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Self-Serve Product Marketing
Self-Serve Product Marketing
4 answers
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.
Vice President, Product Marketing, Braze • March 10
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 ...
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • August 16
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...
6 answers
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Airtable • November 17
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...
Director of PMM, Ironclad • June 29
* 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!
VP of Product Marketing, Oyster® • September 27
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...
Product Marketing Lead, Plaid | Formerly Google • May 24
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...
Head of Product Marketing, LottieFiles | Formerly WeLoveNoCode (made $3.6M ARR), Abstract, Flawless App (sold) • July 23
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...
8 answers
Director of Brand and Product Marketing, Twilio.org, Twilio • July 16
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...
VP of Marketing, Builder.io • January 19
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...
Group Product Marketing Manager, Intercom • March 16
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 ...
Senior Director Product Marketing, Fivetran • April 12
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.
Product, Partner & Developer Marketing Leader, Samsara • June 28
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.
Head of Product Marketing, HiredScore • July 28
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.
8 answers
VP of Product Marketing, Oyster® • February 11
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, ...
Head Of Product Marketing, Redox • April 6
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.
Product, Partner & Developer Marketing Leader, Samsara • May 13
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...
Head of Growth Marketing, Clockwise • July 29
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...
Sr. Director Product Marketing, BlueVine • January 16
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.
Marketing, Magical • February 9
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.
Product Marketing, Trusted Health • May 25
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...
7 answers
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Airtable • November 17
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...
Head of Product Marketing, Calendly • August 10
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...
Sr. Director Product Marketing, BlueVine • January 17
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...
Director of Product Marketing, Bill.com • February 1
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...
Marketing, Magical • February 9
(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...
Chief Strategy Officer, Unbounce • May 9
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 ...
Head of Growth Marketing, Clockwise • May 22
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.
8 answers
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.
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki, Cisco | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • July 6
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
...
VP of Marketing, Blueocean.ai • July 8
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...
VP Product Marketing, Medallia • July 20
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...
VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce • July 27
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...
Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform, Atlassian • August 4
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 :)
Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • April 7
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 ...
Director of Product Marketing, SnorkelAI | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid • May 25
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.
5 answers
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Airtable • November 17
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...
Head of Product Marketing, Retool • June 24
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...
Sr. Director Product Marketing, BlueVine • January 18
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...
Marketing, Magical • February 10
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...
Product Marketing, Intercom | Formerly Glassdoor, Prophet, Kraft • May 3
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...
5 answers
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Airtable • November 17
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...
Head of Growth Marketing, Clockwise • July 29
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...
Sr. Director Product Marketing, BlueVine • January 17
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 ...
Marketing, Magical • February 9
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...
Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • April 7
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...
6 answers
Director, PMM - Support & Platform, Intercom • November 7
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...
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Airtable • November 17
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...
Head of Marketing, Cloud Enterprise & Platform, Atlassian • December 22
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...
VP Product Marketing, Box • July 20
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...
VP of Product Marketing, Salesforce • July 27
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...
Head of Product Marketing, Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • April 7
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...
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Head of Talent Acquisition, Strategy & Operations, Asana • October 15
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 ...
Director, PMM - Support & Platform, Intercom • November 8
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...
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Airtable • November 17
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...
VP, Product and Growth Marketing, 1Password | Formerly Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, LinkedIn • February 11
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...
Head (VP) of Global Enablement, Benchling • March 10
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...
VP Product Marketing, AppFolio • April 4
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...