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Product Marketing Stakeholders

How do you manage up vs. manage down and ensure that as a leader you remain on top of the organization when directs under-perform (so their non-performance is handled as it's own issue and not misconstrued as a management failure)?

2 Answers

LaShaun Williams

Observable VP, Marketing • January 12

This is a great question. In my overcommunication with leadership, I am very open about the skill levels of my directs, what I think they're currently capable of, and where I think they need improvement. While some failures are a result of non-performance, many help surface areas for improvem......Read More

506 Views

How can I make it easier for my team and stakeholders to work with me on the marketing launch timeline when engineering releases are sometimes delayed?

Any tips for setting expectations and not losing team’s trust while ensuring we have a timeline to work towards?

6 Answers

Priya Patel

TripActions Vice President, Product Marketing • March 15

I've never worked anywhere where releases don't get delayed - delays happen. The best you can do is to stay in as close communication with your key stakeholders as possible - informing them of updates in real-time. You won't lose trust with your team if you're open and honest: put a stake in the ......Read More

811 Views

How to identify stakeholders of a certain product launch? And if the stakeholders change in the process (either some roles become less vital with launch activities pushing forward or vice versa), how to manage that?

5 Answers

Madeline Ng

Google Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform • December 20

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 engin......Read More

712 Views

If product marketing is a relatively new function at your company (relative to product), what advice do you have on becoming a strategic partner and more involved earlier in the product roadmap development process?

5 Answers

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • August 11

I’m glad you are asking this question because this is exactly the right mindset you should have in a young Product Marketing org to avoid becoming solely a GTM service function. The path to this is through a mixture of education and showing value to the Product team. Something you should find ou......Read More

1038 Views

How do you build better relationships with product? I feel like this is the most complicated relationship out of all cross-functional partners. How do you constantly stay aligned?

5 Answers

Holly Watson

Amazon Product Marketing SME, AWS • February 9

Yes, great question. This relationship can be so valuable to both the PM and PMM, but also to the rest of the organization. For this relationship, I encourage each team to spend time understanding each others roles and responsibilities as well as having a discussion to align on what responsibilit......Read More

808 Views

As a product marketer, how do you handle design disagreements on something you're working on with your designer?

4 Answers

Akshay Kerkar

Stripe Head of Product Marketing, Emerging Products • December 22

I must admit that design disagreements have been rare in my experience. The best way to ensure alignment is to really think of your design partner as a true partner (vs. just a service role), bring them in early and upfront, provide them with context (e.g. maybe even have them be part of planning......Read More

921 Views

Knowing that people in different functions and different levels of leadership often need different approaches to storytelling in decks, docs, and shareouts for key strategic projects, do you have any tricks for thinking through whether it's worth the work to "reskin" docs and decks for these diverse stakeholders?

I suppose with executive level comms, it's more obvious, but how do you manage work that's in-flight that requires as many as 5 PMs, in addition to analysts, designers, marketers, and more? How do you keep people "in the loop" at the right level of fidelity without opening up a can of worms and adding complexity? A DACI model is great, but has its limits.

3 Answers

Harish Peri

Okta SVP Product Marketing • December 13

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 do......Read More

1381 Views

How can I use external experience (sales for example) to bring different opinions to the table to gain influence and persuade other teams?

3 Answers

Jackie Palmer

Demandbase VP Product and Industry Marketing • August 22

Getting a variety of feedback from a variety of people is the best thing you can do to influence and persuade teams. I always like to poll multiple teams and different levels of people to ensure that I have as many examples as possible. Make sure you ask internal teams - sales (including pre-sale......Read More

408 Views

What has been the greatest accomplishment made when you’ve had to influence others without authority and did it make things easier for you when you needed buy in on other projects?

2 Answers

Daniel Waas

AppFolio Vice President Product Marketing • April 6

My biggest accomplishment was in a prior role at a different company for a SaaS product. I was able to persuade the product and executive leadership team to invest in a redesign of the user experience of a product that had become stale compared to new entrants in the space. Redesigns can be a har......Read More

296 Views

How often and when do you typically get feedback on collateral from the teams that will use it?

I've found that it's valuable to get feedback from 1-3 reps on a high-quality first draft, and sometimes, even the final version to ensure it will work for the team it's using it, but it often takes more time than I'd like

1 Answer

Jackie Palmer

Demandbase VP Product and Industry Marketing • August 22

Getting feedback on assets and collateral from stakeholders is a key part of Product Marketing's job. What I like to do is create a tiger team of people you can count on. This could differ of course depending on the asset but should likely include a mix of salespeople (pre-sales, AEs/reps, SDRs, ......Read More

424 Views