learning experiences of my career so far. Your list of questions is great. If you’re able to get through all of these in the time you have allotted with the founders, that’s fantastic. You might find that the answers to these can be substantive, though, so you may need to prioritize the highest leverage questions that will give you the most inform...

1. What is your mandate for product marketing ? Note: Open ended question. Really important to hear the founders vision behind this function. Always a best practice to start with open ended questions 2. 12 months from now, how will I know that I am doing an amazing job ? Note: This is a take on the common question - what does success look like ? I suggest keeping a defined timeline of say 6 or 12 months. Also, the words “amazing job” or “knocking it out of the park” is a way to demonstrate that you want to be very successful in this role 3. Who will I be reporting to ? (options coul...

I wouldn't look at asking "mandatory" questions but rather asking them what their vision is for the product marketing function and coming to a mutual understanding of what product marketing does and doesn't do. I'd guide the discussion with a visual and/ or data (a couple of useful links below). Agree on a 30-60-90 day plan and success metrics. Agreeing on positioning and messaging should be a top priority. Leave with a process and hopefully time set up for your first discussion.  Gartner eBook on product marketing priorities: https://www.gartner.com/en/industries/high-tech/tech-marke...

This feels to me like a loaded question and I'd love to hear more background in order to answer better. Are you "interviewing" leadership before joining the company or are you asking about how to approach them on a day-to-day while building the function or something else? The answer is different at every stage. 

Highlighted this one in another question, so will point you there, but overall, yes - we break PMM responsibilities down by audience. Some PMMs will work only on Consumer and some only on Restaurant for example. In a three-sided marketplace, there is naturally a ton of organic collaboration across the edges, so though there's usually only one focus area, there's a lot of collaboration across the audiences.

* It’s most valuable to align the PMM team to the Product team structure to drive stronger alignment and integration. Back in the day, when we worked in person, we strived to have Product Marketers sit directly with their product teams. In some cases, this has meant that I’m in a different building than my manager and some of my team members, but I find this integration extremely valuable. * Nextdoor is structured by the following Pillars: Member Experience (Consumer), Neighborhood Vitality (Trust, Safety, & Groups), Business Solutions (free to paid products for b...

I've been in PMM roles at mostly large companies and PMM has typically focused on either the consumer or the business side of things. However, for smaller companies with smaller teams, it's not uncommon for PMM to lean into both, depending on the needs of the organization. Regardless of how the team is structured, close partnership across PMM whether your focus is B2B or B2C is critical. PMM is often positioned to oversee what's happening holistically across the org and can help provide visibility across B2B and B2C to ensure the broader team is coordinated and thinking more holistically ab...

Among the places I’ve worked, this answer has varied considerably. It’s varied company by company, and it’s even varied within a given company at different stages. For instance, when I was at Lyft, early on there were products that consumer-focused PMMs helped do the sales enablement for because it was the fastest way to get it done. As the company grew, by the time I left, there was a large B2B product marketing team. A number of things could impact what the right answer is for your company at a given point in time. * Relative importance: How important is B2B or B2C marketing relative t...

- It's all about being able to tell a story about how your previous experience tracks to what you want to do - B2B and B2C are converging a bit so I think the skills are definitely transferrable. It might be hard to move from the far end of the spectrum all the way to the other far end - What determines fit for a position isn’t just about B2B vs. B2C. It is also about: - How well defined the product is - What stage of life the company is in - How well supported the role will be - Whether or it is a big brand vs. nascent brand - All of the above contribute to the kind of product marketing yo...

I touched on this a bit above - I started my career in B2B and learned really valuable lessons before moving more deeply into B2C.  I think Marketing is evolving so quickly that you can learn extremely valuable skills in either the B2B or the B2C world that are applicable across both, so wouldn't say strictly focusing on just one for the next 10-years is absolutely the right (or wrong choice.) It's more the growth mindset and defining and understanding what your career goals and ambitions are.  When hiring somebody, it's extremely context specific. For a Consumer Growth PMM for exampl...

I've thought about this a lot as I've worked across both B2B and B2C and wondered if it makes sense to specialize and how transferrable skills are. This is also something I've asked many leaders and mentors. The overwhelming advice I've gotten is to focus on being a good marketer and not focus on B2B vs. B2C - instead, think about the types of problems you're interested in solving, the day to day work that most engages and challenges you, and how much you'll learn in a certain job. Additionally, marketing leadership roles often span both B2B and B2C, so having a good knowledge of both can b...

There are multiple factors you could use to determine where to build a deeper focus but I don’t necessarily think that you have to make such a firm pick. There are definitely nuances between the two roles, but skills are also transferable. Crafting messaging/positioning, translating user insights into strategy, influencing product/technical roadmaps, and understanding market behaviors are all skills which at the core are the same across both B2B and B2C. It might be harder to cross over between the two if you have only been in one or the other for an extended period of time. Not impossib...

There’s no singular answer to this one. It truly depends on what your goals and ambitions are for your marketing career. For instance, some people just really like the type of work they get to do on B2C product marketing. The same goes for B2B product marketing. If you’re someone who gets the most fulfillment out of one more than the other and would find it a drag to do your best work if you couldn’t, it may make sense to go as far as you can in that space. In that sense, yes, it absolutely makes sense to develop a deep focus and expertise in either B2C or B2B product marketing. The m...

There’s so much B2C product marketing -- just look around you! Think about the laptop or phone you’re reading this on right now. The bluetooth headphones you used to listen to music recently. The shoes on your feet. The credit cards in your pocket. The toothpaste you used to brush your teeth this morning. What convinced you to buy those things? Maybe it was the description of the audio quality for the headphones. Maybe it was the extra cavity-fighting and whitening power of the toothpaste. Throughout my career so far, I’ve already worked on B2C product marketing for credit cards an...

In general, I don't really think "background" is that important. To me, background does not = skills. I hire for signal on skill and not for whether or not somebody has done something before.  We have some absolutely incredible PMMs on Eats and almost all of them came from a background that was not Product Marketing.  Because the function and the role is growing so quickly, you rarely find somebody who's spent 5 years in Consumer PMM for example. Instead, hone your skills.  Uncover great insights, run a bunch of research and get really good at understanding customers, competition a...

I myself come from a less than traditional path to PMM after spending the first half of my career on the brand side of the house. I may be biased, but I think less than traditional backgrounds are really valuable in a PMM and I typically look for a couple of key characteristics: Trust Building I look at roles this person has had before and ask about the stakeholders they've had to work with. So much of PMM is being at the center of a wheel where you need to operate without top-down automony. I look for stories of times where they were able to use the trust they built to execute beyond t...

If someone is new to PMM, there are two skills I look for: 1. Strategic thinking: Can you demonstrate an ability to take an intentional, rational thought process when solving problems? Can you get creative about solving a problem while also never losing sight of the end goal? Can you solve a problem as it develops / as you receive new information?  2. Ability to prioritize and execute: Can you cut through noise and narrow in on what’s most critically important? Once you have a plan, can you make that plan a reality?

Whether you are an experienced or aspiring product marketer, these are the qualities I look for in product marketing hires:  * Customer obsessed. Product marketing is the voice of the customer and a successful product marketer is one that is customer obsessed and keeps the consumer at the core of all that they do. Product marketing's role is to help inform the product roadmap and market new products and features to consumers. If we don't have a deep understanding of who our customers are and what they care about we simply cannot do our job well.  * Analytical. Marketing is...

It all depends on the role I am hiring for and what stage a company is at, but on a general note, I would look for transferable experience and skills that could work well for the role. Crafting messaging/positioning, identifying user insights and translating them into strategy, influencing product/technical roadmaps, understanding market behaviors and trends, project managing projects from start to finish, Go-to-market campaigns (integrated or channel based), product development & packaging is all experience that is super valuable for consumer product marketing For example if you have be...

To understand whether someone new to consumer product marketing will likely succeed in that role, I usually look for a combination of skills that are both directly and indirectly related to the job. Skills that are directly related to the substance of product marketing work: * Consumer-mindedness: Have they ever worked with gathering consumer insights before? Have they ever had to translate that to an action the business should take? Are they hungry for data about consumer behavior to help them make better decisions? Can they empathize with what customers are experiencing? * ...

I think there has been a massive shift in just the awareness and momentum around Consumer Product Marketing overall. When I joined Eats 3 years ago as the first Consumer PMM, everybody was asking what this role was and how we were different than Brand Marketing or Performance Marketing. Not only at Uber has that changed dramatically, but also, within the industry there has been a really evolution of folks who would traditionally be in "Brand Management" roles at CPG companies starting to move into PMM roles at tech companies. I think there are a lot of similiarities between those two actual...

Product Marketing Prediction for 2023 🔮 Based on my biased opinion, the most interesting trends that’ll shape the PMM role will be: 🔮 Product-Led and Sales Product-Led Growth will influence product marketers' day-to-day work. We will shift our GTM strategies, as well as sales enablement programs to support those motions. Currently, most of the GTM motions are still marketing and sales-led. With the shift to PLG and SPLG, every function in the company will adapt accordingly. There are many great posts on this topic from amazing Elena Verna, just check her Linkedin posts 💎 🔮 Incre...

Though there are many we could talk about, here are a few I’ve been reflecting on lately. 📈 Trend: The era of “build it and they will come” messaging is dead 👀 What’s next: Product marketers need to up their positioning game For a long time, it worked to market consumer tech products in a way that was very centered on what the business did. We built a thing, here’s what it does. Straightforward. This worked for a while because the innovations felt more meaningful and there was less noise in channels. Now, however, customers have many options (and ever expanding), and they’re less ...

Where to start? Every company has different policies for promotion criteria, but ultimately it needs to take into account 2 things: merit and business need. Business need has to come first. It means that there's a larger scope of a role that needs to be done - more responsibility and complexity within an org / team - and there's now an opportunity or need for someone to fill that. If that doesn't exist, promotions shouldn't be happening arbitrarily. I recongize that especially within startups, individual contributors want to grow and should be recognized for their efforts, but when merit su...

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have become a popular way for companies to clearly define goals and measure progress against them, at the employee, team, and company level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR There's lots written about these that you can reference elsewhere, but it's a really helpful frame work that allows you to measure, quantitatively and qualitatively, how you're tracking against the "key results" that you've defined. The common expectation is that you'll hit about 70% of your OKRs - idea is that you're including stretch goals so missing 20-30% doens't mean you're perfo...

If you're on this forum as a PMM, you know that one of the biggest challenges for the PMM org is "What the hell do we measure!?" - an age-old conundrum that PMMs always struggle with. This is especially pronouned in an enterprise B2B environment vs. a fast-moving B2C environment where immediate usage/feedback may be available.  To me, the most primary thing I'm looking for is how effective the person is in relationship/ stakeholder management. In Product Marketing, you have many constituents across Sales, Product, and customer teams, as well as within Marketing itself. It's easy to get p...

This varies by company and role, but I generally think about the path to promotion on the two key vectors: ownership level and degree of autonomy.  Strong performance against OKRs or KPIs is a core underpinning to that. When considering promotion I start there and then look at how the person has demonstrated rising levels of ownership and autonomy across the following: * Strategic Direction: As an associate, I'd expect you to own a feature set fully and demonstrate the ability to bring insights into the go-to-market under direction. As you rise in the organization, I'd expect you...

The best way for a product marketer to get promoted is by demonstrating the impact of their work. To do this, I incentivize all my PMMs to befriend data and tie their deliverables to key business and customer metrics.  To me, the two most important categories of metrics are: 1) Customer insights a. Number of actionable insights that helped drive product development b. Number of actionable insights that informed a business strategy/service 2) Customer engagement a. Product adoption: This is the % of customers that adopted a new service or product launched by PMM. b. Customer lifet...

I'm not a fan of connecting metrics to promotions for a role like product marketing becuase there are so many other dependencies that can't be controlled. Rather I like to establish some expectations of responsibility for each seniority level. Seniority levels can usually be attached to the level of responsiblity you can assign someone. Can they run a launch end to end? Can they take a new offer to market? You can use success of some of those outputs to make a determination of how and when to promote.

PMMs often are measured by output, since most of what we provide are tied to other metrics. I would focus on delivering tangible assets on a regular cadence (case studies, one-pagers, pitch decks, etc) and in parallel - measuring utilization metrics like: product activation, MAUs, reactivations, attach rate, conversion velocity etc. These two streams (tangible output + metrics) cover your bases, establish influence and prove growth (worthy of promotion).

I came from a background in brand and so my natural instincts served me most well on the outbound side of product marketing. I had my fair share of imposter syndrom in the early days when I looked at my peers and realized that I'd never done the traditional inbound work of a PMM. I spent more time than I should have in those early days being afraid to ask for fear of not being able to meet the bar. It took building a relationship with a peer whose work I admired to admit that I was really learning on the fly and to my surprise, they were too!  We all have strengths and areas where we ...

I spent a lot of time in my early career worrying about getting to the next promotion and how I was progressing versus my peers. Looking back now, this was all wasted energy. I wish I had been more focused on learning and picking up as many skills and experiences as possible. I also wish I had been less worried about making mistakes. I think I would have been able to take more risks and push myself to try new things that would have ultimately helped me to build more skills. I also wish I knew how to prioritize better early in my career. I worked a lot of late nights and weekends in my earl...

One thing I wish I learned earlier is the most powerful product marketing you can do is always centered on a shared human truth. When I look back on my very early PMM GTM work, I focused primarily on communicating about the product and the benefit derived from the features themselves. But the product features, however innovative, were only half the story. Connecting the Product to the Customer Need is where the true magic lies. Find the truth we all share (an experience, an emotion) and connect that to the new experience the product provides -- that’s where your message takes on real meanin...

There is one key learning: Actively plan & manage your development. Here is what is involved: * Know the menu: Since Product Marketing is such a broad discipline, its important to understand the various functional competenices that comprise it. This way, you can assess where you have strengths and where you want to develop. These competenices span target segmentation definition, messaging & positioning, content development, sales enablement, pricing/packaging, PR/AR and more, they are quite different and require different skills. * The market will evolve: There are als...

When you're starting out your career as a PMM, it is very important to remember that your value promise is to customers and not internal stakeholders. I don't mean to say that internal alignment and buy-in isn't important but it should never take priority over serving your customers. In my early days, I spend 80% of my time trying to understand what were the needs of my internal stakeholders and ensuring I was supporting them fully, leaving little focus on the customer. The moment I started prioritizing customer needs over internal stakeholder needs, when I started to champion customers int...

* Don't box yourself, ever!  * Don't always stick to how things are always done.  * And ask questions more.  * And observe and take notes.  * And don't pretend to know it all!  Here's the thing: When you are early in your career, you are often embarrassed to ask questions or ask "why?" But asking those questions more would help you understand things wayyyyy better. Some of my best learnings have come from asking questions to understand things better. Think about it — if you can't understand a feature as a marketer, chances are that your customers won't. That's your biggest advantage; ...

As someone with a tech background and self-education in marketing, I learn everything in practice. I wish I knew more about the importance of user research and CI at the beginning of my PMM journey: - User research: back in 2015, we released our first startup product which dramatically failed. We spent one year of development without proper user research, without defining the customer journey, or even having personas. That taught me the importance of knowing your users and their needs :) - Constant competitive analysis: somewhere in 2018 a competitor copied our startup features and ad...

My not helpful answer is that there is no "typical" 30-60-90 day plan. Your first 90 days will vary drastically depending on the stage of the company you are joining, the maturity of the product marketing team, and the specific challenges the company is facing. In my experience, the first 30 days are about learning and building relationships. The next 30 days are about aligning on a plan of action. And the next 90 days are executing that plan.

I love the power of a new perspective. I recommend an inspect, reflect, then suggest approach. Taking time to gather information from and form relationships with teams you support including product, sales, sales enablament/programs, marketing, as well as peers at your level will help you gauge your role's expectations and the business needs. Learning priorities, measures, recent learnings, challenges, and opportunities from these teams will help inform a perspective that will drive your approach and priorities as you ramp up. 

Great question! I think about this one a lot...First off, it’s important to callout that there is no perfect org structure :)  In general, you have to identify what you’re optimizing towards and what structure will give you the highest chance to get there. For Eats PMM, we’ve always kept a fairly tight PMM to PM relationship, so we map PMMs directly to their Product counterparts.  Product is broken down by audience - ie., Consumer, Restaurant, Delivery Person so we have leads within each audience and typically, sub-groups within that focus on either Growth (getting users from 0 → 1 tr...

This all comes down to how is the rest of the business organized. If you're organizing in a way that's incongrous to everyone else in the org, you will not be setup for success. With smaller nimble teams it's likely just based on bandwith and who has room to take things on. With larger teams, or as a team is being built out, it's best to align with your core cross-functional partners such as Product. There is usually overlap with PMMs working with 2-3 PMs. I've organized teams by product area in the past which aligned well to how Product was organized. 

In general, PMM roles at Intercom are more of the 'full stack' variety - i.e we cover the whole journey from feeding into the roadmap to launch, including competitive research, buyer/persona/market research, GTM strategy, positioning and messaging, enablement, launch planning etc. Our team sits in marketing and reports into a Senior Director of PMM. Our team structure has shifted several times in the time I've been here, based on changes to the company strategy, product team structure and where we most need to focus resources,. Currently, we're split into 3 'groups' based primarily around ...

The structure of the PMM team is usually a function of the size of the company and it’s GTM model. The “typical” SaaS PMM team has a set of Core PMMs that are focused on product, and usually a sister PMM team in the form of Industry/Solutions Marketing that is focused on solutions for specific verticals or segments. At Atlassian, since we have a flywheel model, PMMs have a lot more focus on activities that deal with acquisition (self-serve), cross-sell, and upsell. So while our PMM teams are organized by product (e.g. Jira, Confluence, etc.) individual PMMs on a product team can focus on c...

The PMM team structure depends on the size of the company, how technical the product is, and the GTM model. * Company Size: As the company grows and scales, PMM tends to fall under the Marketing org and they may segmented by Core Product PMMs where they focus on the overall messaging and positioning, Industry/Solution PMMs that focus use cases for those specific industries ,and solution areas, and there may be PMMs that will focus solely on sales enablement, competitive intelligence, or pricing. For smaller companies, PMM teams will play a more 'full stack' PMM role. For...

Our team is structured by audience type and discipline. We have one part of the team focused on our end users and prospects, another part of the team is focused on our partners, and a third on market research and market strategy. That said, I strongly believe it's important for PMM teams at hypergrowth companies to be nimble in terms of their structure and be willing to redefine roles and responsibilities as company strategy and the needs of the business shift over time.

At DocuSign, there are product marketers across our main product categories, as well as industry and audience teams. Every company I've ever worked at has grouped their teams differently, so I tend to consider new roles based on mapping skills to company needs. If the largest TAM is in a vertical that is specialized, perhaps you'll need an industry PMM. If the biggest gap in company need is relative to product launch materials, maybe you need someone focused on building a great bill of materials. Etc. 

I've done it in so many different ways! Few quick pointers:  * The most important thing is to ensure every team member has a good swim lane and growth path.  * Take your revenue goal and slice that evenly across the team to see what makes the most sense — product line, segment, or objective.  * If you have a big product organization, try aligning your team with leaders. This will help you ensure PM-PMM alignment for a stronger product strategy.  * If you have several SKUs/product lines, it might be worthwhile to have a person or a team dedicated to overall messaging and nar...