Be in the driver's seat. Product marketing managers are the CMO of the product. Launching a product is a campaign ("series of connected activities designed to bring about an accelerated result"). When you think about launch that way it changes your entire perspective. You define launch goals, put metrics in place, develop a campaign strategy, build campaign elements, identify/close readiness gaps, etc.
Be large and in charge. Take the reigns. Go big or go hom. [Other trite corporate-speak saying goes here]
As a rule, I like to work with existing tools the Product team uses to avoid adding overhead to their day.
To communicate and collaborate we use the usual suspects: Slack, Notion, Asana, Google Slides, and live meetings. However a big focus for me was to establish a Research Hub - a centralized and searchable repository for customer insights so that PMs and Marketers could quickly make decisions because they had easy access to this information. Today this lives on Notion, but I could see us moving to a more specialized solution as we grow.
We establish multiple listening channels ranging from our field to direct customer conversations to engagements with analysts. The insights we receive from these channels allow us to then identify the general areas of opportunity which we then partner with engineering on researching further through qualitative and quantitative research. This allows us to priortize the highest areas of opportunity which get added to the product roadmap.
A few questions to ask yourself:
Do you want to be the mini-CEO of the product?
Do you have enough experience to appreciate how engineering operates to build a product?
Are you comfortable making major tradeoffs between direct customer requests and company strategic priorities?
Are you savvy enough to navigate tough decisions when requirements or quality are cut to meet deadlines?
Are you excited about documenting product strategy, epics, users stories and low level requirements?
If you answered yes to a majority of these, by all means seek out a role in PM.
It’s really important to understand your product’s team development process. How is the Product team structured and why? What and when are their sprint cycles. How do new tasks get on the backlog and how is the backlog prioritized. If possible, attend backlog prioritization meetings so you can understand what information PMs look at when making decisions.
This will help you be much more strategic in how, when, and why you add on the backlog. Also it’s key to develop a close relationship with a few PMs so they can champion for you during the prioritization process.
IME this should sit in engineering, but it's generally not a bad idea for the copy writer to solicit PMM feedback. PMM needs to be hyper focused on strategic tasks. This is a good example of a tactical distraction.
If your company has the resources, I would advocate for there to be an in-app copy writer that sits under design. By putting them with design, they will have the shortest path to where the product is actually being made. That being said, they should be very aligned with both product management and product marketing.
In one of my past roles, it's been a combination of product management and product marketing who were responsible for it.
We like keeping this with the PMM or a Product Manager/Owner, as the person writing this copy needs to be super familiar with the product and user experience. They need to be power users, IMO. Occasionally, I've leveraged Support or Customer Success Managers for this as well, becausr they are so familiar with the ins and outs of the user experience.
Another solution would be to have someone is design or engineering draft the basic copy and have a copywriter make it sound better.
In my opinion, PMM has a better vantage of customer needs and command of customer voice to produce best in app copy, product naming nomenclature and in-product guidance. This responsibility can be shared with UX and PM to ensure everyone is on the same page. Engineering and PM usually need a lot of help in this department as it is not their forte.