Product Marketing Stakeholders

How do you align internal stakeholders as a product marketer?

4 answers

Product Marketing SME, AWS at Amazon • February 9

Internal alignment takes time. Here are a few recommendations for getting started and fostering strong relationships for the long term. First - it's important to recognize and write down who your stak

23 Saves

Kevin Garcia

Head of Product Marketing at Retool • October 6

Product marketers have to work with a lot of stakeholders! I always recommend two strategies for keeping internal stakeholders aligned—and they both require consistent work. I recommend rigorous docu

2 Saves

Molly Friederich

Director of Product Marketing at Sanity.io | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid • November 29

While this will depend on the company culture and existing relationships across stakeholders, there are first principles that I always find helpful. Crystalize your story and strategy first. Start b

2 Saves

Candice Sparks

Director of Product Marketing at Attentive • March 16

Getting stakeholder alignment is critical for the success of any project or initiative. I think this skill set is even more important to a PMM as a large part of the job is getting teams aligned on th

1 Save

Product Marketing

PMMs are typically tasked with a broad scope, balancing both strategic & tactical work and serving as the X-functional glue across multiple teams. How do you combat burnout for your team?

4 answers

Roopal Shah

Head (VP) of Global Enablement at Benchling • January 24

What a great question. One thing I do in almost all my teams is run them in agile sprints - they can be two weeks, three weeks, or monthly depending on the speed of business. As part of this, one thin

8 Saves

Eileen Buenviaje Reyes

VP, Product and Growth Marketing at 1Password | Formerly Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, LinkedIn • February 11

I completely agree that PMMs are highly cross-functional and often broadly scoped. The common trap I’ve seen us fall into is that of “peanut-buttering”, spreading ourselves thin over a broad range of

71 Saves

Daniel Waas

Vice President Product Marketing at AppFolio • April 6

Set boundaries and clear expectations with the various stakeholders you work with. Don't commit to crazy timelines. If a crazy timeline is unavoidable, communicate what you will have to trade off. C

5 Saves

Candice Sparks

Director of Product Marketing at Attentive • March 16

There are a few things that I believe help PMMs to prioritize and manage expectations across the organization. Creating quarterly and annual plans. These plans should include the top priorities for y

3 Saves

Product Marketing

Should product marketing report into Product management or Marketing?

17 answers

Feng Hong

Global Product Marketing Manager at TikTok • August 2

This depends on the company and what it needs the role of product marketing to be. This boils down to: what gap is the company trying to fill? I'll use my role as an example, and for context, Full Cir

34 Saves

Mary (Shirley) Sheehan

Head of Lightroom Product Marketing at Adobe • August 2

Thoughtful answers, Feng! In my experience, resource-wise its best to be with the marketing team & budget. Tech-wise, product. If you want to pull your hair out all the time, sales :)

53 Saves

Mike Flouton

VP, Product at Barracuda Networks • August 3

This reminds me of the classic "SDR team in sales or marketing" debate. The answer is that it can work in either place and really doesn't matter as long as PMM and the rest of marketing are communicat

23 Saves

Ross Overline

Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Fivestars • August 15

While there are benefits to both, judging from my experience, I believe PMM reporting into Marketing is more effective. Reporting into makreting creates stronger ties between PMM and the revenue orga

39 Saves

Clare Hegg

Director of Product Marketing at Skopenow • August 18

It can work in many places, but I find it to be the most effective if it is either within Marketing or on its own entirely so that marketing is properly on message. I often draw a venn diagram of prod

24 Saves

Jennifer Ottovegio

Fmr Director of Product Marketing at Narvar • October 17

I’ve not personally sat on a product team (so I’m admittedly biased.) But I would vote for it to live in marketing. Here’s why - the essential functions of these teams are different: Product Team - e

50 Saves

Savita Kini

Director of Product Management, Speech and Video AI at Cisco • March 11

I have been in marketing and product org -- both places and see pros and cons for both. It all depends on the strength of the PM team and their skills. > If PM team is strong enough to own end-t

45 Saves

Pulkit Agrawal

Co-founder & CEO at Chameleon • July 4

Based on some research we did (admittendly small sample size), we found that 2/3 report to CMO / VP Marketing and only ~10% to Product. Source: A New Definition of Product Marketing At this stage

25 Saves

Devang Sachdev

Vice President of Marketing at Snorkel AI • July 9

Product Management and Product Marketing are two sides of the same coin. Organizationally there are benefits to both approaches. As a product manager, I have had product marketers on my team, and as a

84 Saves

Alexa Scordato

PMO at TikTok • August 13

This is related to the question above with regards to marketing's ability to influence the roadmap. There's no right or wrong way to do this. It's a matter of the role a CEO wants marketing to play wi

34 Saves

Dan Laufer

CEO at PipeDreams Ventures • January 14

There are good arguments for either. My team is in the marketing org so I have a bias towards that structure :) Ultimately it comes down to people and where you think PMM can have the most impact and

48 Saves

Teresa Haun

Senior Director, Technology Marketing and Communications at Zendesk • February 4

I personally think Product Marketing should report into Marketing with the head of the whole product marketing function reporting directly to the CMO. This is exactly how we’re organized at Zendesk an

120 Saves

Jon Rooney

Vice President Product Marketing at Unity | Formerly Splunk, New Relic, Microsoft, Oracle • February 9

I firmly believe that Product Marketing should report into the Marketing org for one central reason: PMM is a communications-driven role requiring the ability to effectively craft and convey messages

48 Saves

Natalie Louie

Product Marketing, Senior Director at Replicant | Formerly MobileCoin, Zuora, Hired, Oracle, Responsys • May 5

The more technical your product and complex your use cases, i.e. selling to enterprise customers, then PMM can report into Product. This is what we do at Zuora and other companies I’ve worked at. The

51 Saves

Julian Dunn

Senior Director of Product Management at GitHub • June 13

I've reported into both in my career and the best I can come up with is "it depends". As an overall philosophy, I would generally prefer to report into marketing, because it creates the right level of

31 Saves

Carlos González de Villaumbrosia

CEO at Product School • July 15

A Product Marketing Manager’s position varies depending on the company. However, you will find yourself from time to time working very closely together with the PM and count yourselves as part of the

19 Saves

Nayab Nazir

Product Marketing Manager at Metric • March 10

I believe it should always report to Marketing as the role directly links with messaging, personas, and understanding customers and all these things come into marketing. This is exactly how we are des

1 Save

Product Marketing

What has worked well (or has not worked) as far as positioning your product marketing team within a larger marketing org?

9 answers

Carrie Zhang

Product Lead at Square • November 16

Great question. I always tell my team that as product marketers we are the bridge between product development and the broader marketing & sales teams. We focus relationship building and collaborat

143 Saves

Patrick Cuttica

Product Marketing Lead at Square | Formerly Sprout Social • October 15

This is a great question. A fair amount has been written about where Product Marketing should exist within the broader company structure—just Google "where should Product Marketing report" and you'll

82 Saves

Shabih Syed

Product Lead, Ecosystem Discovery at Square | Formerly Mparticle • December 9

Within a large marketing team I have always positioned the Product Marketing team as the experts who are the go-to people for any product question and I make sure we indeed are. One of my personal rea

36 Saves

Mike Polner

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

Love this question and something I had to do a ton when I first got to Eats and everybody was like - hold on, what is Product Marketing? I talk a lot about internal marketing and say you have to Pro

95 Saves

Harsha Kalapala

Vice President Product Marketing at AlertMedia | Formerly TrustRadius, Levelset, Walmart • April 15

Product marketing's biggest challenge (no matter anywhere I go) is defining the scope and sticking to it. Anything under the sun that is not Demand Gen or SEO tends to be seen as a job for product mar

41 Saves

Jeff Beckham

Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing at Gem • May 6

I’ve found that most companies want the most capable people doing the most important work. If you prove your value as a PMM by making the team and company successful, bigger and better projects will n

30 Saves

Jasmine Jaume

Director, Product Marketing at Intercom • October 25

Being clear about what PMM's role and mission is, and ensuring other marketing leaders understand what your team does and doesn't do. Have open discussions about where there might be overlap between

15 Saves

Daniel J. Murphy

Marketing Strategy Consultant at • June 8

Great question. Yes, been there & struggled there before. Think ultimately the more you can make product marketing a group of strategic thinkers and enablement gurus to marketing, the more clout y

6 Saves

Louis Debatte-Monroy

Director of Product Marketing at Backbase • March 1

Define (with your team) a short, memorable mission statement. Create a short slide deck that introduce your team, its mission, what you stand for, and some of the work you're the most proud of Show t

2 Saves

Product Marketing

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

10 answers

Mike Polner

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

Great question! I think about this one a lot...First off, it’s important to callout that there is no perfect org structure :) In general, you have to identify what you’re optimizing towards and what

114 Saves

Lara McCaskill

Product Marketing Lead at Atlassian • January 16

This all comes down to how is the rest of the business organized. If you're organizing in a way that's incongrous to everyone else in the org, you will not be setup for success. With smaller nimble te

48 Saves

Jasmine Jaume

Director, Product Marketing at Intercom • November 10

In general, PMM roles at Intercom are more of the 'full stack' variety - i.e we cover the whole journey from feeding into the roadmap to launch, including competitive research, buyer/persona/market re

67 Saves

Akshay Kerkar

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

The structure of the PMM team is usually a function of the size of the company and it’s GTM model. The “typical” SaaS PMM team has a set of Core PMMs that are focused on product, and usually a sister

60 Saves

Karen He

Product Marketing at Fiddler AI • March 16

The PMM team structure depends on the size of the company, how technical the product is, and the GTM model. Company Size: As the company grows and scales, PMM tends to fall under the Marketing org an

13 Saves

Gregg Miller

VP of Product Marketing at Oyster® • September 29

Our team is structured by audience type and discipline. We have one part of the team focused on our end users and prospects, another part of the team is focused on our partners, and a third on market

21 Saves

Vishal Naik

Product Marketing Lead at Google | Formerly DocuSign • January 24

At DocuSign, there are product marketers across our main product categories, as well as industry and audience teams. Every company I've ever worked at has grouped their teams differently, so I tend to

14 Saves

Rekha Srivatsan

Vice President Product Marketing at Salesforce • August 11

I've done it in so many different ways! Few quick pointers: The most important thing is to ensure every team member has a good swim lane and growth path. Take your revenue goal and slice that evenl

15 Saves

Jack Wei

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

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

4 Saves

Richard McClurg

Former CMO at Dejero | Formerly ON Semiconductor • February 23

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

1 Save

Product Marketing

What's your approach to competitive differentiation?

How does this inform your core messaging, how do you enable sales to understand what makes you different/better, how do you know if it's working with your target buyers?

12 answers

Thomas Dong

VP of Marketing at NetSpring • December 9

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

37 Saves

Joe Abbott

Head of Product Marketing at Ramp | Formerly Zendesk, ThoughtSpot, Oracle • June 22

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 o

19 Saves

Sarah Din

VP of Product Marketing at Quickbase • August 12

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 wh

20 Saves

Ambika Aggarwal

Director of Product Marketing at Culture Amp • September 23

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 y

10 Saves

Marina Ben-Zvi

Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Productboard • December 14

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 c

13 Saves

Grant Shirk

Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki at Cisco Meraki | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • April 13

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

6 Saves

Harsha Kalapala

Vice President Product Marketing at AlertMedia | Formerly TrustRadius, Levelset, Walmart • July 7

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

5 Saves

Jeffrey Vocell

VP of Product Marketing at | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • August 3

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 w

7 Saves

Alex McDonnell

Market Intelligence Lead at Airtable • September 20

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 too

9 Saves

Desiree Motamedi

VP Global Head of Product Marketing at Shopify • November 16

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 me

9 Saves

Dave Steer

Vice President of Product Marketing at GitLab • January 31

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 Dunf

6 Saves

Sean Lauer

Senior Director, Product Marketing at MURAL • February 16

The most important aspect of competitive differentiation is that it's authentic and resonates with the customer and/or user. From a core messaging standpoint, you first and foremost want to focus on

4 Saves

Product Marketing

What are some strategies that you've used to share messaging guides internally and ensure commercial team alignment?

8 answers

Jeffrey Vocell

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

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,

76 Saves

Chris Mills

Vice President Product Marketing / GTM at Wrike • April 9

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 oth

55 Saves

Vivek Asija

Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Heap • June 9

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

48 Saves

Priyanka Srinivasan

Head of Product & Growth Marketing at Qualia • August 24

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

21 Saves

William Davis

Vice President of Product Marketing at Workato • September 28

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

14 Saves

Alina Fu

Head of Marketing for Viva Goals and Learning (Director) at Microsoft • November 30

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 ensur

11 Saves

Julia Szatar

Director of Product Marketing & Lifecycle Marketing at Loom • December 2

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 m

15 Saves

Lawson Abinanti

Co-Founder at Messages That Matter • February 13

I have my clients create a team responsible for positioning a B2B product and seeking input and feedback throughout the process from key stakeholders - especially sales. Once the team is confident tha

1 Save

Product Marketing

How do you segment your customers? What tools/data/insights do you use?

3 answers

Stephanie Zou

Senior Director, Marketing at Figma • December 3

At all the companies I’ve been at, the one consistent segmentation lens has always been company size. Bigger company = more people = more licenses you can sell. Other lens can be the types of custom

120 Saves

Daniel Palay

Head Of Product Marketing at 3Gtms • February 13

I always segment in three dimensions: One traditional segmentation metric (size, industry, geography, etc.); the problems experienced (that create a need for the product); the different stakeholders (

30 Saves

Hema Thanki

Product Marketing @ Twilio Segment at Twilio | Formerly Amazon • February 7

Depending on which part of the funnel you want to segment and whether its for customers or prospects. An often great place to start for customer segmentation is looking at the customer lifecycle, and

2 Saves

Product Marketing

How does your company define the difference between product marketing and integrated / brand / customer marketing?

Do you see value in having both roles, e.g. Integrated team works more closely with the creative team on seasonal/holiday/brand campaigns whereas Product Marketing works more closely with the Product team on product launches, user research/insights, positioning strategy, etc. I have found it challenging for Product Marketing to own all of this, and often see different skill sets from marketers who are great at creative brand campaigns vs. PMMs who are skilled at positioning a new product and bringing it to market.

7 answers

Kaitlin Yount

Senior Director of Product Marketing, Trust at LinkedIn • August 25

On the Consumer side (where I sit) we have Brand Marketers and Product Marketers. Product Marketers need to deeply understand the value prop, positioning and user needs of the product. A big part of t

83 Saves

Jessica Webb Kennedy

Head Of Marketing at Tailscale | Formerly Atlassian (Trello), HubSpot, Lyft • June 16

I think there is a ton of value in having these teams work closely but separated into specific pods. As you noted, there are different skillsets here and they can be even more effective when given the

32 Saves

Madeline Ng

Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform at Google • December 21

At my current company, these roles are different and lean on the different skills that you mention! That said, at smaller organizations, or even smaller marketing organizations, you may not have the l

32 Saves

Nate Franklin

Director, Product Marketing at Amplitude • January 26

I see those as different skills sets and usually different teams but I don't think there are strict lines in between them. Product Marketers should own the story, the core positioning and messaging, t

40 Saves

Aneri Shah

Head of Product Marketing at Ethos Life | Formerly Meta, Microsoft • February 17

Yes, great question! As a PMM, I've always worked closely with a separate integrated/brand marketing function. The PMM sits closer to product/eng, is more initimately familiar with the product, owns i

52 Saves

Morgan Molnar

Director of Product Marketing, Global Insights Solutions @ Momentive at Momentive (SurveyMonkey) | Formerly SurveyMonkey, Nielsen • December 6

It's been a while since we've had an integrated marketing function at Momentive, but here's how I'd envision this working: Product marketing owns: - Buyer persona research, development, and enablemen

11 Saves

Raman Sharma

Vice President, Product Marketing at DigitalOcean • February 6

I have seen this done differently in different organizations. There is no right or wrong way. However, I firmly believe that the Product Marketer should own the narrative for their product. If it is

6 Saves

Product Marketing

Knowing that marketing is always trying to quantify their metrics, how are you in Product Marketing quantifying the ROI of your work?

11 answers

Dave Kong

Head of Product Marketing at Scale AI • January 16

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

95 Saves

James Winter

VP of Marketing at Spekit • January 17

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

73 Saves

Sandhya Hegde

General Partner at Unusual Ventures • January 22

Definitely echo the fact that Product marketing KPIs need to keep evolving with the focus that the organization currently has. When I was at Amplitude, we came up with some strong *impact* metrics t

167 Saves

Ellie Mirman

Chief Marketing Officer at Crayon • December 20

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

59 Saves

Rebecca Wells

Senior Product Marketing Manager at Highspot • January 24

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 qu

38 Saves

Pulkit Agrawal

Co-founder & CEO at Chameleon • February 4

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 t

35 Saves

Dan Laufer

CEO at PipeDreams Ventures • January 14

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 mar

88 Saves

Rehan Mirza

Chief Growth Officer at Verifiable • March 26

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&

79 Saves

Andy Schumeister

Director of Product Marketing at Sourcegraph • June 8

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 workin

29 Saves

Jennifer Kay

Product Marketing Expert & Mentor at | Formerly Homebase, Angi, The Knot • October 12

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 sta

20 Saves

Jason Oakley

Senior Director of Product Marketing at Klue • January 5

Sales win rate, more specifically competitive win rateMake 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 trac

43 Saves