Platform and Solutions Product Marketing

What are some things you wish you knew in your first few years of Product Marketing, that you have learnt since

9 answers

Senior Director, Head of Product Marketing at DoorDash • March 31

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

103 Saves

Dana Barrett

Head of Global Inbound Marketing at Asana • October 15

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 fo

287 Saves

Jasmine Anderson Taylor

Senior Director, Product Marketing at Instacart • June 2

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

33 Saves

Naman Khan

Chief Marketing Officer at Blend • July 7

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 va

11 Saves

Francisco M. T. Bram

Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies • March 24

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 b

8 Saves

Rekha Srivatsan

Vice President Product Marketing at Salesforce • August 11

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

13 Saves

Lisa Dziuba

Head of Product Marketing at LottieFiles | Formerly WeLoveNoCode (made $3.6M ARR), Abstract, Flawless App (sold) • August 16

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:

6 Saves

Louis Debatte-Monroy

Director of Product Marketing at Backbase • March 1

You are not here to market products. That's the main thing I wish I knew. Would have saved me countless hours and tears. The number one mistake PMMs make is to start from the product. They organize we

3 Saves

Jennifer Kay

Product Marketing Expert & Mentor at | Formerly Homebase, Angi, The Knot • March 21

The ability to effectively build cross-functional relationships is really important in product marketing and understanding the role that each functional area plays in making a product successful. I'd

2 Saves

Product Marketing

What key metrics do product marketing managers need to meet in order to get promoted?

8 answers

Alexa Scordato

PMO at TikTok • August 13

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 t

42 Saves

Pete Schott

Senior Director of Product Marketing at Zenput • March 23

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/

24 Saves

Rehan Mirza

Chief Growth Officer at Verifiable • March 26

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 especial

82 Saves

Brandon McGraw

Senior Director, Head of Product Marketing at DoorDash • March 31

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 u

95 Saves

Francisco M. T. Bram

Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies • March 24

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

6 Saves

Jam Khan

Senior Vice President Product Marketing at 6sense • July 20

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

11 Saves

Amanda Groves

Senior Director Product Marketing at Crossbeam | Formerly 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • September 7

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

6 Saves

Jennifer Kay

Product Marketing Expert & Mentor at | Formerly Homebase, Angi, The Knot • March 21

The short answer is this is going to be highly dependent and will be different given your company, product or service, stage, and marketing organization. Every company is different and the role of pro

2 Saves

Product Marketing

How do you use market research to inform priority verticals to go after in your go to market efforts?

12 answers

Agustina Sacerdote

Global Head of PMM and Content Marketing, TIDAL at Square • March 24

I don't actually use market research for that, is the short answer. If we believe that our solution is well suited for a particular vertical, we have the budget to invest in GTM to capture business i

74 Saves

Jenna Langer

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Solutions at Matterport • December 29

There are a few questions you need to answer to determine if it's worth targeting this new vertical: - Do you have product-market fit? Are you solving a real problem for this vertical? - What is the s

51 Saves

John Hurley

Head of Product Marketing at Notion • February 4

Ensure verticalization aligns well with core competencies, market perception, ability to deliver and differentiation. If you do not clearly understand the definition of the target vertical, the trends

65 Saves

Vanessa Thompson

Senior Director, Product Marketing at Twilio • December 2

When looking to identify target verticals, I always prefer a data driven approach. I'd work up a detailed analysis exercise and build a vertical based TAM. I have a go-to bubble chart that I like to d

12 Saves

Vishal Naik

Product Marketing Lead at Google | Formerly DocuSign • January 25

Market research is a pretty valuable data point in terms of prioritizing verticals (or any other segmentation slice), but so too is your product ownership point of view and your internal usage data. S

14 Saves

Susan "Spark" Park

Head of Product Marketing, VR Work Experiences, Oculus at Meta • February 3

Instead of a "vertical focus" go forward with a New Audience focus so you can leverage the 5A GTM framework , and ensure you're thinking through a consumers' need. Also, if you focus on a new user, y

35 Saves

Harish Peri

Head of Product Marketing - Security, Developer Services & Hyperforce at Salesforce • April 5

Making the assumption here that vertical = industry. Industry definition - which taxonomy are you using. NAICS, SIC, propietary, DUNS, Clearbit? This is important because there is a lot of nuance h

20 Saves

Dave Steer

Vice President of Product Marketing at GitLab • July 13

I believe that market insights are the #1 core product marketing capability. Literally everything – from positioning and messaging to the products and capabilities you deliver to the market – flows fr

12 Saves

Arianna Schatzki-Mcclain

Group Manager, Product Marketing at Lyra Health • August 3

Market research is near and dear to my heart and at the core of any strong product and go-to-market plan. I have many examples of how you can use research to inform vertical strategy, but my first tip

6 Saves

Michele Nieberding 🚀

Head of Solutions Marketing at Iterable • January 11

When we first started to verticalize our solution, we looked at: TAM (total addressable market) and SAM (sellable addressable market--what is realistic that YOUR company can sell in to?) CARR Win Rat

8 Saves

Amanda Groves

Senior Director Product Marketing at Crossbeam | Formerly 6sense, JazzHR, Imagine Learning, Appsembler • January 23

We aim to diversify our revenue strategy with dynamic and compelling GTM campaigns. We use market research from internal and external sources to fuel decisions. Internal market research comes from our

4 Saves

Hien Phan

Director of Product Marketing at Amplitude • March 15

I'm biased. I'm a former consultant and market researcher— market research always follows priority verticals and market efforts. Depending on the stage of your organization, you might not have the

2 Saves

Product Marketing

How is the Product Marketing team structured there by product line, segment, function or by objective (ie. revenue retention, product engagement, etc)?

10 answers

Mike Polner

Head of Marketing at Discord | Formerly Uber, Fivestars, Electronic Arts • December 12

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

114 Saves

Lara McCaskill

Product Marketing Lead at Atlassian • January 16

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 te

48 Saves

Jasmine Jaume

Director, Product Marketing at Intercom • November 10

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 re

67 Saves

Akshay Kerkar

Head of Product Marketing, Platform & Commerce at Atlassian • December 22

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

60 Saves

Karen He

Product Marketing at Fiddler AI • March 16

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 an

13 Saves

Gregg Miller

VP of Product Marketing at Oyster® • September 29

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

21 Saves

Vishal Naik

Product Marketing Lead at Google | Formerly DocuSign • January 24

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

14 Saves

Rekha Srivatsan

Vice President Product Marketing at Salesforce • August 11

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 evenl

14 Saves

Jack Wei

Head of Product Marketing at Sendbird | Formerly SmartRecruiters, Mixpanel, Deloitte • January 10

Sendbird is an in-app conversations platform, where we help improve customer retention and conversion through chat, voice, video, and livestream APIs. Our team is structured as follows: GTM excellenc

4 Saves

Richard McClurg

Former CMO at Dejero | Formerly ON Semiconductor • February 23

It depends on multiple factors, as others have pointed out, including company size, number of markets served, number of products/solutions, GTM model, and alignment with the rest of the organization (

1 Save

Product Marketing

I'm looking for tips and advice on building an effective buyer journey: Do you have any insights on how to effectively map and orchestrate a learning->buying cycle, considering a B2B Saas Product?

We're currently revisiting our content strategy here at Resultados Digitais, and some help on the subject would be very valuable. Our main challenges include: - Finding which types of of subject/content/format/channel work better, and in which stage of the journey; and - Understand how far should we go on segmenting and personalizing our strategy, and under which axis (demographics, persona, etc);

3 answers

Sherrie Nguyen (she/her)

Director of Product Marketing at Indeed • July 28

Great question! You actually squeezed 3 topics in here, which are all inter-related and important to buyer journey maps. In my experience, I start with segmenting my audience (total addressable market

12 Saves

Jennifer Kuvlesky

Director of Product Marketing at Snow Software • November 16

I'd first understand the personas you are targeting-what problems do they have, how do they like to consume materials and find answers to their problems. You can have multiple personas, but for your h

3 Saves

Madison Leonard 🕶

Product Marketing & Growth Advisor at | Formerly ClickUp, Vanta, DreamWorks Animation • January 18

In order to understand your ideal distribution strategy, you have to know your ICP extremely well. Your company growth strategy will also play a role... product-led (PLG) with a freemium or trial prod

5 Saves

Product Marketing

How important is platform positioning and messaging early when you have basic product capabilities?

5 answers

Liza Sperling

Head Of Product Marketing at Upwork • February 16

In general, I don't think you can determine that a platform approach makes sense or begin developing platform positioning and messaging until you know more about your product(s) than just capabilities

67 Saves

Anna Wiggins

Sr. Director Product Marketing, Insights, Copy & Content at Bluevine • March 23

I would say this depends on your roadmap and when the platform functionality is scheduled to launch. If you incorporate platform messaging too early, you can actually do more harm than good because yo

17 Saves

Natalie Louie

Product Marketing, Senior Director at Replicant | Formerly MobileCoin, Zuora, Hired, Oracle, Responsys • April 13

I wouldn’t prioritize it and instead focus on iterating on your existing product messaging and positioning. Get clarity on how to message and position your existing products while being mindful of you

20 Saves

Francisco M. T. Bram

Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies • March 24

That’s a great question. The most successful salespeople build relationships with customers by selling them the promise of a product or platform that will evolve, as their needs evolve. And in today’s

5 Saves

Jack Wei

Head of Product Marketing at Sendbird | Formerly SmartRecruiters, Mixpanel, Deloitte • January 10

Not very important. Nail the basics (at the product feature/function level)... make sure they map to the corporate and brand messaging. Once the business passes a certain revenue threshold in your spa

2 Saves

Product Marketing

Which are the mandatory questions you should ask the company founders when you're empowered to create the Product Marketing function from zero?

I will face this challenge very son and my thoughts are: - which are the company objectives? - which are the marketing and product marketing specific objectives? - the resources in place to achieve the objectives (human, financial, tools) - where is the product on the lifecycle? - top three priorities - how are sales/marketing/product teams organised?

5 answers

Alex Chahin

VP of Marketing at Titan | Formerly Lyft, Hims & Hers, American Express • October 4

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 te

5 Saves

Sahil Sethi

Senior Vice President, Product Marketing at BetterUp | Formerly Klaviyo, Qualtrics, Microsoft, MckInsey • October 4

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

3 Saves

Linda Sonne-Harrison

President at Giant Stride Marketing Group • October 6

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 d

4 Saves

Rachel Cheyfitz

Head of Product Marketing and Documentation at Coro | Formerly Lytx, Cisco, Snyk, Lightrun, Comeet • November 12

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 appr

1 Save

Jack Wei

Head of Product Marketing at Sendbird | Formerly SmartRecruiters, Mixpanel, Deloitte • January 10

How are products currently released and who's involved? What does pricing/packaging optimize for and how was it developed? What's the company's ICP and why? Who's the target persona and has this/will

3 Saves

Product Marketing

What internal messaging efforts have helped you shift your company's mindset from a product company to a solutions or platform company? What worked the best? What mistakes did you make?

5 answers

Nipul Chokshi

Head of Marketing at Atrium • September 8

I found that making the shift to “solutions” or “platform” requires becoming more business outcome focused in terms of your messaging. Rather than speak to individual user-level features/benefits (e.g

27 Saves

Natalie Louie

Product Marketing, Senior Director at Replicant | Formerly MobileCoin, Zuora, Hired, Oracle, Responsys • April 13

It starts with the PMM team to come up with messaging that positions the benefits of your solutions/platform. PMM’s own the WHY and not the WHAT. Please refer to my other answers on frameworks and bes

21 Saves

William Davis

Vice President of Product Marketing at Workato • September 28

When moving your messaging from product-centric to solutions-centric, you're going to bring in experts in the solutions you're trying to organize around. Whether that be industry, departmental or some

9 Saves

Vishal Naik

Product Marketing Lead at Google | Formerly DocuSign • January 25

Great question. To be frank, even for companies with a reputation of being open and extensible, this one is always a challenge when you're in a Platform role. Because at the end of the day, the Platfo

10 Saves

Jack Wei

Head of Product Marketing at Sendbird | Formerly SmartRecruiters, Mixpanel, Deloitte • January 10

Embrace repetition, and get influential stakeholders on board. I've been lucky to have worked in very collaborative, supportive cultures where any repositioning and messaging was broadcasted at major

3 Saves

Product Marketing

How can I start making a change in my organization to influence the roadmap based on consumer insights?

I am at a company where Product builds the roadmap without many insights from Marketing or research.

8 answers

Krithika Muthukumar

Head of Marketing at Retool • December 19

The only advice I can share is that customer insights (when shared in a clear and actionable way) are very hard to ignore. Survey users, talk to prospects, and bring customer insights to the product t

127 Saves

Dan Laufer

CEO at PipeDreams Ventures • January 14

That can be very tough. Similar to another answer I wrote, I think a lot of this is interpersonal which makes specific feedback tough without more context. A few ideas to hopefully help: 1. Assume be

63 Saves

Lauren Culbertson

Co-founder & CEO at LoopVOC • February 3

Data is power! Feedback is everywhere, and as product marketers we can harness that voice of the customer data to influence product roadmap. Product Managers have to balance market needs with technica

30 Saves

Dobrin Grancharov

Product Marketing Manager at Quantive • February 4

On top of everything that @Krithika Muthukumar , @Dan Laufer and @Lauren Culbertson have already mentioned, one actionable and practical approach would be to introduce a Marketing Requirement Document

37 Saves

Mary Jane Han

Product Marketing Director at Roofstock • February 2

I’d first ask what’s driving this – does the company/leadership not believe in customer insights, is there a lack of prioritization to do this or is it simply inertia of how the company operates today

31 Saves

Vishal Naik

Product Marketing Lead at Google | Formerly DocuSign • January 25

An Engineering leader at a previous company described this to me as a tripod--decisions made based on the intersection of PM, Eng and PMM. Here PMM is representing the customer, and to an effect, also

11 Saves

Willem Maas

President at Growth Velocity | Formerly Vigilent, USGBC, FICO, Macromedia/Adobe • December 8

@Vishal Naik I agree! In a former life as a B2B product manager, I struggled to get useful input on the needs of new buyers. Most of my time and attention was spent enhancing the current product for c

3 Saves

Jack Wei

Head of Product Marketing at Sendbird | Formerly SmartRecruiters, Mixpanel, Deloitte • January 10

If your product team ignores product marketing, that can be fixed through better exec alignment, relationship building and proving out collaboration successes in smaller, low stake projects over time.

3 Saves

Product Marketing

How do you ensure that product marketers you manage are creating great messaging, and hitting the right milestones?

7 answers

Jeffrey Vocell

VP of Product Marketing at | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • December 10

Great question. This gets at the heart of managing others, while also is central to our role as product marketers. As a manager, it's your responsibility to ensure that the right milestones are being

47 Saves

Kevin Garcia

Head of Product Marketing at Retool • April 16

1. Make talking to customers integral to their role. By keeping your team as connected as possible to the customer, they will develop 1) sharper intuition and 2) a network of customers they can tap in

80 Saves

James Huddleston

Head of Marketing at Skedulo • December 16

I ask them a lot of hard questions to understand how they came up with the messaging they did. I want to hear from them what customers they talked to or surveyed, who else they worked with internally

10 Saves

Vishal Naik

Product Marketing Lead at Google | Formerly DocuSign • January 25

The biggest thing I consider is that the messaging created is about the customer and what they are thinking/feeling/experiencing. Rather than what we are building and what we are selling. I've kept a

15 Saves

Catlyn Origitano

Senior Director of Product Marketing at Fivetran • April 13

I am a project manager at heart. So I push the team to be the same. We have our roadmaps which we present and then turn into tickets for overall tracking. We also have a monthly reivew on areas of the

4 Saves

Danny Sack

Director of Product Marketing at SAP • June 15

If the marketing machine has been created correctly, this should be fairly measureable. In a prior role we had an excellent demand generation team who tracked how different messaging worked over time

7 Saves

Jack Wei

Head of Product Marketing at Sendbird | Formerly SmartRecruiters, Mixpanel, Deloitte • January 10

When the customer nods in agreement with messaging, it's good. When they pull out a credit card or sign the contract, it's great. Ultimately, a product marketer IC, leader, CMO, or CEO can opine on

3 Saves