Product Marketing Stakeholders

I know that this is sometimes an incredible challenge. I think the challenge specifically is around balance. A balance between: What are metrics indicative of your business / GTM goals? AND What you can control? This requires leadership buy-in from multiple groups — ideally they would understand Marketing and Product Marketing (this is not always the case!) Based on Your Goals, I would then identify metrics. Some examples below: * GTM / Revenue Initiatives —> Before and After Analysis (ideally based on something specific) * Content —> Content Metrics  * Support —> NPS 

Hopefully I don't make this answer overly complex.  I think the more important question here is what are you actively working on? Because product marketing can cover such a wide variety of activities and tactics, we can't exactly tell you which metrics would be important.  Greg Hollander and Derek Pando both had great insights to share when they spoke on a panel about the topic of prioritization in product marketing. The key takeaway there is to know what the greater organizational goals are, and align yourself where it makes the most sense for the impact you can have.  Example: Your company has great awareness and lots of leads, but isn't closing enough deals. In this case, there are lots of different factors that could be contributing to the funnel leak (people entering but falling out). As a product marketer it may fall to you to understand why this is happening and address the problem.  For the sake of simplicity, let's say that you have great demo show rates but don't convert these into customers at the rate that you think you should be. Assuming that the prospect knows your pricing and terms ahead of time, this likely points to your demos being bad. Bad could mean a lot of things so it will require further analysis. Are your sales people doing enough discovery? Are they talking about things that actually matter to the prospect or are they just reciting from a script? In this fantasy scenario, with the information that you've been given, it's probably fair to assume that a good metric for you to track would be increase in conversion rate. 

Definitely echo the fact that Product marketing KPIs need to keep evolving with the focus that the organization currently has.  At Amplitude, we have come up with some strong *impact* metrics that the PMM function owns. Each metric is shared with a different team in the org: * Product Launches: # of deals closed where we had atleast 1 newly launched product add ons/packages purchased by customers. Our stretch goal for Q1 this year is 50% of all deals. Sidenote: this is a shared metric with the Product team and incentivizes them to work very closely with PMMs * Thought Leadership: # of opportunities influenced by original (often gated) content from the Product Marketing team. Shared metric with Marketing * Enablement: ACV and Win Rate - this is shared with the Sales & team and is a longer term, strategic metric. But in the near term, we track strategic deals with specific account-based interventions that the PMM function is making and their win rate  Would love to hear reactions to our frameworks from PMMs out there!

Agreed with the other answers about aligning impact with focus areas for the business as a whole. Though I also like to have some consistent metrics to be able to see some longer term trends. There's a separate thread here that dives into PMM metrics: https://sharebird.com/are-there-any-broad-metrics-you-guys-track-as-pmms Some good points there about the combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics, and even quantifying some of that qualitative feedback.

Full disclosure - I work for Highspot - but we do use our own platforrm and one of the benefits of it is that we can see usage and buyer enagement analytics for all of the content we create. It's a quick and easy way for us to determine what's working, what is being used (or valued) the most and also connect content performance with CRM data to understand how content is driving sales velocity, conversion, and quota performance.

Curious to know if there are any metrics that the Product Marketing function is accountable for any metrics? I know there is such a wide variety of jobs that Product Marketers do, but for example, if trial conversion or adoption purely owned by the Product Marketing function, or are all the metrics shared with other teams? 

That's a great question. It depends a lot on the product of course. There are some products that lend itself to a soft launch before we put any marketing effort behind it in which case quantifying marketing impact is pretty straightforward. More generally, I'm a fan of PMM and PM co-owning several metrics. You can't parse which side drove what share of the metric but if you have a good partnership that shouldn't matter. And having that lens means a PMM should care deeply about whether we're bringing the right product to market (or what could we do to make it more successful). And conversely that means the PM should care if we're positioning the product in a way they feel like can make the product long term successful. The end goal is the product generally speaking hits its OKR which should be the north star anyhow.

Recently PMM has been very involved with top-of-funnel marketing and campaigns, so a lot of the typical metrics you might suspect in a campaign are ways we measure success for these (Leads, MQLs, MQL>Opp conversion, Opportunities generated). For more middle & bottom of funnel content - we use a tool called Pathfactory (content tracks of content) that allow for visibility into what content is being sent out by sales, what is getting viewed, how much time spent on assets, and having this link in with opportunities influenced in Salesforce, which gives us a sense of revenue impact. Separately, this quarter, we're focused heavily on partnering with Sales Enablement to impact a very particular layer of the sales funnel where we were seeing the highest levels of drop-off (early discovery/pain). In focusing on this, we're working on additional tooling in SFDC to capture what is impactable vs non-impactable reasons (impactable by SE/PMM training). Once breaking out the impactable %, we're focusing our efforts this quarter on activities/trainings/content that supports for early "Why Change" opening perspective messaging (via slides or whiteboard), additional discovery training/questions refinement, and a revised First Call Deck that provides more wide-angle messaging beyond product features (cliche, but check out Andy Raskin on Medium). The goal here is to zoom in on an early-stage in the Sales cycle where we're experiencing dropoff and seeing opportunity and measure the imporvement we're able to have here through a quantifiable metric.  

While there is no "one size fits all" metric that works for product marketing, my recommendation is to try to align your goals with either sales, demand gen, or product depending on what you're working on. Ideally, you'll have explicitly shared goals with one or more of the cross-functional teams you're working with. This ensures everybody is optimizing for the same outcome. For a new product launch, I'll typically have a shared adoption goal with product and/or an attach rate goal (percentage of customers using the product/feature) with sales.  I'd also caution against only prioritizing work that can easily be attributed to ROI. Product marketing is responsible for driving a lot of initiatives (naming products, customer research, market research, etc.) that don't have an immediately measurable impact on leads or pipeline - but that work is still important. 

The question comes up a lot in product marketing. It is particularly challenging when you are in a product marketing role or on projects that lean heavy into influence or when your organization is stacked with channel owners. Simply put- there is no one metric that suits all product marketing.  That said, at the outset of any project, it is critical to discuss what the hypothesis or goal of the work is and how you intend to measure the success of the outcome. Since product marketing is cross functional, I'd look to align goals and outcomes around known or proxy metrics and I'd urge communication- consistently + often around them.  

1. Sales win rate, more specifically competitive win rate Make sure that you're reps are populating a "primary competitor" field in your CRM so you can track this effectively. You'll then be able to track win rates over time and show how your efforts to enable your team with competitive content is driving you win rates up.  2. Influenced deals Is your PMM team responsible for things like customer references, creating custom content (ie. decks or leave behinds), or generally brought in to help on strategic deals? If so, add a special field to Opportunities in your CRM so you can mark when you've "influenced" a deal. This will give you an additional way to show how your work, especially ad-hoc requests, are influencing revenue.  3. Sales confidence Distribute a quarterly survey to the sales team asking them to rank their confidence in the ways you support them. Some ideas are: 1) competitive enablement 2) collateral and 3) product positioning and messaging. 4. New product revenue If you're launching a new product or service offering, track revenue during the first 30-60-90 days since this is largely a result of your GTM launch.  A bonus tip that's less of a measurable metric: any time someone praises your team, like a sales rep, department leader, customer, etc. grab a screenshot of that shit and save it all somewhere. It can never hurt to have social proof that your team is killing it. 

At HubSpot we have a “master” positioning guide that exists for every core product and is shared on a central wiki that everyone can access. This positioning guide helps inform the work of marketers, sales enablement, and many other customer-facing teams. To ensure alignment we work closely with these other teams, such as sales enablement, to build assets like “Demo Like a Pro” that carry our positioning and messaging and transform it into an actual sample demo from a sales rep. This is just one example, but we typically carry this across departments to ensure messaging stays consistent.

Generally, product marketing creates messaging guides for new products, features, pricing, campaigns, company positioning, etc. While develop the messaging guide, we typically solicity input from other teams and individuals including product management and other marketers like communications/brand, demand gen and marketing leadership. As the messaging gets near final we do a final review with sales enablement, our sales advisory council (a handful of individual reps and saleas managers) and finally with sales/revenue leadership.   We then roll-out at one of our weekly or bi-weekly all sales meetings and/or share at the team lead meetings for more in depth Q&A and objection handling. Typically, the messaging guide comes with supporting customer facing slides, talk tracks, etc. We re-inforce through an on-line learning tool to make sure folks internalize the messaging.

I mentioned in another post that I have come up with a structured process for messaging development. with my team of product managers and product marketers, I work through a series of questions that force us to define and articulate our differentiation. This results in a number of messaging framework and source messaging documents that we hand off to the Marketing and Sales teams. We see these types of documents as foundational - the North Star for how we tell our story. Other marketing teams extend that messaging into demand gen campaigns, and our Sales teams pick up our pitch decks and marketing collateral to present to prospects. Ensuring commercial team alignment is tricky because it's fundamentally about dissemination (Confluence, newsletters, G-Drive, etc), training (both live and on-demand), and repetition (going on sales calls and using it over and over again). Messaging guides are a critical product marketing deliverable - they are foundational -- but a series of hands-on training and reinforcement on a per-deal-level are required to get a larger organization on-board.

In my view, the whole point of messaging guides is that they are shared as widely and as openly in your organization as possible. We actually keep a "launch tracker" document (google sheets file) that has the latest on every launch we're planning. This document is publicly available and very widely distributed. We link to the positioning guide for the new product or set of features there. In addition, we've built really strong relationships with counterparts in Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success, so we are regularly communicating across a wide number of forums (team trainings, slack channels, in person meetings with leadership, etc) and share or point to key documents like messaging guides in these meetings. Unfortunately, in my experience, there is no 'silver bullet' to communicating to large audiences - having lots of channels and repetition is really key.  I think the other thing to keep in mind is having your messaging guide be a format that is really easily digestible. We use a format that actually summarizes the goal of the campaign or launch really nicely upfront, then gets into the messaging, and towards the bottom goes into more of the nitty gritty research on the market, trends, competition, etc. We've gotten good feedback that the format is pretty easy to consume, and I think that goes a long way in getting the message out there. 

One thing I try not to do is share content or messaging without walking the person I want to get feedback from through the context and purpose live on a call/zoom. Sending something over for feedback without the right context can be disastrous...especially if they share with others and expand any confusion/dissent to others.  I will typically walk them through a google slide or doc with what we're trying to move towards and then offer them the opportunity to provide feedback live or in the doc once they've had some time to think about it.  Always try to prove why the messaging you're recommending is the right approach with proof points...these can be based on surveys, customer/analyst feedback, A/B or some testing framework, market movement, etc.  If your internal teams see the context for why you're moving in a specific direction and the proof points that support what you're trying to do then it will go a long way in getting their support/alignment. 

What I’ve learned from great leaders who are able to inspire and motivate is to gain consensus before you walk into the room. This is pretty much how I have shared messaging guides internally to ensure alignment. If you are really starting from scratch, hosting a workshop to hear everyone’s opinions works well. If you are adding value to something that already exists, have 1:few meetings to get specific feedback on voice, tone, choice of words, etc. Then, share it more broadly at a team meeting. Then share it with all leaders in Rev org. Then share it with C-level, backing up how much consensus you’ve already built and the alignment that’s been established.

We are still working on refining our process here, however, our usual process is to attend the commercial team all-hands to notify them of any new messaging guides and materials and then we record a more in-depth Loom video that walks through the messaging in more detail and with more nuance. We house these looms in a Sales Library in Notion. By recording it, reps and CSMs can review it more than once if needed in their own time. It also doubles as great onboarding material. We have a system to ensure everyone consumes the content.

There are many stakeholders when it comes to competitive intelligence and aligning messaging and product strategy with competitive differentiation. I have found an effective model where PMM is the the driver, although any of the contributors could also drive. Regardless, it is a joint effort across at least PMM, PM, Presales and Sales Enablement (some larger enterprises like IBM have dedicated, centralized competitive program offices). As the driver, PMM can focus on arming the sales team with up-to-date tools (e.g. battle cards) to win, ensuring marketing can land us in competitive evaluations, and ensuring the roadmap continues to reinforce our competitive differention.

Ideally, your brand positioning pillars are unique enough individually or in combination with each other that competitive positioning is baked in. Effectively enabling sales is about educating them on the landscape and competitive buckets (read answer above re: putting all your competitors into distinct categories you can more generically position against). Then when it comes to your Tier 1 competitors, it's all about training the sales team and making battlecard content super easy to find. Bring the energy, show them a side-by-side demo if you can to give them confidence, and personalize your competitive differentiation for each sales role (e.g. SDRs need a one-liner, Senior AEs may need you to explain product differentiators). That, combined with compelling assets, is a winning strategy. You can measure effectiveness of competitive positioning at different stages of the funnel. For example, if you have competitive landing pages you could A/B test messaging changes to see if there's a lift in conversion. Further down-funnel (this takes more time), you can do before-and-after analysis of competitive win/loss rates.

I believe competitive research should always be part of the process when you develop your core messaging, but it’s important to not get too hung up on your competitors, you can easily lose sight of what your own customers care about. (Also, who is to say that their messaging is better than others?) I usually build a competitive positioning matrix where I will have at least 2 rows for each competitor: “We help you”, and “so you can” (But use what version works best for you)--- and then go through competitor websites/content/materials to gather what statements they use to answer each of those. This helps to look at your competitors’ positioning in a more uniform way. Then add a column for your company and your own statements - and in the simplest, easiest way this should give you an idea of how you differentiate at a high level. Enabling sales on competitive intel is a whole topic on its own, but here are a few tips on how to do it effectively: * Make it easy to find - so have a centralized location where you can point people to. * Share the links, and share it again, and again over time. * Have quick, TL;DR versions of all your competitive intel docs (but also keep detailed documentation if anyone wants to dig into something more specific). This can be in the form of battle cards or simple FAQs that you can publish internally * There are certain tools that allow you to publish information like this within platforms like SFDC or slack - where people already look for information * Create short videos and see if people find it easier to listen than read * It’s not always enough to just create these materials. It often helps to do regular competitive readouts with the sales team so you can have a more interactive conversation and help answer specific questions. And here are few tips on how to test if it's resonating with your buyers * Run test campaigns against your control messaging across different marketing channels to see how it performs (Paid, Social, Email, website A/B tests, Sales pitches, etc.) * Talk to your sales team, run pilots, listen to gong calls, sit in on sales calls, etc. * Test in-product messaging * Run quantitative studies, interviews, focus groups, etc * Test it with analysts.

Competitive differentiation should make up the pillars of your messaging and value proposition. The reason being is that most markets are crowded and customers can choose from many alterntatives, so your differentation needs to be clearly articulated across the buyer's journey. To understand your competitive differentiation you can conduct buyer persona research, closed won research, analyze Gong calls with high ACVs, speak to reps and customer success teams, and really hone in on determining 1) What pain points are you solving for your buyers and 2) What makes you the "only" one? (see onlyness test here ) A couple ways to know if your messaging and value proposition is landing with your buyers 1. Market research messaging testing  2. A/B Test is through marketing channels (paid, email, website)  3. A/B Test it with SDRS in their outreach sequences 4. Present it to your customer advisory board (or similar) to see if it resonates 5. Test it with Analysts 

Competitive differentiation is what forms your positioning and what you build your messaging around. With how crowded every market category is now its essential to nail your differentiation and then communicate it through your messaging and the rest of the go-to-market. Enabling sales effectively requires making the competitive information actionable and easily digestible. Whether you’re creating battlecards, sharing competitive updates in Slack, or leading a competitive play sales training distill it down to the key points and bring it to life with examples with what worked in deals. Finally to test if your messaging is resonating you can: * Test copy across competitive campaigns and landing pages * Look at competitive win rates before and after competitive enablement * Sit in on sales call or listen to call recordings to see how competitive messaging points are resonating * Ask industry analysts for feedback

The answer here is in the question. My approach to differentiation starts with understanding why the product or service you're responsible is uniquely suited to a specific customer. And then focus on what makes you great, not what makes others less good. Too many companies (including a few I've worked with) focus too much on the question of "how do we compete against X competitor?" This creates a backwards-looking mentality and you're always in reactive mode. I will say it's my favorite thing to compete against someone who's more concerned about me than I am about them... they can chase my message all day, and all I have to do is worry about making customers wildly successful. Way more fun. How do you know if it's working? If sales are up, win rates are strong, average deal size is up, and the competition is starting to talk about you more? It's working. 

Competitive positioning is a key component of defining core messaging. If we sit down and come up with copy on how to best describe our offerings, a key step is to compare that against how competitors describe themselves. You’ll likely be hit with an unpleasant surprise that about half your copy has already been used directly or indirectly by competitors. Some words might be well-adapted lexicons that prospects associate competitors with. Developing your positioning and messaging without this key insight would lead to bad outcomes. I always try to find words we can “own” in the prospect’s mind when associating the value to our products and brand. These words should be unique from the competitor’s identity and still be aligned with the prospect’s language. We try to stay away from feature differentiators and focus on how we help customers solve the problem in a better way. The most effective forms of training for sales are role play sessions combined with learning materials as everyone learns and retains information differently. Salespeople in different segments (SMB, MM, Enterprise) may need different forms of enablement to drive meaningful results. Testing your messaging with potential target buyers from interviews or tools like Wynter is the best way to confirm if your positioning is on-target.

Great question! I'll start with saying Klue has a phenomenal blog post on this topic I'd encourage you to read. But to your question, most will try to differentiate off features. In most cases this will lead to a conversation about value -- and in a crowded market is really difficult to truly differentiate in this case. There are some tactical things you can pursue to drive differentiation: * Social Proof * Lean-in to aspects of your solution that customers rave about! I've seen this be everythign from the sales team/process, to customer support team, implementation, education, and more. I call all those out just to say it's important to think outside our product as well. * Competitive content - while it's tactical, if you have a comparison page it enables you to tell a story about how your different -- and not just about features. * Brand - This is the ultimate differentiation, but it's not an overnight fix. Consider what's unique about the attributes of your company, and lean-in to building your brand around that which will give prospects a clear view of your company.  Beyond the above, it's really about storytelling and messaging. Instead of just thinking about how your product is different from compeition, think about the changes your prospects are experecing in their day-to-day and tell a compelling story around that -- and then educate them on how to win, with your product.

Our competitive differentiation is central to our overall company/product positioning. They're almost the same thing. We have a high-level view of our position in the market vs other categories of tools, and a deeper view of the specific capabilities that make us unique.  Enabling sales is a constant function of updating self-serve resources, delivering training, and sharing major intel. good luck!

With messaging, the one thing that I always push my team to think about is what’s unique to Shopify that no one else can own. Can someone slap their brand on top and say the same things? If so, the messaging and positioning is not good enough. We want to ensure that we are sharing what is most valuable to our business and that no one else can claim.

I have a few lenses that I look through for competitive differentiation: 1. The Positioning Canvas -- I mentioned this in an earlier question, but it's worth repeating the effectiveness of April Dunford's Obviously Awesome positioning canvas (must reading for any Product Marketer). With this methodology, you and your team will go through an exercise of defining 'competitive alternative' -- the task here is to identify what customers would use if you did not exist AND to look inwards at what unique attributes you have that your competitors do not. Highly recommend using this as part of your competitive differentiation exercise. 2. Company Strategy -- Many people think competitive differentiation is limited to product. It's not. I like to look at competitive differentiation through a combination of (1) product strategy, (2) GTM strategy, and (3) operational strategy. Often, you can find -- or create -- differentiation in one or multiple of these areas. One way I've put it all together is to develop a 'Buyer Consideration Attribute' map and workshop strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis competition on the most important attributes. <-- Informed by Blue Ocean Strategy (another must read) Once you have a good thesis on competitive differentiation, it's time to document it and enable as many relevant teams as possible. Not just sales. Product management and engineering needs these insights to inform their roadmap. Marketing needs these insights both for messaging strategy and in determining other GTM elements like channel, audiences, and more. And then, yes, Sales and customer success needs easy-to-understand and easy-to-take action enablement so they have 20/20 vision of who they will be up against in deals and so they know how to navigate conversations....and win deals.

There are probably three major questions to answer when operationalizing a GTM plan: What is the governance? Meaning who is in charge? What is the division of labor? Who holds what decision rights (e.g., decide, influence, escalate)? When do you scale? There are two broad options: launch-and-learn or test-and-scale. In a launch-and-learn model, scaling happens first as the commercialization comes online across the enterprise at once. Learning then occurs after rollout and across the enterprise. This type of GTM implementation makes sense in a low-risk, high-resilience situation. In a test-and-scale model, the innovations come online in pockets and pilots. Pilot learnings inspire changes to the plan, and the finalized plan is rolled out in waves. The test-and-scale model makes sense for implementing a commercialization strategy when external and internal resilience is low. It also makes sense when resilience is high but risk is also high. And, last you need a framework. In either scaling framework, what is the cadence of activities over the course of the implementation? I've used a 4-step process successfully: 1) Act on the plan 2) Measure the actions’ results 3) Share and discuss the results 4) Adjust the plan

One of the biggest risks of operationalizing a GTM plan is the lack of a common understanding of the time it takes to do good marketing work, internally. Marketing shouldn't slow down product; but at the same time, the more time and advance notice marketing has, the more we're able to enrich, adapt, and customize a GTM plan appropriately. A GTM playbook is a best-case scenario and a guideline which has to be adapted rapidly and practically to the lead time available. The marketing team for WordPress.com is relatively new (around 5 years old for a product almost 15 years old), and speed is very important to product development and serving millions of existing customers. Our engineering teams are pushing to production several times or even dozens of times a day, and so we have to work together to make sure we give sufficient time to amplify the great work they're doing with existing and prospective customers. Ideally we're involved as soon as it's known the product team is preparing a feature or change for launch, so we can identify the channels, messaging, and timing needed to market the work as soon as it's ready to ship to production. We don't use formal documents like a market requirements document, but I've documented and communicated top elements of that process the engineering team should be thinking about when they're preparing a feature for development, and it's an exercise they can go through at kickoff instead of when the feature is ready to test or launch. We can partner with them to identify any gaps, or help answer those questions, and then come up with a realistic GTM strategy with the time available.  Here's an excerpt of the exercise I shared internally: We’re building a feature or product to solve a problem or do a job for customers, and then tell as many of the right customers as possible that we’ve solved it for them. - What product or feature is being developed? Focus on user perception and usage – features, needs, usability, methods of usage. How does it apply to customers of the entire family of Automattic products? - Who are the target customers? What user behavior, demographics, or other attributes do they have? How might they be different? Does this apply to current or prospective customers, or both? A subset of customers? - Why are customers likely to want this product/feature? (aka: what problem does this solve for the user? Why would they ‘hire’ it to do a job?) - When will the product be available? How much detail can you share about the timing? Can you include any ballpark dates or checkpoint dates which could be helpful for those involved to know about? - Any pricing-related information? Is the feature being added to a plan? Does it replace a paid feature, lower a plan price, or change the potential revenue from a sign-up?

I'll answer this from the aspect of a GTM plan for pricing and packaging changes. The top 3 areas to identify and mitigate risk around include: 1) RISK: Did you get the Price/Packaging right?   * Does the price and what's included in the packaging resonate with the buyer?  * Is the price point in the ball park of what the customer is looking for and relative to alternative solutions? MITIGATION PLAN: Get input from customers, prospects, analysts and advisors in advance of the change and GTM roll-out. 2) RISK: Are your revenue teams (sales, CS, renewals, etc.) properly enabled? MITIGATION PLAN: Make sure that you have all the mesasging, positioning and sales tools ready for the teams. Ensure that you have enablement/training time setup with all the teams. Certify them on the new packaging/pitch/pricing. Makes sure they are ready for objection handling and questions from customers and prospects. 3) RISK: Impact to existing customers (vs. net new) MITIGATION: Map all of your existing customers to new packaging and understand difference in existing pricing and new pricing. Ensure that you have a plan for the timing of when existing customers will go to the new packaging? Will they transition immediately, or wait for renewals? Will you let existing customers grandfather on the old packaging and/or pricing? Are there contractual limitations on what you can change?

Great question. There could be many reasons why a GTM plan is deemed risky. Perhaps because a lot is hinging on a product launch, or a risky marketing campaign and the riskiest of all - you as a PMM are not completely on board with the product. (The later should not happen but it has happened to many us, I assume) IMO, the key is to  1. Over-communicate: Define a DRI, make sure every stakeholder is involved, follow a decision-making model such as the one I mentioned above (RACI model).  2. Plan plan plan: Have a mitigation plan B ready if your original plan fails, or perhaps even a Plan C if Plan B fails. For a recent launch campaign we did on Indiegogo, we had Plan Bs for every major marketing activity. 

1. Making assumptions about pricing and not vetting them with sales VERY early in the process 2. Assuming that its a 'handoff' to sales enablement vs in reality its an ongoing partnership where PMM needs to lean in quite a bit to help 3. Not factoring in global requirements VERY early on and discovering late in the game that its not just a 'localization' issue that will handled by the 'local' teams 4. Not factoring in migration or EOL requirements and just focusing on the new, shiny products. Customers have more heartburn about migrations than marketers account for. Be ready for that, and factor that heavily into operationalization

This is a great question because, as every PMM knows, each launch holds a surprise hiccup. If you can mitigate as much risk as possible before that time comes, then you’ll be successful in solving those last minute snafus. Assuming your marketing brief and GTM plan are finalized and approved, a successful GTM execution comes down to organization, stakeholder alignment and (the hardest one!) seeing around corners. Here are the riskiest components in each of those categories and how to mitigate that risk: 1. Lack of organization: * Misaligned plans * Losing track of documents and creative files * Overly tight timelines * Rehashing previous conversations How to mitigate: Keep a source of truth document (or spreadsheet, my personal favorite) where you track every single launch component, including status and timeline, meeting notes, resources, channel plans and assets, launch day tick tock and more. 2. Missing stakeholder alignment: * Vague R&R * Lack of resourcing * Unclear expectation-setting How to mitigate: Bring your cross-functional and marketing partners along for the journey by pulling them in at key strategic milestones when you’re creating your plan, then holding regular status meetings up until launch through to a post-mortem. 3. Not seeing around corners: * Lack of familiarity with the deployment tech * Broken user journeys * 11th hour feedback How to mitigate: This one tends to be company-specific, so ask your colleagues about unexpected day-of discoveries on previous launches and then prepare for those specific scenarios. Also, it never hurts to build a buffer into your timeline and have an extra set of eyes on the creative before it goes out the door.

Operationalizing a go-to-market strategy is not for the faint of heart. There’s a lot that happens between writing the doc (see narrative above) or slides and executing the strategy in the market. Here’s my list of the riskiest elements and how I solve for them. First, team alignment. In my experience, aligning the team is the trickiest element because the amount of stakeholder voices expands seemingly exponentially the closer you are to launching your GTM activities. This is just as true for the early stage pre-product market fit startup as it is for the hyper-growth, more mature company. My solution for this is constant cascading communications. The job of the Product Marketer is often to ensure that everyone is rowing in the same direction, so make sure that you are communicating often and bringing people into the process early.  Like the above question about GTM plan fundamentals, I find that writing out the GTM plan in narrative form is extremely helpful, both for clarity of thought and as a handbook for new people joining the GTM process. I also find that consistent adoption of OKRs is a great way to help ensure the alignment of activities. Like many companies, we use OKRs at GitLab as a way to align our team activities with the company strategy and with each other. The process of creating, debating, calling out dependencies, and tracking progress is, itself, a way to create clarity on both what we are trying to achieve in our GTM strategy, how we will accomplish it, and who will take ownership of which roles and responsibilities. Second, data data data. A key success factor is ensuring that everyone on the go-to-market team (marketing, sales, customer success…everyone) is using the same data, is following the same KPIs, and is looking at the same dashboards.  Third, the market is not a constant – just as you are evolving and operationalizing your GTM, so are your competitors. It’s like when you look at a star in the sky, you are really seeing the light that emanated in the past. So too is the case with your GTM plan that was based on where your competition was at a previous point in time. My solution: tight feedback loops throughout the GTM team. This is an area that small companies have an advantage - since their teams are small, they can more easily have all the people in the room or zoom giving feedback on every aspect of the GTM process. While easier in a small company, tight feedback loops can work at scale if they are engineered into the process. I once rolled out a new positioning strategy in the market and learned that it was ineffective (see metrics answer above). While it was a bummer that the original positioning wasn’t effective, I was proud of the team for developing this insight quickly, rapidly rolling it back, and then iterating based on what we learned.

Almost every launch has something unexpected arise not matter how much you plan. To me, the riskiest items are the ones that might be harder to change or adjust post-launch. 1. Making sure there is product market fit is make or break. By that I mean, the buyer you've identified has a clear pain point and the product that was build addresses that pain point. I've seen launches across different companies struggle because a product was built before fully understanding the buyer need. 2. Lack of alignment on decision makers can derail a launch plan. If decisions makers and decisions that have been made aren't clearly communicated, you could accidentally move forward with the wrong GTM plan without even knowing. I've used the RACI matrix structure to define rolls as well as RAPID. It's not a very sexy topic, but can be highly effective. 3. Pricing is another risky item. If you don't properly research and test your pricing, your product could be underpriced (losing you money), overpriced (causing adoption issues), or could even have the wrong pricing model. 

The biggest risk I typically see in GTM strategies is that it doesnt work. Somewhere, something was missed, or the messaging, product, etc. doesnt resonate with prospects and customers. ' I have found that your webiste is a great place to experiment to ensure this doesnt happen. It has historical data to anaylze various aspects of your GTM strategy including verticals, personas, messaging, sales motions, customer marketing, etc. Training the org is another big risk. If there is a new revenue-driving feature that CS/CSMs/SEs dont know how to technically talk about or sell, that new feature will fall flat.

The most risky operationalizations in a GTM strategy to me are spray and pray (homogenous) campaigns, broad (not segmented nor sophisticated/suppressed, not segmented (targeted) and not timely (saturated). Basically, if you are not intentional with your outreach that is a huge risk and you'll end up as noise, spam, or worse - blacklisted (and that is a huge risk).

  I start by developing a Go-To-Market strategy that identifies the business objective of the launch campaign and articulates the in-focus audience. Once I know what I need to accomplish and who I'm talking to, then I can think about the best channels to land that message. The channels should be tailored to the behavior of your users, so that you can meet them in the right place, at the right moment, with the right message. If you are unsure of which channels are most appropriate, Journey Mapping can be a helpful tool to identify those key moments and media. Once you have a proposed strategy, it is helpful to vet it with channel owners to make sure they are aligned and to get any additional insights they have to offer around how to most effectively leverage their channel.    

Identifying and prioritizing channels to reach your target audience is key to any product launch. Typically, my channel goal is to surround the audience with a repeated, salient, and consistent message. Depending on the business objective (note to product marketers: clarify the business objective of your product launch first), the goal of a launch can be different from product to product. At times, the business needs to build awareness of your product in order to drive consideration and usage -- this is the most frequent objective. At other times, however, the business wants a product launch to drive a different corporate-level objective, such as positive sentiment or consideration for a broader solution. The first step of any product launch channel strategy is to identify your target audience(s) and, based on a deep understanding of them, identify the best ways to reach them. From this starting point, you can begin stitching together a channel strategy. People’s social and professional networks and media behaviors are complex, so we try our best to develop a comprehensive understanding of our target audience. Beyond their title, who is this person? What keeps them up at night? Where do they learn, get, and share information? What terms do they use when they search for a product similar to yours? How do they engage with channels such as email? Be sure to have a truthful answer for each of these questions -- as a cautionary tale, an IT executive recently told my team that he deletes ALL marketing emails at the beginning and end of his day. Ouch. For product launches, my team typically weaves together a mixture of ‘owned & operated’ (e.g. email, website), earned (e.g. press, analysts), social media, and paid channels with core content that can be integrated into each channel. We prioritize the channels that have the greatest likelihood of reaching our audience and motivating them to make the purchase consideration and decision journey. Laying all of these considerations out is part of the fun of creating a cohesive channel strategy.

In my answer to the “not all launches are created equal” question, I laid out some options for communications channels to pursue based on the tier that you assign a given launch. (This best applies to B2B SaaS organizations, since that’s the sector in which I’ve spent my entire career.) As far as demand generation or running paid campaigns goes, I don’t have personal expertise in those areas, so I can’t provide insight into how to choose advertising channels. But, the best thing you can do as a PMM if you don’t own that function is to give the people who do own it as much information as possible so they can make some decisions: all your persona research, your SWOT analysis, ideas for keywords to research, your competitor list, etc.

One question to start with is – is the goal to target existing customers or attract new ones (or both)? Then figure out where that audience is and how you can most effectively reach them.  Another is resourcing and scope - what can you pull off in the timeframe you have, and prioritize from there.  Another would be, do you want to experiment with new channels (and do you have the resources/risk appetite/budget)? For example, we have an upcoming launch and we're looking into new social channels: Instagram and TikTok. But we've made it a P1-2 priority. We're focused on the channels we know are effective for us and will make a game-time decision on TikTok if we have the bandwidth. 

Successfully launching a product these days is an undertaking that requires careful consideration and planning. A lot of factors go into deciding which channels to use for your launch campaign, but there are some key questions you need to ask yourself first: * What are the goals of my campaign? * Who do I want to reach with this campaign? * Where can I find them? * How much time and money do I have available for my marketing efforts? These are just a few of the many considerations you'll need to make before diving in. I start by thinking about the goal of the campaign and who I'm talking to. Then I think about which channels to use to reach them. You should make sure that you are using the right channels for your customers. This will help you meet them with a compelling message in a place they’ll actually see it. If you're not sure which channels are most appropriate, talk to some customers to find out what they need in different moments. Finally, discuss your plan with other people. They can tell you if they agree or have more advice on how to do it.

Audience. Know your audience. It's cliche. I'm still going to say it again - KNOW your audience. What/who influences them? Where do they get their information? What does the buying journey look like?  Prioritization comes down to your goals and any testing you've already done. This is more of an integrated marketing / campaign question, but an awareness play is very different from a mid to bottom funnel play.  Ah-ha moment: Sometimes, the reality is, the budget dictates the channels. That's okay too. Shoot for shareability!  

Try applying elements of the “t-shirt sizing” product methodology within your tiering process. For background, t-shirt sizing helps you map effort to impact. Typically, a team assigns points or t-shirt sizes ( i.e., XS to XXL) to represent a task’s relative effort/market impact. This helps illuminate team capacity, scope, impact, and ownership around projects. To parallelize this practice for product marketing, start by consulting your product manager with these standard questions (or tweak to your heart's desire): Does this feature/product… 1. Provide something our competitors don’t?  2. Solve a new buyer pain point? 3. Solve a new use case for an existing customer? 4. Introduce new functionality that changes customer workflows? 5. Improves functionality or performance of an existing customer workflow? 6. Change the User Interface (UI)? 7. Add new internal tasks/support requirements? For each question, apply a 0 (False) or 1 (True), then calculate the total to automate your corresponding launch tier: Tier 1: 6-7 points. - These are typically big launches that involve innovative, net new functionality that increases market share, domain authority and acquisition. Communication channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, external - email announcement, in-app post, social promotion, website update, sales/cs outreach template, blog post, explainer video/tour, pr/ar, newsletter, and co-marketing campaign if relevant, website update. Tier 2: 4-5 points. - These are typically medium launches with functionality that improves product market fit/net promoter score, retention and expansion. Communication channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, external - email announcement, cs/sales outreach template, in-app post, social, embedded tour, newsletter update, slide update, website update, help doc update. Tier 3: 2-3 points. - These are typically small launches with functionality that maintains market position, parity, and performance. Tier 4: 0-1 points. Communication channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, external - cs/sales outreach template, targeted email announcement, newsletter, help docs update. - These are typically your soft/quiet launches that don’t require broad messaging/awareness. (Pixel changes). Communicaiton channels should include but are not limited to: internal - slack announcement with positioning brief, cs outreach comm if relevant, help doc update. Channels will also change per targeted launch outcome: awareness, activation, adoption, advocacy.

Not necessarily. The goal is to ensure that for whatever initiative (launch, pricing, campaign etc) youre leading, the north star is clear, expectations from each member (or group) are clear, and the communication is very clear. The only group that usually 'needs' their own reskinned decks and docs are senior leadership. They usally get packaged updates that are much more streamlined with a focus on updates, risks and asks. If you have other stakeholders that are asking for their own format, Id encourage you sit down with them ask why. Its a huge burden on you to make multiple documents, so the best approach is to figure out a middle ground.   A few tips: * Before starting the project, get everyone's buy in on their role in the project. Use a RACI if that's the culture, or at least a simple document saying if someone is in the 'working team', 'approval team', informed/consulted team etc. This will ensure expectation management up front. If someone comes up later saying 'why wasnt I involved' you can show them the paper trail to explain no malintent * Drive home this divison of responsibility in your kickoff call (as in HAVE a kickoff call for sure) * Ensure that everyone involved is on the recurring meeting invite, Slack channel, Teams group, whatever you use for comms and accountability * If you have a top down culture, explicitly build in meeting cadences for review, approval, stakeholder feedback and call it what it is. Dont assume that people will know things, or pay attention 'offline' * Over communicate -- pre-meeting, agendas, status boards, recapss. Call out what's stakeholder relevant, whats not No easy way to do this, but its a lot of cat herding that if done well can drive massive organizational alignment.

Part of our jobs as PMMs is to drive alignment across teams of diverse stakeholders, all of which speak different languages, care about different things, and want to be approached in a specific way. When it comes to key strategic projects, I believe that tailoring your approach to meet the needs of your stakeholders is critical to achieve maximum success and collaboration! This could be as simple as reframing certain elements of a master deck/doc you’ve created for a key strategic project. Depending on who you’re communicating with, identify how you can adjust your project updates to ensure those particular stakeholders find your work important and valuable. For example, marketing may care more about how you helped them generate more high quality leads vs product may care more about product/feature adoption. No matter who it is you're communicating with, identify their key measures of success and think about how you can align your outcomes to their objectives.

Building a launch process from scratch is a big lift, but early work like identifying all stakeholders will set you up for success once things get rolling. I frame product launches as "commercialization" to anchor my thinking. To expand beyond a single word, this means we're making a new product or component available for people to buy. To identify the stakeholders required to accomplish that goal, rely on your customer's process as they go from problem awareness to activation and support. This approach gets bonus from me for creating a customer-centric mindset early in the launch process. Some high-level questions to start thinking about this: * How will customers and prospects become aware of the new offering? * How will customers and prospects express interest in the new offering? * How will customers buy the new offering? * How do customers get set up and trained on the new offering? * How will customers get help with the new offering once they are using it? Pro Tip: When you land on your initial stakeholder group, ask the team "Who else needs to know". This simple question helped me resolve a few gaps in the past that would have caused major issues downstream. Regarding changing stakeholders, the level of effort from different teams and functions will naturally shift over the course of a launch. Letting people check-in and check-out has led to dropped balls and miscommunications more times than I can count. Stakeholders should have enough invested in the entire commercialization effort that they want to be aware of the work going on. You can have information radiators for update communications to leaders, but silent observers don't add much value to launch project meetings.

The best way to identify the stakeholders is to identify the success metric for the launch, and then figure out who is directly responsible for hitting that metric. Typically your product manager is a stakeholder, but often you'll have a customer success/sales organization involved and also engineering. Stakeholders are also up and down the leadership chain so be sure to include the leaders of those who are directly responsible. Stakeholder changes are inevitable so I tend to learn on documentation to help smooth over the transitions when they happen. Do you have your messaging and positioning documents ready? Your marketing strategy? If so, anyone new coming into the launch will immediately be able to understand your plan and you won't need to spend lots of time ramping them up.

Product Launch is where all the magic happens. So many stakeholders have both vested interests and points of view of how the launch should be executed, but only Product Marketing has an end-to-end view of the product, go-to-market team, and the external market, so is best positioned to champion the process.  We've broken our launch into four phases where the first and last stages have the most stakeholders present, and the middle two have the fewest. What we've had success with understand that some roles just need to be informed when the launch kicks off. This can be a wide range of stakeholders who just need to be informed on just the facts - what are we launching, when are we launching it, what are the goals of the launch and what behaviors do we need to change to achieve our goals. The Phase 1 work here is about strategizing - where you need the business goals and objectives understood to really land your launch. Here is a great time to confirm who needs/wants to be a part of the execution "crew" through the next 2 phases.  With the kickoff in the rearview mirror, we narrow the audience to the people who have to go do the majority of the work to drive the launch, and we rely on our partners in Product Management, Demand Generation, Content Marketing, Sales Enablement, and Customer Success - teams that need to make sure the go-to-market team is ready to market, sell and support the change. A lot of the Phase 2 work here is about planning what to do and when to do it, and creating the content and context to equip, train and coach your teams.  Finally, there's the launch, when you can "push the button" on getting all the things you created to market. There it's effective to bring the same stakeholders you informed in Phase 1 back to the table to share learnings and close the loop.  We continue to iterate our launch motion, but it's becoming a strength for us as we've earned the trust of partner teams over the last 18 months. 

Product launches take a village to execute successfully! Start by defining your launch goals and plan. This will make it easier to identify your stakeholders, which can include individuals or groups that will be involved in the launch execution and/or impacted by the outcome of the launch. At Zendesk, we use a tiering system to determine the level of effort required to support a product launch and the stakeholders that will need to be involved. For example: * A tier 1 launch is typically reserved for brand new product offerings that will have a major impact on our customers or the business. A tier 1 launch would span many different stakeholders across product (e.g. product managers, engineering, pricing, etc), core marketing (campaigns, events, PR, SEO, brand, etc.) and GTM (enablement, pre/post solutions consultants, partners, etc.). * A tier 3 launch may be a smaller update to an existing product with minimal impact. As opposed to a tier 1 launch, a tier 3 launch would require less stakeholder involvement. We may pull in the web team for website updates, docs team for release note updates, email marketing, etc. As with most product launches, things are constantly changing! Involve your stakeholders early and often, and make sure to get their buy-in on the launch goals and the role they will play. Proactively and constantly communicating with your stakeholders makes it much easier to pivot if necessary as things change or challenges arise.

Great question! This is a common scenario for growing organizations. As a smaller PMM team, you'll have to work to set project priorities. This is not an easy tasks, but what helps is being transparent and communicative with your teams across Product, Sales, Marketing and others.  For growing organizations, work with your Sales Department to understand their biggest pain points and align on where you as a PMM can best support. Prioritize the feedback and the work you're able to take on vs what you might have to revist or commit to later. This conversation seems obvious, but keep having it. Set up recurring touchpoints (even if for 15min) to hold each party accountable to what was committed.  Finally - Be consistent and meet your deadlines. This is important when building a fostering trust across the organization. Trust is fundamental to establishing strong relationships. When working with your stakeholders be clear about expectations, deadlines, roadblocks, and deliverables.

Anchor on the highest priority for the company, versus any one team. One of the hardest but also most liberating things about product marketing is that we are an inherently flexible function. Our skillsets are diverse, so we can quickly get into formation behind whatever is most important and strategic to the company at any given point in time. This is our greatest strength (and, if handled poorly, our greatest weakness), so don't let it go to waste! If the most important initiative at the company is revenue, make yourself indispensable to sales by holding your team to sales targets. If it is building a revolutionary product, prioritize product. Whatever you do, do not try to be everything to everyone. That just results in a lot of "RAM" (random acts of marketing) that don't make clear to anyone what you're actually good for.

You have to align on what priorities you are working on and when. I even suggest having a sort of PMM roadmap. If you can get that agreed to at the leadership level then it will be a lot easier to have conversations with your stakeholders across teams. There are always going to be firedrills you have to jump on, but by driving alignment and visibility at the leadership level you can make sure those are the exception not the rule.

While it might be easy to find industry standards on the number of PMMs per stakeholder team, I find the better marker to be the number of products in the portfolio, segments served, geographies, or even industries. Small teams can pack a mighty punch if swim lanes are clear and roles and responsibilities are understood. For example, a PMM team of 3 with respective focuses on core product marketing (use cases, value props, enablement, release/launch, pricing, etc.) audience/portfolio marketing (segment, geo, new biz/customer, etc.), and competitive (differentiation, dispositioning, strategy) can serve a growing set of stakeholders effectively, and as the team proves value, will scale with the rest of the organization. 

PMM sits at the intersection of these various stakeholder teams and keeps them aligned. No matter how big or small your company is, you likely have similar stakeholders that you need to manage and communicate with. To be effective, product marketing needs to have a voice across the company. I’ve always found it valuable to forge trusting relationships with someone in sales leadership, product leadership, etc. Make sure you’re communicating with them on a regular basis. With product, catch up regularly on upcoming releases, voice of customer, strategic launches, etc. With sales, review performance, key customer wins, strategic campaigns, etc. Having a regular cadence with these teams while bringing them valuable insights and a unique POV will ensure PMM has a seat at the table.

This is going to vary widely by organization, and you'll find Jr. PMMs doing the same work in one organization that a director or even VP would in another.  That said, as a general rule, the more junior PMMs typically take on more tactical work. This can take many forms, but content creation, ghostwriting, babysitting the demand gen team and refreshing existing collateral are all at the top of the list.   At the other end of the spectrum, more senior folks are likely to be out of the office - evangelizing the company, meeting customers, influencing analysts and training senior sales people. They will spend more time interfacing with the executive team, both on portfolio messaging and corporate messaging and brand.    Your head of PMM will also spend a lot of time hiring, mentoring and training the PMM team. I've spent as much as 75-80% of my time doing that at various points in my career. 

This very much depends on the company and individual team lead vision so I will just chime in with what it is like at Square.   In general, PMMs at Square cover a wide range of responsibilities regardless of level. These responsibilities include: 1. Develop product or feature launch/ GTM strategy and plans, including positioning and messaging 2. Quarterback marketing and sales partners (e.g., paid marketing, SEO, content marketing, lead generation) to execute GTM and growth plans 3. Lead customer research and collaborate with PMs on product strategy and roadmap 4. Lead pricing and packaging recommendations Square is a multi-product company, so our junior PMMs tend to focus on one product to learn how to excel at the role. Senior PMMs start to cover more products. Additionally, junior PMMs are empowered on tactical executions, but important, strategic decisions like tent pole product launch strategies and pricing decisions are led by senior PMMs. As a team lead, I focus more of my time building and coaching my team, elevating the reputation of the function within our company, and weighing in heavily on product and business unit strategies.

Another avenue that some companies take, is the TYPE of PMM you are. So you can be a product marketer, a solution marketing, a segment marketer, a vertical marketer - these all still fall under the role of Product Marketing, but rather than focusing specifically on tacitical to strategy, they're also segmented more granularly on their individual focus. So a vertical PMM, may focus on everything across the portfolio, that relates to the banking industry, and tailors messaging, GTM motions, and enablement for that specific vertical. 

This can certainly vary depending on the company! Here are some examples of areas that would be owned by different product marketing levels based on my experience: Messaging & Positioning * PMM: Crafts messaging and positioning at capability/feature level with some coaching * Sr. PMM: Drives messaging and positioning at the product/feature level and coaches others on product/feature level positioning * Director: Drives messaging and positioning at the category level and ensures alignment across teams Sales enablement * PMM: Creates materials and conducts enablement sessions on sales fundamentals (e.g. first call deck, demos) * Sr. PMM: Orchestrates enablement initiatives and programs at the product level or across multiple features. Identifies opportunities to increase pipeline by collaborating directly with reps and sales leadership. * Director: A mix of strategic/tactical partner to sales leadership for their functional area. Ensures execution of sales-facing content and training. GTM strategy & execution * PMM: Plays a specific role in building GTM strategy and execution for area of focus (e.g. buyer, competitors) * Sr. PMM: Drives GTM strategy work across multiple products, features, or initiatives (e.g. pricing, narrative). Makes recommendations to optimize methodologies and processes. * Director: Ensures the success of the development of GTM strategy and responsible for their teams’ execution of GTM programs. Considers the portfolio strategy (e.g. where a particular launch strategy fits in amongst other launches). Makes recommendations to optimize methodologies and processes.

I love this question. I’ll step away from PMM for a minute and say - regardless of what function you’re in at a company, you should be championing yourself and your team constantly. People who ‘get ahead’ in business not only create value, they make sure others know that they create value. What makes PMM hard is that you don’t own a number -- there’s no clear attribution. You can’t say “at the end of Q2 we grew revenue by X% YoY” in the way a sales or DG team can. So you need to constantly be talking about what you are delivering and how you are partnering with teams who do own numbers. What are the channels for communication in your business? At Gainsight, Slack is a major channel. I post often to our Sales channel about projects we’re working on, things we’ve delivered, and I give kudos to others. I do so in a very clear and consistent way. Another idea is asking for your team to be a part of regular weekly business reviews with the Exec team (or asking to be featured one week) if they exist. There’s always some kind of exec alignment session that happens every week or month - find it at figure out who owns it and how to get on it. Also - this is part of your manager’s job (to both trumpet your work and figure out the right forums to do so) so ask them directly how you can get more visibility for you or your team’s work.

Marketing your accomplishments is critical! It is epecially important to align leadership expectations with reality since product marketing roles and responsiblities can vary greatly from business to business or even across products/BUs.  My team and I address this in a few ways. First, we share quarterly email updates with a broad distribution list. These emails include our topline priorities, related initiatives, shoutouts to our key stakeholders (since most of what we do is collaborative), learnings and pivots, as well as a link to an archive doc with all of our previous updates for easy reference. I also ensure my direct leadership is aware of our goals and accomplishments so they can know what we're focused on and can speak up when given the opportunity in higher level meetings. Finally, not leadership specific, but we are active on team slack channels sharing key activities across sales, marketing, and product teams in real time.

Tying your work to tangible outcomes, specifically those related to product growth and revenue, and socializing it has worked well for me. Here's my approach: Have a revenue-first mindset. Businesses exist to make money. One of the first questions I ask myself about any launch is "how can we leverage this to drive revenue?" Before getting strategic or tactical, I explore the different angles we could position or message the launch to drive revenue. Releases small, medium, and large have the potential for revenue impact.  Work backwards. When setting launch goals, I work backwards from the company goals, and map the connection so I know where tactical efforts and outcomes ladder up. This trail is helpful when communicating the value of your work, especially at the executive level.  Map your tactics to the growth framework of choice (flywheel, funnel...). This has worked really for me when presenting GTM plans and running reviews. Organizing your tactics into a strategic framework helps folks see all of the areas Product Marketing touches, understand what areas your work is contributing to and how it all works together.  Socialize wins and learnings. Beating your own drum brings visibility to your work while also increasing morale (wins) and knowledge (learnings) across the company.  Celebrate others. Spread the love and it will come back around to you. Word of mouth is a great internal marketing tool. I've found that when you celebrate and champion the work of others, they are more inclined to do it for you — which increases your visbility throughout the organization. 

Great question. At Zendesk, we do a lot of monthly/quarterly syncs with product leadership, sales leadership, marketing leadership, etc to discuss top programs and communicate achievements. Quarterly business reviews are another great way to share top wins and learnings. We also leverage supplemental channels like Slack, company/team all hands and our GTM newsletter. This can vary by company. To determine what works best for you and your team, you’ll need to figure out a way to speak the same language of the people that you’re trying to communicate with. Take the time to understand the priorities of your key stakeholders and executives so you can align your outcomes to their measures of success. Identify their communication preferences so you can establish a communication approach that best meets their needs. When you’ve taken these steps, it’s much easier to build visibility and communicate achievements in a way that resonates with your audience.