Self-Serve Product Marketing

I have taken the certification offered by Pragmatic institute foundations and launch certification. I found them to be good courses for PMMs in enterprise companies. They have used their generic framework for GTM. I got some clarity on a few concepts, but overall I was expecting to come back with many more actionable frameworks, learnings from instructors' experiences. I am looking to engage with an alternative program that may be focused on PLG and low touch sales programs where we can learn about how marketing has influenced growth more comprehensively.

I am aware of just a few 1. Pragmatic institute - I took it. However, I found that to be specific to B2B enterprise sales. 2. 280 Group: I recently found out about this institute, I am looking to connect with someone who has been to this program. 3. AIPMM: Seems to offer courses similar to Pragmatic Institute. I am looking to connect with someone who has been to this program to understand more. Outside of these, I am looking for more engaging courses, especially where we can learn how to influence PLG in low touch product environments, and contribute to strategy comprehensively.

I am not aware of any one key certification for product marketers. I work with PMMs that come from backgrounds in campaigns, sales, engineering, and product management. Each of those backgrounds lend themselves to a specific function in product marketing.  In my experience, there are three types of product marketers:  1. Technical PMM 2. Market Programs PMM 3. Go-to-Market PMM.  An aspiring product marketer should identify their entry point into one of the aforementioned functions. If there was one skill that unites each type of PMM, it is their ability to diagnose a market, create ...

I'm a little biased here, but I don't believe that there are courses or certifications that are a prerequisite or requirement to jumping into product marketing. If you haven't done any marketing before, or worked alongside a good marketing team, Pragmatic Marketing by the Pragmatic Institute is a solid framework for twisting your head around what marketing is really about.  But the best way to learn is on the job. If you have a PMM function at your current company, get to know them. Ask about what they're working on, why it's important. What are the biggest challenges they're trying to o...

I'm going to admit upfront that I answered this in a previous AMA, so I'll copy and paste that same answer here. A year later, I can truly say that these continue to be the things I think are most important for a PMM to have. Almost all hard PMM skills can be taught, but these soft skills are much more valuable to me because they come from the PMM themselves. I can model the behavior, but each individual is responsible for whether or not they exhibit these traits.  Cross-functional excellence: As a PMM, you have the opportunity to lead without being a manager of people. A strong product m...

* High growth mindset / hunger to continuously improve. * Great negotiators. We sit at the intersection of a lot of teams and needs! PMMs need to be skilled not just at bringing value, but negotiating priorities. * Great collaborators. PMMs can't drive impact if they can't collaborate. * Can't emphasize enough the importance of empathy, especially when it comes to XFN work!

Communication: You simply must be a good communicator to be a stellar product marketer. So much of our discipline requires strong communication in order to provide clarity (both externally and internally) and develop and exercise influence. Strong communication to me spans written skills, presentation creation skills, public speaking skills, and executive presence.  Adaptability: The potential list of things you might work on as a product marketer is so incredibly long and diverse! Someone who is excited by the chance to parachute into new situations and create new deliverables they've nev...

Because Product Marketing is at the cross-section between Marketing, Product and Sales, there are times when they are barely treading water to keep up with all the product launches, become a “catch all” function or have multiple conflicting stakeholder priorities. Thus, I think these additional other soft skills are must-haves to succeed in product marketing. Takes Initiative: Acts ahead of need/anticipates problems, proactively sees things through, steps up to challenges even when things are not going well Results Orientated: Focuses on and drives toward delivering on goals, documents ac...

A couple of others that come to mind: 1. Excellent communication skills and the ability to adapt these to the right audience - whether that's for consumers at scale, customers, or internal stakeholders. 2. Cross-functional influence - PMMs sit in between customers/consumers, Sales, Marketing, Product and even more functions depending on the organization. The ability to rally folks towards a common goal and bring everyone along is critical. 3. Related to curiosity - that constant need to understand the end user, whether that's consumers or customers, and continue to study their pain poi...

As I spend a decade working in product marketing at high-growth startups, I'll focus on must-have soft skills for PMM in a fast-growing startup: * Hight user empathy: PMM should absolutely love talking to users. In most startups, personas, ICPs, value props, messaging, product features need to be constantly improved. This is normal to search for the best users to provide your features, with the best value prop and messaging. That's the essence of working in startups: build, learn, iterate. And it's impossible to do without talking to users, constantly. * Ability to le...

We match internal promotion based on the level of the product announcement. Small updates are little features that mostly existing customers are excited about. Medium updates are larger changes that potentially open up a small new audience or unlock new revenue potential. Large updates are major product changes or brand new products that require significantly adjusting our go to market strategy.  Small updates: Monthly email to sales, slack message to success Medium updates: ^ + dedicated email to sales/success + all company slack channel + join sales all hands recurring meeting to train...

Internal comms is sometimes undervalued, but in my opinion, it is one of the most important parts of a PMM's role, especially because product marketing is one of the very few roles that are extremely cross-functional and sits between multiple teams. Here are few ways I've seen it work best: * For major XF projects, have regular update emails so that you can make sure you are bringing everyone along the journey and it does not feel like you are working in a black box. * Internal newsletters (whatever cadence works for your org). We partner with the product team on a monthly newsl...

Internal newsletters, revenue org all-hands, relevant slack channels, and team-specific meetings. Of course, not every activity is shared through every channel. Depending on the "size" of the project or deliverable, we choose which channels to broadcast through. Thankfully we have a well-organized enablement team that manages these channel logistics, so we're able to efficiently streamline internal comms. On a personal level, it's critical that I provide key executives and other team leads with visibility of what's coming, so that they get their teams' attention and start a network effe...

I think this depends largely on the size of an update - and the audience.  For our largest releases, they are communicated early and often - to drum up excitement. Through company all hands, sales trainings, slack channels, etc.  For mid-sized and smaller updates, we'll leverage the internal channels that make the most sense for the internal audience. If its sales, we'll update via our bi-weekly newsletter, slack channels, internal knoweldgebase docs on what to know, as one example. Each internal audience has their own channels and communication styles they prefer - and usually we work ...

We are a slack heavy company. So we have our own announcement channel for all things Marketing that I actually started so that we could share our updates!  We also do quarterly roadmaps and retros where PM + PMMs present their upcoming roadmap and a retro on their activities from the past quarter. All of Product and PMM go - and we invite our key stakeholders across the business, including the leaders from other areas of Marketing. 

Why do you want to communicate updates and activities? If the goal is to communicate just the work the team has been doing, then I don't think that you should be communicating this to a large audience. This may be a good weekly summary email to your manager (Also, why would your manager need it?, the manager should already know it and it should be in your 1:1 doc), anyway, my point is communicating just WHAT you or your team is working on is waste of time for you and the reader. I would rather communicate the impact and how other teams could leverage the work your team has done. This ...

The key here is consistency. Find a channel that works and stick to it. Else it becomes to fractured and fragmented. You can use a slack channel, you can have a dedicated section in your sales enablement platform, you can issue regular emails with links to content. Just make sure you stick to an appraoch so your GTM teams get conditioned to the process.

It depends on the size of your company. This will become more challenging as the size of the company scales. At a company with less than 200 employees it is pretty easy to maintain relationships with executive leadership to keep them in the loop via regular meetings, Slack, and internal newsletters. No matter what the size of your company is, make sure you are spending enough time educating others on your value, contributions, and successes. Don't try to hide your failures, though. Nobody is perfect. Be honest about your lessons learned and help others learn from them as well. 

In an ideal world product and product marketing should be embedded in one another’s efforts from start to finish (see my other response on “customer needs” and getting PMM further upstream). In this world product marketing has played an active role in helping set the vision for the feature, doing research to support its validation/market opportunity, and coordinating the launch priority (e.g. is this a “nice to have” vs. a tentpole launch). In such a scenario it can often be appropriate for product and product marketing to sign up for shared KPI targets on things like free trials, signups, ...

So I am actually not sure this should be split, the best companies I have ever worked at Product Management and Product Marketing shared these numbers and it was our goal as a team to impact these. Now not every company looks at it this way, some just want to know the impact YOU as a single person or team are impacting. So I usually talk about owning registration numbers, second week retention numbers and have the product teams focused on the MAU and DAU numbers from there out and work with them to make sure they are retaining. 

Why split? Make feature adoption a shared metric between PMM and PM teams. This is an important metric for both teams. I would use this metric pre-launch to really understand the target market segment, to set the baseline, and to define post-launch target. Post-launch, evaluate how the needle moves on this metric. If you are doing this in your company for the first time, this could start interesting conversations. Depending on the root cause analysis, PM and PMM will own different metrics to move the adoption up.  Example:  * Customers don't use this feature as anticipated because it add...

To the contrary, I always like to share and align on KPIs with the product team. Bonus points is you can also align that with key partners in other functions as well, like growth marketing. The more you can stay aligned from the top, the more naturally everything else will fall when it comes to prioritization and resourcing of projects. Now, some KPIs will vary widely based on the lifecycle of the product and the context of your company. Here are some examples to get your wheels turning: * For new products: Adoption (X% of users are using a product) and monthly/daily active users of...

The ideal scenario is that product and product marketing have shared adoption KPIs because this creates greater investment and accountability from both groups. If that’s not the case, product will tend to focus on post-login KPIs such as MAUs and DAUs. Marketing will focus on pre-login KPIs such as site visits, email engagement rates etc. Overall, it’s best if both teams focus on the NPS as that’s a clear indicator of how satisfied customers are with the product and if they will recommend it to others.

First off, is feature adoption the right KPI? In my opinion, focusing on feature adoption could be too narrow of a metric and doesn't shed light on what the end-user is experiencing. End users don't find value in features; they find value in getting their job to be done, done, and more effectively or efficiently than they did it before. At a basic level, product is responsible for building a feature that solves a job to be done effectively and efficiently. Product marketing is responsible for ensuring the value of the job to be done is described clearly and compellingly to the right audien...

PMMs should be responsible for KPIs that bring users and customers to the product and through onboarding and activation. Are the materials provided to educate a user leading to activation? Is the onboarding experience good? Are experiments leading to intended results? Once the user has activated, PMs should be responsible for owning long-term adoption of specific feature areas. At some point, sending more emails to remind users that certain features exist just won't cut it. If the feature isn't solving a real business problem, that's a problem with the product.

In any SaaS business, “adoption” is a company-wide priority. If customers aren’t happy and using the product, you’re just putting your sales/marketing investments into a leaky bucket. So it makes sense that Marketing -- and PMM specifically -- would monitor adoption closely, and even set KPIs in this area. While I see Product as primarily responsible for tracking the usability of the features they build in a detailed way (i.e. did moving the button make a difference/did a given change resolve broken user flows) PMM should be looking at the big picture of feature usage, and advancing adoptio...

One of the biggest changes is that I find the relationship with the product team to be different in a product-led growth company. It’s a much closer partnership, focused on more than just launch moments but ongoing work, and shared metrics. When it comes specifically to the sales and marketing funnel, I’d say the big difference is that we’re less focused on traditional demandgen work and we have a much heavier hand in monetization than we do in a sales-assisted business. Our work is tied more to product usage than on lead volume. The role isn’t necessarily “defined” differently, but our fo...

This is one of my favorite topics, and I write more extensively about product-led marketing versus sales-led marketing on the Product-Led Growth Collective site: https://www.productled.org/blog/marketers-prepare-product-led-growth The tl;dr, though: In many product-led growth (PLG) companies non-salespeople (e.g., product managers, designers, engineers, founders, etc.) helping to create the actual product have the initial greatest influence on what product marketing does. In many PLG companies, product marketers find themselves in particular helping out product managers with research, posi...

THERE ARE PRODUCT-LED COMPANIES THAT ALSO HAVE SALES AND MARKETING FUNNELS. I WOULD SAY MARKETING AND SALES FUNNELS ARE KEY TO THE SUCCESS OF MANY PRODUCT-LED COMPANIES.  TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION, THE BIGGEST DIFFERENCE IS THAT IN A SELF-SERVE COMPANY YOU WILL BE FOCUSED ON PRODUCT MARKETING AT SCALE. MUCH LIKE IN A SALES ORG, YOU’LL STILL BE FOCUSED ON FUNNEL OPTIMIZATION. HOWEVER, INSTEAD OF DRIVING LEADS TO THE SALES TEAM, YOU’LL BE DRIVING SIGN-UP AND ACTIVATION RATE GROWTH. AND INSTEAD OF USING LEAD GEN FORMS, YOU’LL BE USING YOUR SITE, RETARGETING ADS, AND PRODUCT EXPERIENCE TO ENSURE...

My experience in PMM has often been defined more by organizational structure and openness more than a type of product. The three biggest factors I’ve seen that impact product marketing’s role in an organization are the following: Reporting structure: Where does PMM report to? To the CEO, the CMO, or the CPO? Depending on who Product Marketing reports to, the goals will likely be different. When you report to the CMO, you may focus on driving GTM. When reporting to the CPO, you may spend more time focused on market insights and influencing product strategy. Inbound vs Outbound: What is the...

(This answer is copied from a previous question) I believe it's important to start out with how product marketing is the same across a self-serve/product-led motion and a sales-led motion. In my opinion, the core pillars of the product marketing responsibilities remain: * Target audience and buyer definition * Positioning and messaging * Pricing and packaging * Product narrative and storytelling * Product and feature launches * and so on... With either motion, you have to be an expert in your product, customer, and market. Where the function starts to differ is how you design your...

I would argue that the definition of product marketing remains the same regardless of go-to-market motion. At it's core, product marketing is about identifying the right customer and markets that find your product valuable, positioning and packaging that value in a compelling way, and then driving go-to-market strategy to capture that market. What changes across go-to-market motions are channel strategies and areas of focus.  For example, if you're at a company with a sales-led go-to-market motion - ie. you have an outbound sales team that drives the majority of purchases - then your ...

I think the core definition is still the same but in pure B2B you’re going to have a much stronger emphasis on sales enablement and think of sales as one of your core channels for communicating with customers. In PLG or B2C, you’re going to have a stronger emphasis on communicating directly to users via marketing channels. In PLG, you’ll still have sales enablement as a core part of your responsibilities, but there’s more of a balance of your time spent on direct-to-user communication and sales enablement.

I think that list is correct and you should prioritize this list depending on your business. In addition to the above, I would advise getting a tool like Chorus.ai or Gong.io. Chorus or Gong will help you scale as your team scales in getting customer feedback both on the new business side as well as current business. In reality, you can't be on all the great calls as that is physically impossible.  

Aim high, and ask for more than you think you'll need - but not by more than 15-20%. People will always be your biggest budget line item in PMM - we're the most valuable asset because structured thinking and positioning can't really be outsourced or delegated to software. However, key items that I would examine for fit in your budget: * Content creation for top-of-funnel assets, separate from Content Marketing * Video production (think $5-10K for an animated explainer video) to fill in gaps in your content * Competitive and market survey data. Plan ahead to learn more about your ...

I would recommend doing a listening tour with your key stakeholder teams in the organization (product, sales, growth, enablement, partner) to help inform your priorities, as budget items could be almost limitless. It's also important to understand the state of your product and where it might need the most help, to help prioritize your asks. E.g you might need to invest more in awareness / thought leadership content or third party validation research, or maybe you have needs lower in the funnel such as demo and video creation. Some good buckets could be: content creation (white papers, webi...

This is a good list to start with. I will add a couple: * Analyst/3rd party thought leadership pieces: Having independent, 3rd party content is very helpful. If you are focused on the Enterprise, having content from top tier analysts is helpful. I have worked with Gartner, Forrester, The 451 Group, Ovum Research and IDC in the past * Graphics/multimedia: you will need to generate lots of great content that you deploy across channels. You may have good writing skills in your team but you will likely need support for research/graphics/multimedia. I have typically relied o...

You have all the right line items! In addition, I'd recommend: * Focus groups for messaging/positioning/pricing & packaging: I'm a huge fan of getting feedback from prospects and customers on any new changes. This helps to have impactful content.  * Video editor/agency: Having a 3rd party video editor helps speed up content creation considerably. Plus, they can usually handle multiple projects at the same time and you can create new sales or external-facing collateral pretty fast. * Tool to track sales content adoption: Highly recommend a tool to track content adoption...

A few other things to consider: * Your team's research needs (qual and/or quant)  * Any analyst-related spent (either for research reports or to engage w/ analysts) * Content-related needs -- always a good idea to work with a good content agency to flex your capacity when needed * And perhaps most important - a team-building/fun budget for your team :)

Great question. Looks like you've captured a lot of the big rocks that normally go into the budget, but a few additional things to consider: * People Budget: Depending on the planned growth of your team for this year, and near-term priorities, knowing your people budget can ensure you can bring in consultants (as necessary) to bridge any gaps and help support short-term strategic initiatives.  * Tools: Beyond Sales Enablement/Content Management, you may want to consider Competitive Intelligence as another tool category if you don't have one already. * Win/Loss: If you're ...

Love what you have already! Do you have budget for qual research incentives? This is a huge gift if you can offer $100 to target personas to provide feedback on messaging, or to prospects for win/loss interviews, etc. Also consider a recruiting tool like Respondent.io if you are running out of low-hanging fruit from networking / site pop-ups / LinkedIn recruiting.  

This probably won’t come as a huge surprise, but our most used tool for surveys at Airtable is...Airtable. A lot of our customer surveys are done using Airtable Forms, which help us store that feedback directly in Airtable to report on and sync to other important bases, so everyone in the org has access to valuable customer feedback. I won’t make this just an Airtable product pitch, so I'll share that I’ve also used SurveyMonkey and GetFeedback and both have worked well for my survey needs. Extracting qualitative and quantitative insights is really about creating a good survey. Often, we w...

I like Typeform (super simple for users, works for my use case right now) for surveys where I have pointed questions on a research topic, and also work with other teams to run evergreen G2 campaigns and NPS surveys which I think give you an ongoing thread of general feedback. Extracting value depends a lot on what you're working with. For example, a 1-question free text survey that 10 users complete can help you get a TON of qualitative insights but not as much quantitative you can pull from there due to the small sample size. I like to think about that up front! If you have a small aud...

There are a few ways to collect customer insights. First, you can look at your own data to understand how your customers are using the product and what they are doing on your site. Tools like Google Analytics, MixPanel, Crazy Egg, and Segment are great for journey mapping customer behavior at scale. Next, you can do qualitative and quantitative studies to understand why your customers are using your product and who they are - this is important for segmentation. You can run surveys in-house using tools like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics or you can outsource studies to an agency. I recommend get...

At Atlassian, we use many methods for understanding customers both qualitatively and quantitatively.  The most standardized, larger-scale tool we use across all of our cloud products is our Happiness Tracking Survey known as HaTS (developed by Google). Our research teams sends out weekly emails to employees who subscribe that give the overall customer satisfaction score and short clips of customer feedback such as what customers find frustrating about our products or what they like best. This is a helpful way to keep customer feedback top of mind.  For more in-depth research on a particul...

It’s no surprise since at Intercom we offer an in-product surveys tool, so I’m naturally a big fan of in-product surveys. Even before Intercom, I had always seen a 3-4x response rate to in-product surveys than email or any other channel. I think surveys in-product are generally more valuable for quantitative insight and tactics like interviews, a customer advisory board and focus groups are more helpful for those rich emotional or granular feedback. How does your customer feel about your product and which problems are most urgent to them are best revealed in a live conversation. The way to...

You’re right that as a self-serve PMM, you’re no longer as focused on sales enablement as many B2B product marketers are. Here are some of the big areas my team is focused on that might be a bit different than a sales enablement focused PMM role.  * Acquisition: My team is very focused on how we can help prospective customers understand the value of Airtable, what it can do for them, and why they should use it. We get a ton of website traffic, and our performance marketing team does a great job targeting users, but PMM should have a role in making sure we have the right messag...

Great question! I’ve sat in product marketing roles at both consumer/product-led companies and B2B companies so I’ve seen both. In a B2B setting, product marketing is making its impact on revenue and user growth by enabling Sales. Well, in a self-serve world, your end goal is the same but the methods by which you do that are different. Let’s take monetization and generating revenue as an example. With B2B, you’re arming the Sales team with killer decks with just the right sizzle and proof points to close the deal. In self-serve, you’re still trying to “sell” your users but you’re doin...

SIMILAR TO MY EARLIER ANSWER, PRODUCT MARKETERS WHO WORK ON SELF-SERVE PRODUCTS ARE MAINLY FOCUSED ON COMMUNICATING WITH CUSTOMERS AT SCALE - SINCE THIS MODEL RELIES ON BROAD-BASED CHANNELS TO INTEREST, EDUCATE, AND RETAIN CUSTOMERS. YOUR WEBSITE, PRODUCT UI, AND RESOURCE CENTER WILL BE DOING A LOT OF HEAVY LIFTING TO ACCOMPLISH THESE GOALS AND YOU’LL BE INVESTING IN CONTEXTUAL PRODUCT EDUCATION, DEMOS, WALKTHROUGHS, RESOURCE GUIDES, AND EMAIL JOURNEYS.  ALSO, IN A SALES/ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT DRIVEN ORG, PRODUCT FEEDBACK, AND FEATURE REQUESTS COME VIA INFORMAL CONVERSATIONS BETWEEN CUSTOMERS ...

In my eyes, much of the time you spend and core fundamentals and responsibilities are the same. As a PMM for self-serve and sales-led motions, you need to be an expert on the product, customer, and market. Doing this well involves time with customers (and non-customers!), analyzing data, partnering with product teams, and so on. Where you spend the rest of your time will depend on the GTM motion (or combination of motions) you've decided are best for your product/company. See my answer to: 'How does self-serve product impact product marketing function?' Speaking from the Atlassian perspec...

In most B2B settings, Product Marketing, or a distinct Enablement team (if your organization has one), spends a lot of time driving revenue and user growth through enabling Sales and CS. Whereas, in self-serve or consumer-facing teams, this time spend enabling should be redirected to users directly and communicating with them through all the channels you're utilizing -- email, in-app, SMS, etc.  In self-serve, you're directly selling to your customers, and also educating them on the value of your product/solution as well. Consider balancing these and working with your grwoth team (if you...

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 p...

Airtable’s product marketing team has a bit of a unique structure in that we don’t have one “Head of Product Marketing”, we have two. Myself (Self-Serve PMM lead) and my counterpart (Enterprise PMM lead) are responsible for the two sides of our business and both report into our CMO. The other thing to note is that product marketing is a fairly nascent function at Airtable. The company has seen really impressive growth and success over the last few years with only a few dedicated marketing folks - which was one of the things that was most attractive to me when I was interviewing. Because PMM...

The structure of any team needs to be driven by the success criteria for that team. At Atlassian, we typically look at KPIs like # of paid users and pipeline (MQLs) for PMM. Enterprise-focused PMM teams typically have a couple more things they need to solve for: Sales enablement, and account-based programs (which can vary from events to ABM campaigns to EDR programs). Currently, my team is a mix of core PMM who own the GTM for specific products, as well as “horizontal” PMMs who own programs (like campaigns, enablement, content) that stripe across all products. The structure of the team wil...

A lot of it depends on the types of products you're marketing. Some teams can be easily organized into solution-based pods, so if you have a lot of products in your portfolio, you might have product marketers who focus on individual products reporting up to a solutions marketer, who represents a broader category.  At Box, our products are more horizontal, so we have a team of product-focused marketers who work closely with the product and engineering teams, and then a team of solutions marketers who work more closely with the go-to-market teams like sales and customer success. These team...

My team is responsible for product messaging & positioning for Salesforce's core solutions for small businesses across our high-growth industries and customer & community marketing initiatives. On my team:  * One PMM per key Salesforce solution for SMBs  * One PMM leading our high-growth SMB Industry verticals * One PMM leading our customer and community marketing initiatives  * One technical PMM  This helps us align team members with the right revenue goals, balances the work on the team while creating individual growth paths for each team member. Its all about the revenue for us and...

Team structure is always a hot topic in product marketing, and there's a lot of different ways of doing it. The product marketing team at Iterable recently re-organized into 5 groups: Release Marketing, Solutions Marketing, Pricing & Packaging, Platform Marketing, and Market Intelligence. Each group has a specific charter and KPIs that align up to company initiatives and OKRs as well. Briefly, the mission of each team is: * Release Marketing: Tell Iterable's innovation story, and effectively communicate launches to the market through our launch strategy. * Solutions Marketing: Tell...

You are 100% correct that the hardest part of a PMMs job is managing without authority. Often, PMMs rely on shared resources or centralized teams to get their job done. I have found three things work really well in managing without authority. They are all hard and take time, but they are effective. First, invest the time in building a relationship with your cross functional partners. If someone knows you and likes you, they are going to be much more open to any feedback you have. They are also much more likely to prioritize your requests. Second, create a shared vision for success. Every ...

I believe that the ability to build relationships with stakeholders and influence others is key to being a successful PMM. As you've noted in your question, due to the nature of our role PMMs are often drivers of very cross-functional projects, which involves co-ordinating peers and potentially people more senior than you too.  Really, it comes down to all the classic relationship-building things: * Build trust - spend time with the people you need to influence (and not just when you need something!), be helpful and reliable, do what you say you will, ask for their input and feedb...

You’re right that as PMMs it’s often impossible for us to get our work done without work from another team, often multiple other teams. Part of my advice for doing this well is a critique of the way you’ve worded your question. I don’t see myself, or my team, as “managing” people who don’t report to me. We’re partnering with them. We should have shared goals, a shared vision for what we’re trying to accomplish, and equal motivation to get it done. If we don’t, that team is just doing a favor for the product marketing org and that work will get quickly deprioritized if something more pressin...

Product marketers often end up in the position of “dotted line” managers/stakeholders for many functions — design, writing, research (to name a few). What’s worked for me in the past is two-fold:  * Influence: For every function that feels like a “dotted line”, it’s important to build a close relationship with the leaders for those functions. This relationship enables you to freely exchange ideas, maintain alignment on priorities, operate efficiently, and set expectations between teams. If things between us go sideways, a strong relationship feels less like an escalation an...

It starts with aligning on common goals - what I find people get lost is in the "how" we get there. In business, we can all agree on goals that are like motherhood and apple pie - like revenue or cost savings. Hard to argue with those. Once you get aligned on that, then start with understanding what the recommended path is to get there. It could be what you're pitching or it could be something else. As long as you stay grounded in the shared goal, the rest is a lot easier, in my opinion. 

Like most cross-functional work, the most important thing is to build trust and establish shared goals early on. Instead of delegating work, involve them in your process, provide them with proper context, and agree on timelines where applicable. They will be much more motivated to help if they have the same context and can be part of the journey. When giving feedback, make sure to provide the why and take a step back when necessary to ground your discussions around objectives, guardrails, and who should be the decision maker for what. There are going to be scenarios where you and your count...

You will need to win their respect and trust. To do that you need to...  * know your stuff * be humble * give ample positive feedback * understand their agenda and help them advance it * take personal responsibility for everything that goes wrong, and emphasize the team contribution over your own for everything that went right * criticize in private, while using "I" instead of "You" statements but be unmistakably clear in your feedback. Don't leave room for ambiguity and always criticize the work, not the person) * don't take yourself too seriously * be ready to admit mist...