Product Marketing KPI's

Where to start? Every company has different policies for promotion criteria, but ultimately it needs to take into account 2 things: merit and business need. Business need has to come first. It means that there's a larger scope of a role that needs to be done - more responsibility and complexity within an org / team - and there's now an opportunity or need for someone to fill that. If that doesn't exist, promotions shouldn't be happening arbitrarily. I recongize that especially within startups, individual contributors want to grow and should be recognized for their efforts, but when merit supercedes business need, it creates complications down the road (inexperienced middle managers, people promoted for the sake of being promoted and then drowning in the deep end, etc.). There isn't a blanket set of KPI's someone needs to hit before they're promoted, but there should be an expectation with any job description that success is defined by x, y, and z. What those things are can be a combination of both quantitative and qualitative results. 

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have become a popular way for companies to clearly define goals and measure progress against them, at the employee, team, and company level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR There's lots written about these that you can reference elsewhere, but it's a really helpful frame work that allows you to measure, quantitatively and qualitatively, how you're tracking against the "key results" that you've defined. The common expectation is that you'll hit about 70% of your OKRs - idea is that you're including stretch goals so missing 20-30% doens't mean you're performing poorly. I do try to quantify as much as possible in my OKRs but you also need to be careful to not arbitrarily quantify things to the point that it distracts from what will really add the most value to your team or company.

If you're on this forum as a PMM, you know that one of the biggest challenges for the PMM org is "What the hell do we measure!?" - an age-old conundrum that PMMs always struggle with. This is especially pronouned in an enterprise B2B environment vs. a fast-moving B2C environment where immediate usage/feedback may be available.  To me, the most primary thing I'm looking for is how effective the person is in relationship/ stakeholder management. In Product Marketing, you have many constituents across Sales, Product, and customer teams, as well as within Marketing itself. It's easy to get pulled in a lot of different directions with competing priorities - so how these stakeholders are communicated & collaborated with, along with how they're supported becomes something I really try and pay attention to when looking at how a PMM is advancing in their development. Additionally, with PMM being a strategic and highly cross-functional role - instead of a list of set metrics, I'll look to how the PMM is able to bring together and run a cross-functional project that has clear outcomes and success metrics related to that (we've moved to OKRs, and also have project-team goal-setting & feedback tools within Culture Amp that support this agile team structure).  I think what's most important is for the individual to know, depending on the team's overarching priorities (aligned up to practice and company-level), how the work that they're doing contributes and which of the projects they are running are seen as critical projects for them to demonstrate competence and success in to align with their career progression objectives. Though, one thing I've also learned in my career is to make sure that you've had this conversation / and gaining alignment with your own manager on this, before extending this clarity out. Because if the individual really leans in and delivers, but you aren't able to hold up your end (I've been on both sides of this), it can really torpedo morale and lead to the frustration of people feeling like they're on a neverending treadmill.

This varies by company and role, but I generally think about the path to promotion on the two key vectors: ownership level and degree of autonomy.  Strong performance against OKRs or KPIs is a core underpinning to that. When considering promotion I start there and then look at how the person has demonstrated rising levels of ownership and autonomy across the following: * Strategic Direction: As an associate, I'd expect you to own a feature set fully and demonstrate the ability to bring insights into the go-to-market under direction. As you rise in the organization, I'd expect you to own a product group and set goals and drive projects with more independence. As you approach the most senior levels of the organization you most commonly own an audience or problem set and are expected to develop and drive your KPIs with very little direction.  * Execution & Accountability: At earlier levels you're executing against problems you're given and working with teams to show the results. As you rise, you're expected to help the organization understand the questions to ask and align stakeholders around how to understand the impact of that work. * Communication & Collaboration: For someone just starting you need to demonstrate clear communication with your assigned team and to escalate when issues arise. As you grow in the organization, you become responsible for identifying the team you need and the escalation needs to become more strategic and answer-first. * Leadership & Influence: If you're an associate I'd expect that you're a master of your assigned area. For a director and above, you're sought as an expert on broad audience problems and most frequently work with the most senior levels of leadership.

The best way for a product marketer to get promoted is by demonstrating the impact of their work. To do this, I incentivize all my PMMs to befriend data and tie their deliverables to key business and customer metrics.  To me, the two most important categories of metrics are: 1) Customer insights a. Number of actionable insights that helped drive product development b. Number of actionable insights that informed a business strategy/service 2) Customer engagement a. Product adoption: This is the % of customers that adopted a new service or product launched by PMM. b. Customer lifetime value (LTV): The total dollar amount you're likely to receive from the customers that adopted the new service or product, over the average life of the product or services. c. Active and engaged customers: Number of customers that actively engage with the product, could be measured daily, weekly or monthly.

I'm not a fan of connecting metrics to promotions for a role like product marketing becuase there are so many other dependencies that can't be controlled. Rather I like to establish some expectations of responsibility for each seniority level. Seniority levels can usually be attached to the level of responsiblity you can assign someone. Can they run a launch end to end? Can they take a new offer to market? You can use success of some of those outputs to make a determination of how and when to promote.

PMMs often are measured by output, since most of what we provide are tied to other metrics. I would focus on delivering tangible assets on a regular cadence (case studies, one-pagers, pitch decks, etc) and in parallel - measuring utilization metrics like: product activation, MAUs, reactivations, attach rate, conversion velocity etc. These two streams (tangible output + metrics) cover your bases, establish influence and prove growth (worthy of promotion).

There are dfinitely many directions to take. I'll try to distill down to two metrics across external & internal GTM KPIs: External * Leads, or Revenue within X days of launch * Activation/adoption within X days of launch Internal * Stakeholder satisfaction (survey) * GTM on time delivery, asset readiness The X in days depends on the type of business you're in. For B2C you'll focus on MRR and shorter conversion cycles, likely within the first 15-30 days. For B2B align it with your avg sales cycle for prospects and 75% of the time for customer add-ons.

The goal of most B2B launches is revenue--but there are many other KPIs you can track besides how much revenue you've generated!  Customer KPIs: These KPIs all tell me how much my launch resonates with my target customer. Pipe generation; lead generation/form fills on any key launch assets like demos and datasheets; registrations/attendance to events and webinars; website views; time on-page.  Sales team KPIs: This is how I make sure my sales teams are excited about my launch and are properly informed to have customer conversations. # attendees for enablement; # views/engagement for key enablement assets; # sales support requests;  AR/PR: This is how I know I'm getting the right coverage. # AR briefings/inquiries; # AR reports/mentions; # PR interviews pre-launch; # press mentions

I'm glad you asked about KPIs. As Product Marketers, we don't have the luxury of a single metric or even a couple metrics. We own the health of the story & vision our company is selling. I say health intentionally. It's not just that we own the story (we do) but we also need to make sure it's landing amongst our key segments, that we have the right segments, our sellers can actually deliver the story (if you're B2B) and on and on. And it's something that we need to be monitoring regularly --- which is where KPIs come in. I see the cornerstone KPIs in four categories: Interest, Velocity, Win Rate, Cross-Sell. For the B2B context, these are some specific examples I would expect to see in these categories. For B2C - these can still apply, but win rate will be more around engagement or purchase conversion. Interest - Opportunity Growth - how many new opportunities is the business creating each month? Your goal is to grow this number! If it starts to stagnate - go figure out why. Is your content stale? Did your target segment change? Is a competitor stealing attention? Velocity - Deal Progression - how long (days/weeks) does it for deals to move through the sales cycle? Your goal is to see if you can shorten it - through sales plays, content, customer stories, ROI calculators, etc. Look for where deals are getting stuck and stay close to your sellers. Win Rate - Win Rate :) - what percentage of deals become closed-won revenue for the business? Your goal here is, no surprise, maintain or improve your win rate! Also included here is a win rate against top competitors, but as an input into the overall metric. If you see your win rate dipping that's where you need to quickly diagnose what's behind it. Cross-sell - Cross-sell :) - what percentage of accounts purchase additional products after becoming a customer? Your goal here is understand if your story continues to work post-sale. Is the vision your company sells compelling customers to expand their business with you? Are youe expansion plays working as well as your land plays? The challenge we face as a product marketer is we don't control a single part of the process - rather we influence all parts of the buyer journey from first touch all the way to cross-selling. Looking at one metric will never give us the full picture. Use metrics like those above to measure the impact of the work you are doing and look for opportunities to make improvements.

As always, the answer is probably “it depends” as it really does depend on what the goal of your launch is. For example, are you trying to drive awareness of a feature? Adoption? Expansion sales? Once you’ve determined the goal of a launch, the KPIs should be relatively straightforward from there. For us, most of our Tier1/2 launches have the goal of generating pipeline revenue (for either new logos, or expansion, or both) so we look at number of demos set / pipeline generated. Even if the opportunity already exists, I’m also curious to see whether this was the thing that moved the needle for the prospect to buy. When it comes to Tier 3/4 launches, the metrics may be more focused around product adoption and less around direct revenue impact. Did the customers we were targeting in our marketing actually try using the new feature? How often do they use it? For example, is it happening on every order/transaction they do with us, or only a subset? For product adoption you also have to determine what “success” means - that is, what is the specific ‘event’ you want to track when it comes to the feature that would make it a successful use.

As much as I would love to share a one-size-fits-all KPIs, I’ve found that no two launches are the same. Even if you’re launching a product again in a new market, you’ve probably learned something from the first launch that will lead you to optimize your approach the next time. Instead, I break it down into these four categories and choose the most important metric from each category: * Business metrics: How will this launch help the business to meet its goals? Is it revenue, subscriptions, marketplace balance, users? * Product metrics: What action(s) do we want our target audience to take? For example, trial, adoption, retention, increased usage. * Channel metrics: Based on the way that the campaign is set up, what’s the most important way that our audience can engage with the marketing campaign? Do we want them to watch the video, click on the push notification, read the blog, ask a question or something else entirely? * Top of funnel metrics: What do you want your audience to know, think or feel based on the launch? These are your awareness, perception and sentiment metrics. It takes a lot of discipline to pick only the most important metrics and stay laser-focused on those. But I’ve found that when I’m able to do it, it gives the team a clearer mission and strengthens the impact.

Product Marketers should, as they say, measure what matters...and what matters is heavily dependent on the stage of the business and product. If you are earlier stage, focus on assessing whether the problem your product is solving is real and important. Good metrics for this stage: Funnel conversion, win rate, marketing tactical effectiveness (traffic, leads). For later stage, your GTM strategy should be measured by more sophisticated indicators, such as pipeline coverage, deal velocity, net expansion, overall category penetration, and customer time-to-value.  The most important part is to understand which metrics drive the business and which levers drive those metrics.

There are different motivations for launching products. For example, beyond solving a buyer problem a company could launch a product to expand TAM, retain customers, or differentiate from competitors. Based on this business objective you should determine specific goals and KPIs to ensure you are tracking towards success. This may look slightly different whether you are B2B, B2C, or B2B2C.   That being said, there are some go-to KPIs that most product marketing care about. As PMMs, a key part of our role is finding product market fit and then communicating value to the market. When it comes to launching new products, this is when we get to find out if all the time spent on research and testing is time well spent. Will buyers/users purchase and engaging with the product? Key metrics to consider 1. Buyer Adoption - did your buyers purchase the product? Or, if it doesn't carry an additional cost, did they adopt the new offering? Depending on the launch, you may want to segment your buyers by persona, industry, or new vs. existing customer.  2. Engagement - is the end user utilizing the product? This one is simple, are users utilizing the product as expected and are they satisfied? 3. Market Engagement - press release engagement and corporate comms engagement (press release, social campaign, blog post etc.).  4. Win/Loss - If the product you are launching is differentiating or intended to compete with a specific competitor, consider setting a specific win/loss goal  Once you have your end goals set, I recommend setting some leading indicators to help you understand throughout the launch if you are on track to hit your end goals. A few examples here include email engagement on launch emails, webinar attendance for upsells, or website landing page engagement. 

The most typical KPIs are pipeline/revenue if it’s a product that can be purchased or product adoption if it’s free. However, there are other KPIs that can be leading indicators to follow. It’ll depend on the feature/product/service you’re launching and what the goal of your launch is, so there’s no hard and fast rule here. But here are some examples depending on what you’re trying to achieve: * Product goals * Product-market fit: product adoption * Product launch success: product-specific pipeline, sign-ups * Marketing goals * Awareness and perception: brand awareness, product awareness, brand associations * Content and campaign performance: paid/email click-through rates, website conversion * Financial impact: marketing-driven pipeline and revenue, MQL → SQL conversion rates * Sales goals * Sales productivity: win rates, pipeline conversion * Financial impact: average deal sizes, target attainment

Ultimately I think that every launch should have one "north-star" goal and cascading KPIs, and you might see that varies by launch. For example, your north-star could be increasing Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), increasing customer Monthly Active Use (MAU), or increasing net new customers. Once you've landed on that, you should be ruthless about developing a GTM strategy that helps you hit those goals, and choosing metrics that help you understand if you are on track for those goals or not.  That being said, the KPIs that I've found most common to track are:  * Total web or app traffic and conversion rate * Email sends / opens / conversion rates * Product usage & MAU  * Attributed ARR  * Digital marketing metrics like impressions and conversion rates  * Contribution of the launch to Marketing Qualified Leads MQLs (for B2B) 

Some KPIs I consider across the PMM remit are: * Core PMM: Platform Adoption, Activation, and Expansion (via product and sales-led motions) * Customer and Lifecycle Marketing: Direct Revenue Attainment + Adoption and Retention * Ecosystem Marketing: Indirect Revenue Attainment + Demand Gen  * Competitive Intelligence: Win/loss rate, deal velcity

KPIs are hard for PMMs.  (1) we don't directly influence everything.  (2) we have a lot of indirect influence.  But my rule of thumb is figuring out your North Star Metric, meaning what is that one metric you can influence that drives say, pipeline, and what are those input metrics? For example, if you're doing a sales play, your input metric might be how often they have used your messaging (Gong is a great tool for this) or your assets (Highspot). In this simplistic example, your North Star Metric might be deal velocity, influencing the ultimate metric: win rates. You get the idea.  Here are some of mine.  North Star Metrics: Deal velocity   Input Metrics: Use of messaging/and content at different buying stages, product adoption Lagging Metrics: Win rates, increase in ARR, expansion 

The end game is for customers to choose your solutions and brand over the competition, so the most meaningful KPI is your win rate against against different competitors when you encounter them in deals. To measure that, you need to make sure your sales team is documenting who they encounter in each opportunity.  As a personal KPI, you could provide a quarterly or even monthly analysis and update with actionable insights and recommendations regarding competition. In my experience, a lot of real-time and one-off competitive intel gets lost. Product development cadence and process is just different than marketing and sales. Documentation and timely injection of information are really important when introducing insights from the marketplace into product development. You can also set some goals across the customer journey--admittedly, some of these are boxes to check as opposed to metrics to measure. Top of Funnel: Including competitive differentiation in your primary brand messaging and properties (websites, marketing campaigns, social, etc., wherever you think prospects are gaining awareness and familiarity with you). You can measure your SEO and web performance against close competitors. Middle of Funnel: Including competitive differentiation in the materials, campaigns and other plays used to get prospects engaged with you and especially in product education materials. Bottom of Funnel: Enabling the sales team with battlecards, objection handling, rip-and-replace customer stories, and updating sales materials to reflect what has been learned. 

Ultimately, the change in win rate against that particular competitor before vs. after your CI project.  There are sub goals and metrics to unpack here:  * QoQ change in the competitor features & functions, and messaging * The pace at which your product team is able to ship against new intel * PM survey results on the usefulness of your CI program This may be a controversial statement, but after seeing CI programs run out of Product, PMM, and Ops at different companies, I think the actual research work belongs in Product -- they're the true owners of what's being scoped and built, and should be invested in delivering a better product. PMM can stil own the pricing/packaging/messaging piece.

This really depends on the actual goal of a CI program, but here are a few ideas: For the sales team: * Competitive win rates (pre and post intel) * Sales confidence on competitive pitching (This is something you can measure using surveys at a regular cadence like quarterly) For the product team: * Feature parity if that is what you are focused on * Competitive differentiation - if you really need a metric you can create a percentage scale and see how that changes over time For the marketing team * If you have competitive materials or webpages - measure engagement and conversions

1. Sales confidence - While not a metric measured in SFDC, you can work with enablement to craft a pre and post sales confidence metric to assess how confident reps feel in navigating competitive conversations.  2. Competitive win rate - You're likely already measuring win rate, but competitive win rate will give you a direct KPI to measure the improvment in closing competitive deals.  3. [ Product specific] Reduction in lost deals due to product capabilities - To measure this metric you'll need to be tracking lost reason and have a drop-down for reps to choose "product gap." 

Another great question, thanks! I have been in a few roles where my job was to provide market data, competitive intelligence etc to other teams (CEO, Product, Sales etc) within the org. These teams would use this information to make strategic decisions, use them in sales presentations, etc but to put a common metric on providing competitive intelligence was hard. So we would send a quarterly survey to other teams within the org to participate in an anoynmous survey asking them about the usefulness of the competitive intelligence my team was providing. Think of it as a CSAT or a NPS survey to measure if they found your services helpful, will they come back to you etc.

It's great to see companies putting more emphasis on measuring this. It's definitely a challenge, but if competitive investments aren't measured, it's less likely they'll be appreciated or incorporated into key processes. The ideal measure of competitive intelligence is win rate. Measured on a quarterly basis (and at the close of a quarter) it can indicate if the organization is competing more effectively in qualified opportunities. It's important to note that like most PMM metrics, win rate is complex and can be influenced by many factors: sales training, market factors, product delivery, etc. But, when measured consistently you can see lift over time. The counterbalance to this is that it's directly connected to the company's top line. Higher win rates drives more revenue drives more investment in sales, marketing, and product. Also, by tying this to opporunities, it gives you any necessary leverage to get competitor data directly into CRM. "Oh, you want to know if we're improving our win rate against Competitor X? Well, there are only 5 opportunities tagged with that data out of 1,000 open opps. I need every opportunity tagged with competition by the time we get to Stage 3 to know how to prioritize this." Depending on your market and stage, you can get more specific. Win rates in a given segement, or versus a specific competitor or tier of competitor. 

Love this question! I'd think about it in terms of outcomes, and effectiveness.  So I'd look at metrics like: * Competitive Win Rates * Usage - To be clear, I like to look at this through the lens of whether the usage of a particular piece of competitive content is impacting the sales cycle and not just pure usage of content.  * Product Feedback/Usage * Retention Depending on the size and stage of your company, you may also have things like: * Competitive SEO - If you use a tool lke SEMRush then you'll be able to track competitive search positions and rankings compared to where you are, and how it's trending over time. * Brand / SOV - This is very high-level, but if you work for a company that is well-known or intently focused on building brand it's a metric that is likely tracked.  Since you mentioned your company tracks every project I think this can also depend on the maturity of your CI program. But work backwards and start with the outcome you're trying to drive, and then determine what needs to be measured to achieve that objective.

For the Sales side, you can look at: - competitive win/loss rates - win rates of deals that used competitive support or resources vs. did not - ultimately, market share over time But for the Product teams or overall company distribution of intelligence, it's tough, because it's not as close to a specific outcome. May need to look at more qualitative measures like positive feedback from your Product teams, saying that your CI helped them make a specific decision faster or more confidently. Good luck!

Competitive win rate is a great north star goal. But it can be challenging to accurately impact that in a positive way in a short amount of time. A couple other KPIs I've used in the past and that I recommend: 1. Competitor confidence (from the sales team) 2. Project-based contribution If you can increase the confidence of your sales team when it comes to competitors, you can infer that it will positively impact your competitive win rate. So every 6 month, I send a survey to my entire sales team and ask them to fill it out. Here's what it looks like: 1. Name 2. Team (e.g. XDR, Account Executive, Customer Success, etc.) 3. How long have you worked at *company*? 4. How confident are you competing against Competitor X? (1 - 5) 5. How confident are you competing against Competitor Y? (1 - 5) 6. How confident are you competing against Competitor Z? (1 - 5) 7. How often do you use competitive collateral like battlecards, one-pagers, etc.? 8. How impactful has our competitive collateral and training been for you? 9. What would help you win more competitive deals? (open text field) If I've done my job, the answers to 4 - 6 should go up over time, and the answers to 7 and 8 should be "very often" :-) I can't tell you how helpful this has been for me in guiding what I work on with my programs.  And then in terms of project-based contributions, try to find big projects happening in your company. This could be a website revamp, launching a big new product, revamping employee onboarding, etc. Figure out a way to get involved. If you're revamping the website, maybe look into advising on compare landing pages. If you're launching a new product, make sure the team is equipped with what the landscape offers that's similar. You get the idea. All of these things positively contribute to how your organization goes to market.

Competitive win rate! This requires reps to record (and for your CRM to have a field for) competitor (existing -rip and replace - or exploring - head to head). This is the most direct way to see if you are moving the needle against your core competitors. Secondary metrics may include things like analyst and review site achievement (i.e. G2 ranking) or traffic and search relevance for comparrison pages (i.e. a competitive landing page). This answer is highly dependent on which data exists in your CRM - if competitor is not trackable, secondary metrics are a good proxy / directional indicator. 

Terrific question! A few metrics that are key to competitive intel: Competitive Intel 101 Metrics 1. Sales engagement -- Is your sales team using the competitive content that your team is developing? If you use a sales enablement platform (we use Highspot), getting this data is much easier. Set your OKRs on increasing sales engagement with this type of content. 2. Sales satisfaction -- This is a more qualitative measure, but very important. Find out whether your sales team feels more confident in the conversations they have with prospects and existing customers. If you want a more quantitative measure, consider sending an NPS specific to your competitive intel to your sales team on a quarterly or bi-annual basis. Advanced Competitive Intel Metrics 3. Impact on sales success -- Once you've established your foundation with #1#1 and #2,#2, you can take it to the next level by measuring the impact of competitive intel content on closed/won and accelerating the sales cycle. You can do this most effectively if your sales team uses an enablement platform that associates content with sales engagements. 4. Impact on product roadmap & GTM strategy -- At its best, competitive intel can influence product roadmap and go-to-market strategy. I recommend qualitative measures to gauge success. Look at the degree to which company strategy is informed by your competitive insights. Last KPI: Great competitive intel makes a product marketer an MVP across the company. Count how many high-fives you get from sales, product, customer success, and marketing. If the number is going up-and-to-the-right, you're doing something right.

Teams should be tracking win/loss rates vs specific competitors. This information is most easily gathered and tracked via the sales team (or possibly solutions eng) and stored in a system of record like Salesforce. Additional detail around win/loss reasons when in a competitive situation is key to measuring success. It's not perfect data and should be viewed through a lens of subjectivity. Is there a product gap vs a competitor that led to a win or loss? Was it a pricing decision? Was the seller able to position your product in a way that closed the deal? If PMM and product are prioritizing competitive intel and strategy (this does NOT mean just doing everything that your customers are doing), then you should see improving win/loss rates. 

It really depends on the company you work for, but for product-led sales companies like Airtable, we look at key performance indicators along the entire customer journey. Early in the funnel, we’ll focus on metrics like sign up and activation because we want to ensure people who find Airtable are successful onboarding onto the platform. For decision-makers, we’re looking at marketing qualified leads and conversion to sales accepted leads. For existing accounts, we focus on user growth, retention, and expansion. Lagging indicators would be new logos and net new ACV. On the product side, we also keep a close eye on new feature adoption and NPS.

The answer to this question really depends on what sort of business you're in. I've typically worked in B2B businesses for most of my career, and B2B organizations have very sales-forward KPI metrics for product marketing, usually coming out of the following three: deal velocity (how fast is sales selling); deal size (how well are you selling the value of the product/solution and are you optimizing for cross-sell); and win-loss rate (how many prospects are closing vs not).   However, if you're a product marketer taking a PLG-centric view you might want to have more product metrics as you're casting nets vs fishing poles. Create feedback loops for your messaging on all your customer-facing channels - is this web copy meeting the need? Is the messaging positioned on my materials appropriately to tell the story I want to tell? Are visitors converting to leads? Are we doing "too good" of a job and getting a lot of dormant signups (users that sign up for the product but never use it)? It's harder to draw straight lines through KPIs in the PLG world, but user growth is the most obvious and biggest one, though obviously shared with Product.

I think it depends on what sub-function of PMM you've excelled in (or are applying for). If more technically-oriented, I'd want to learn about a product launch that you've been a part of, walk through a set of messaging you've developed, and understand how you've worked closely with the product team. If more GTM-oriented, I'd love to see a deck you've built for the sales team, how you've thought about personas and market segmentation, and understand how you've supported the sales team in hitting their targets. If you're applying for a Head of PMM role, perhaps a view into all of the above and how you've led through that. Also, if this is you, we are hiring at Front :)

I would try to highlight anything that shows you have the key skills to be an effective product marketer. That definitely includes strong writing samples and case studies like you suggested, but also: * Presentations that show you can create a compelling narrative and convince an audience of your point * Detailed GTM launch plans with how you will or did measure success * Clear, convincing and well-supported messaging and positioning, like through a messaging source document (something we use at Zendesk for all of our major products and launches) or a presentation * Thorough competitive analyses that highlight where the opportunity is for that company and what value props they should use to differentiate Also, depending on what PMM role you’re interviewing for, like if it’s a Retail Solutions PMM let’s say, I’d suggest adding more to show you have knowledge or experience particularly relevant to Retail and that role if you have it. Lastly, just in case the above feels overwhelming and you don’t have a lot of great materials to put a portfolio together, don’t worry, I rarely see PMM portfolios and usually we just evaluate strong PMMs through the interviews, homework assignments, and recommendations.

Case studies and writing samples signal to me that you can do the job you are asked to do but they rarely make a candidate stand out (unless the content is really bad!) I do think long-form writing samples have their place - they should show that you can communicate well and that you can possess critical thinking skills. But what makes a great candidate stand out for me, far more than anything, is a strategic mindset and an ability to provide evidence of outcomes during the interview. I'd focus on this more than on the portfolio. I go into how to do this in more detail in other questions.

The trifecta of short-form published writing, long-form writing, and enablement materials always does the trick for me. If I can see the candidate has written a great feature-related blog post or one-pager, a positioning and differentiation narrative, and slides that cue up best practices, then I'm a happy hiring manager.

Please add the "why" behind why you chose to take on new initiatives. I often see marketer proposing solutions that are searching for a problem. So, always start with Why and how your work aligned with the company/marketing/PMM north start. Then mention the results.  Example: It's great that you wrote an e-book, but why did you do an e-book instead of a webinar? What was the outcome? How it helped the company drive certain goal.  Some guidelines on what to include:   1. Include different formats - media, writing, interactive  2. Balance long and short form - 1 pagers or inforgraphics and longer whitepapers 3. If the role asks for a specific thing, make sure that you give more than one sample. Example - for a technical marketing role, the hiring manager is trying to asses how well can you simplify technical jargon to drive sales in low maturity buyer but the hiring manage is also curious about the depth of technical knowledge - so, if you did release notes, add that,  4. Don't be afraid to add samples from your previous roles: No one was born as a PMM. so, you might have some work experience before moving to PMM. If you did something that's relevant, please add that. Hiring managers are looking for fresh ideas and the fresh ideas come from the intersection of different fields.  5. Public speaking examples: Public speaking is a core skill for PMMs. The sample doesn't have to be from a large event. Even if it was a webinar or an internal training, add that. 

Absolutely writing samples! I always ask for those. (As you can tell from my other answers, communication is something I care deeply about!)  Case studies, landing pages, pitch decks / other enablement assets, and messaging frameworks can also be great additions to a portfolio. Just make sure you can speak to the process of building those, because it's impossible to know just from looking at them how much was built by the candidate vs. a collaborator.  What really makes a candidate stand out, I've found, is a short 'about me' deck. I've seen some great decks that include:  * Work samples (including some commentary about the process of developing that work) * Some thoughts about their approach to product marketing  * A slide or two about their career and the highlights of their experience * Bonus: Something that tells me a little bit about who they are as a person outside of work (hobbies, things they're passionate about, etc.) Not only is this full of great insight into the candidate, but it's also a great example of how they position themselves. It's essentially a sales enablement asset, which should hopefully translate into how well they can do that for our company and products. 

I've mentioned this framework in other answers, but I believe that great product marketers are great researchers, storytellers, and project managers. A standout product marketing portfolio would include work that helps you cover these critical bases. I've added below some examples of things that could help you stand out in each area. Research: * A summary of a research project you ran and how the insights were used * An example of a research question + interview questions you used in customer calls * An overview of a beta process you helped run, how many customers you talked to, and the outcomes that your insights helped solidify * An example of how you incorporated insights from industry experts or reports into a launch Storytelling: *  Core messaging + the landing page you built to distill the message * A product blog post you wrote to support a launch + outcomes * A video tutorial or webinar that you helped write or execute * A product announcement email + outcomes Project management: * A project plan that you used + the outcomes of the project * A product launch plan that you used + the outcomes * A hefty asset + a description of the team you coordinated to ship it * A cross-functional project timeline and breakdown + how you'd do it better

The great candidate stands out at every stage of the interview process, highlighting her & his value prop 😊 PMM portfolio is one more channel to show how you can help the company. Some practical things you can add to your PMM portfolio (copied from my other answer): * Messaging: key messaging on the products you worked on * GTM: links to your past launches (landing pages) * GTM: launch brief which you can share * Content: links to case studies you have prepared * Sales enablement: sales presentations, personas, sales emails * Your content (articles)

I am a big fan of writing examples.  * Writing crisp customer-facing content (blog posts, data sheets, whitepapers, product pages, etc.) is essential for any Product Marketer. * I must also add that the cross-functional nature of a PMM's job makes internal writing also very important. Clear, concise writing (GTM plans, memos, messages, 1-pagers, etc.) to get the point across succinctly to multiple stakeholders, drives alignment, and reduces duplicated efforts. Besides, I firmly believe that writing is the exercise of organizing your thoughts, answering your own questions, and articulating a straightforward story to the audience. In other words, writing is thinking. So, as much as possible, I ask people for their writing examples in interviews, etc., and I also try to write publicly, something that has benefitted me through connections.

At Zapier I approached this by starting with a mission statement to describe why our team exists and the work we aim to uniquely do for the company: “PMM exists to maximize Zapier’s market opportunities by (1) clarifying where we win and (2) driving GTM strategy for product success.” I then defined responsibilities that align to (1) like TAM, market segmentation, personas, positioning, competitive analysis, etc. and separately to (2) like working with Product validate market opportunities, designing and executing betas that ensure product/market fit, and of course planning and executing launches. Lastly, I made sure to socialize this charter around the org to ensure awareness and buy-in that this was the direction we were heading as a team. This is a very different scope from what PMM was doing when I joined — I often talk about it as charting a course from PMM 1.0 to PMM 2.0 with the expectation that getting to the full potential of PMM 2.0 will take quarters if not years. Thus when it comes to prioritization, I’m always asking myself “where do I see a combination of ripe business context, willing partners/stakeholders, and PMM team capacity for us to tackle an initiative that will take us more in the direction of PMM 2.0?” This requires hard prioritization conversations with stakeholder teams where we say no to some requests that come in in order to create the space for the bigger, more strategic efforts that pay long-term dividends. But without those tough conversations, the team wouldn’t ever get to PMM 2.0.

This can definitely be a challenge whether you're the first or tenth PMM at a company. I'm a fan of working backwards from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for the product team or from the sales team. From there, I like to ladder needs/deliverables up to team goals and business goals (impact). Then I'll stackrank them based on perceived effort of the deliverable.  Essentially, I'm creating an 2X2 grid based on business impact and perceived effort to complete the task.

First, I listen. It's important to understand in depth why these needs/deliverables are being asked of Product Marketing. What is the underlying problem? How can Product Marketing solve this?  Then, I assess company goals and revenue by product. The Product Marketing function is meant to support the company goals and I find that using this as a guidepost for prioritization is key. Assessing revenue by product helps as another factor in prioritization, but isn't the only factor as some companies may prioritize growth of a new product rather than optimizing their existing successful one. From there, it's an exercise of documenting the asks and prioritizing what will make the most impact in terms of supporting company goals and return on investment. Alignment with leadership and communicating these priorities internally is a great way to keep your team focused on the most impactful work.

As mentioned before, product marketing is one of the most cross-functional roles of any in most companies. And as such, you’ll be getting requests for projects and deliverables from every angle. The first thing I try to understand is: what responsibilities fall under me vs. another team (ie: is there a separate pricing team? Enablement team? Market research team?) Once my purview is clear, I put together a Product Marketing Charter (my PMM mission, PMM pillars, responsibilities under each pillar) to share with my stakeholders, to help structure our conversations around what is top of mind for them and where they need support. I like to create a table of all these requests, the stakeholders who have requested them, and understand the effort level of each request. More often than not, you’ll start to see overlapping requests or challenges across multiple teams. That’s where I like to focus first, to help make the biggest impact with the limited time or resources I have.

Only a few weeks into my current role, I’m living this one in real-time! For myself, I’ve created the following approach: Listen → Set Expectations → Execute → Close the Loop. For prioritizing needs/deliverables, I spend as much time as possible listening and understanding what is most pressing for the business immediately (and then mid and longer term). The key here is to determine where the business needs product marketing the most. When you’re the first PMM, it can be incredibly natural for everyone to welcome you on to their project -- there will be so much product marketing to do! So it’s important in the early days that you never bite off more than you can chew and no one is under the impression that you’ll work on more than you feasibly can. Perhaps you’re coming in during planning, then you’re focused on helping identify key insights that can help shape the roadmap. If you’re coming in mid-stream, then you dive in to try to strengthen the most immediate and high stakes launches. Often it’s a mix of both. Wherever you’re coming into the cycle, choose these initiatives intentionally and ensure key partners agree with your prioritization. From there, it’s about flawless execution and communicating internally as projects reach milestones and meet objectives.

I generally use a modified version of the Eisenhower Matrix (I just learned the name). On the spectrum of "not urgent to urgent" and "not important to important," you should prioritize the deliverables/needs that are both urgent and important. When you're the first product marketer, it's easy to fall into the trap of just prioritizing the urgent needs without evaluating the relative importance.  When you're building out a new function, spend time meeting with the teams you'll be working with to understand their pain points and needs. Then, layer in your understanding of which pain points/needs product marketing is uniquely fit to support and create a plan. This will help you understand the urgency and importance of the various opportunities. Document your thoughts and share them broadly to confirm you're tackling the right things and in the right order of priority. Having a shared/common understanding of priorities will make it easier to justify why you are/aren't working on something. More importantly, give yourself time to build out the function. If you reactively tackle every request that comes your way, you won't be able to build the foundation that you need to be successful or spend time hiring the right team.

I'm going to talk about my experience at really early stage companies, at this point, everyone is doing everything, so the priority is to create some strcuture to help every get aligned on the same goals. When I’ve been the first Product Marketer, or only one establishing the PMM function the first thing I do is meet with sales, product and the rest of marketing to identify the gaps. Generally is there's that piece missing between Product and marketing/sales to message what has been built, and so forth. To solve for this I start building out a a messaging map to help define what our core persona is, the main problems we are solivng for and what are key messages should be. I also use this messaging map to help structure out how we should talk about our features by grouping like features and ideas together  This map creates the foundation requirements I need to help starting to 1) Build collateral with your marketing and sales teams 2) Create a cohesive narrative across the company to help keep everyone aligned. 3) Set up the foundation of how you want to structure the PMM team as it aligns to the product and features that your company offers. This will help you build out additional PMM roles and define responsibilities as your company grows.

As stated above, PMM wears so many hats it's important to recognize what is needed at any stage of a company. When first coming into an organization as the first PMM I think the most important thing to do is establish what does and doesn't exist. I think this is the right order of things that should happen first but if you come into an organization and feel that some of these things are already in a good place you can skip to the next step. That being said, when you are new to a company you have a fresh and unbiased perspective that only lasts for a few months - use those fresh eyes to your advantage! Write down all of your thoughts and learnings so you can look back at them later. 1. Interview internal stakeholders 2. Interview end-users 3. Competitive analysis 4. Align on and/or tweak the positioning 5. Sales enablement  6. Design GTM plans

Every company and every growth stage is different so the evaluative framework you utilize needs some flexibility. I recommend that your framework is developed in tandem with your partner stakeholders early on and is communicated often. A reliable framework includes a clear organizing principal, inputs, outputs/ impact, measurements, and timelines. As a first product marketer, I'd also advocate including a line item for dependencies and cross functional asks. Once you start building momentum in an organization, the asks come in quickly and from multiple directions. Your framework will allow you better yield management and help you organize and prioritize where you dedicate your efforts.

I don't have a set framework as such, but this is the approach I'd take: * Meet with stakeholders across the business to understand what's working, where the gaps are that PMM might be able to fill, and ask what they think is the highest priority. Ask lots of questions to understand what the underlying need/problem is, as the 'solution' people ask for might not always be the best way to solve the problem or might be better solved by another team. This is also a great opportunity to start educating others on what PMM does and how they should expect to work with you, if it's a new function. Identifying some small 'quick wins' can help establish your credibility and build relationships with those stakeholders.  * Understand the business strategy and goals. This will help you know what you're working towards, and then you can prioritise needs based on whether they will help towards those goals.  * Get to know your customers and your market. As well as understanding the pain points internally, it's also helpful to understand your current position in the market, how your product is perceived, how you stack up against competitors, what your customers say about you and so on. This should help you identify the highest priority areas - especially where these align with internal needs (for example, if your sales team is complaining you are losing deals to a specific competitor, and then you also find that the market doesn't know how you're differentiated, that may be a sign that you need to strengthen your messaging and enablement against that competitor) * Think about what you want you and your team to be focused on. It's easy for PMM to end up as a 'catch all' and end up doing a ton of things that aren't really product marketing, especially if the marketing team overall is small. That might be what the business needs at that time, and that's ok, but knowing where you want to get to will help you advocate for more resources and moving that work out of the team in the longer term. 

I'm still trying to master this one, but here's what I'm doing at Klue (I'm in my first month at the company).  Create your PMM Charter With the input of your boss and other leaders in the company, you'll first want to define what PMM looks like at your org. This helps set the guardrails for what product marketing is repsonsible for at your org and what your main objectives are. This will take into consideration what the top priorities are for company leadership.   Set out on a priority finding mission In your first month or so, you have the opportunity to have a ton of 1:1 conversations as a new employee. During these conversations, I ask everyone if they have any priorities or asks for product marketing. I use all of this to create a master list of all the internal priorities/projects that people would "like" my team to focus on.  I also like to do a content audit, focusing on all of the collateral that's leveraged throughout the sales cycle. I'll map the existing assets to the sales process and try to uncover gaps, or things that need updating.  After all of the steps above, you'll likely have a sizeable list of competing projects that you need to prioritize. Some factors to include in how you weight each project: * What impact can this have on revenue and how soon? * Is it tied to an existing deadline, like an upcoming product launch? * Who is requesting it? Is the CEO asking for this, or is it a one-off request from a sales rep?  * Does it fall within your charter, or is it outside the scope of product marketing at your org? * Where does it fit into your strategic objectives for that year, quarter, etc.  I would map this all out in a spreadsheet or project board and circulate it between a few key stakeholders in the company, ie. your boss, Head of Product, Head of Sales, Head of CS, the CEO, etc. You could even send them the raw list and ask them to rank it in terms of priority.  Using this feedback I'd create your final, prioritized project list. They key is to then make it available to everyone in your company so everyone can see where things fall and why. 

I start with my phases of success for a PMM in my first 100 days here. Through this process I create my priorities and ensure I have executive alignment on them. I always get feedback from my leadership team. I find that people often want the same thing but are saying it differently – identify this when it happens to bring alignment back on your priorities. Before any cross-functional meeting to get alignment or approval, make sure you’ve already shown your ideas to one or more people to get their advanced feedback and buyin. Some people, especially leaders have other context you don’t have. This is key to getting successful alignment. Also look here on how to build internal consensus on what you want to deliver. 

Chances are you will inherit a number of projects in queue Day 1. Do your best to deliver on those projects to drive results out of the gate. This will instantly help you build credibility with colleagues. That said, start thinking about a learning agenda for each of your org's big areas. At Chime we have built LAs for banking, credit, liquidity and insurance. The PMMs on my team work lock step with PM, UX, etc. to translate Chime's goals into a series of powerful initiatives twice a year. From there they set up a series of experiments and /or new feature - product launches. They work together to 1- knowledge map existing insights and data to inform the LA and 2- outline what is still left to learn. They then sequence the work. Having a formidable LA for each "vertical" really helps everyone with a single point of truth document. New opportunties, partnerships, scope will inevitably crop up. Having really solid LAs will help you more easily re-negotiate the work within each agenda and have thoughtful conversations with your partners ala, "Is [blank] now higher leverage than [blank] or do we stay the course, look for additional resourcing and capacity or backlog something else to make it happen?"

As a first PMM hire it's important to prioritize needs and deliverables based on the overall goals and objectives of the company. Do “discovery” similar to how you would approach a product launch – get up to speed on the business, the competitive landscape, the customer, and the product. This will help you understand the biggest opportunity areas and align your efforts with the company’s goals to maximize impact. In addition to listening & learning from your stakeholders its also important to educate your partners on the role of PMM, PMM’s superpowers, and the metrics you are accountable for. This will provide your peers with context on how to partner with you and give you a chance to share back the projects you’ll be prioritizing and gather feedback on that plan to ensure you are working on the most impactful things.

As a first (and oftentimes only) product marketer at a company, prioritization is the mother of all skills. The framework I would apply is a natural extension of the 30/60/90 day plan outlined above. Prioritization can only come once there is a decent amount of work done to understand the current state and needs of the business, and your fellow cross-functional counterparts. That said, there are some tangible and practical ways to approach prioritization.  1. Build out your team (functional) charter as a first step. How do you define your function, the areas you will focus on, the roles and responsiblities that fall within, how you measure success and how you collaborate with your cross-functional peers. Use this as a map to what projects you'll take on, and what projects you'll thoughtfully and respectfully say no to.  2. Have a clear understanding of the priorities and goals of the business overall, and specifically the wider marketing team. Your priorities should align to these areas. If the business has decided to strategically focus on the Enteprirse market, your prioritized deliverables should include how you will position your product to that market.  3. Leave space to build the foundations. If you are the first PMM, it is likely there are not a lot of processes or frameworks in place that set a PMM up to be effecient in the future. Give yourself the time and space to build these out. For example, building a launch framework and GTM templates for announcing new features and products. Defining with product and sales teams how you will work together. etc. If you jump into pumping out deliverables, you may end up positioning yourself and the PMM function as a service hub, rather than a strategic partner.  3. Capacity plan. As the only PMM, it can feel overwhelming at times to tackle all things - at once. Set clear and firm boundaries for yourself so you are not burning the midnight oil, and then plan your weeks, months, and quarters based on your capacity. What low hanging fruit is there - projects that take little time and resources that can deliver an impact - and how many of those can you take on, while still building out the foundations. Scope out how many meatier projects you can take on - and capacity plan with teams you may need to partner with. Things will not always go to plan, dates may slip and scope may creep - but starting with a plan will help provide guardrails to keep you on track to delivering impact. 

30 days - Learn the market and competitive landscape. Visit as many customers and non-customers as possible. Read every Win/Loss report you can get your hands on. Talk to as many sales reps as possible. Use the Steve Jobs line of questioning: "What's working here?" "What's not working here?" Warning: don't assume you're the smartest person in the room. Network and leverage as many brains in the organization as you can.  60 days - Formulate a GTM strategy. Be prepared for a lot of "We don't do it that way here". Be persistent and focused. Use facts to inform your decisions not fantasies.  90 days - Execute, execute, execute. 

One thing I'd add that's very tactical to the great stuff that David has already laid out: Find your allies.  Talk to everyone within the org that you can and assemble a shortlist of people who have good understandings of things like the customers, the tech etc... Befriend a good sales rep, the best sales reps in complex sales cycles are often product marketers in disguise. If they've been there for a bit they have a ton of knowledge that has never ever been documented or made sense of and they can accelerate your understanding immensely. 

I suggest combining pieces from my answers to these questions.  1. What's your framework to prioritizing needs/deliverables when you're the first Product Marketer at a company establishing the function?   2. How do you think about your first 30/60/90 day goals when coming in as the Head of Product Marketing in a startup that didn't have product marketing before? 

Whenever you are starting a new role, it's critical to understand what's important to your manager and what the objectives are for your new organization so you can align yourself well to them. Every company has a different onboarding plan, and for PMMs I think it's critical to get the lay of the land through meet and greets with the people you'll work with to hear first hand what is on their mind, so you can start to understand how you will work together. I also work with my manager to define what I can deliver as soon as possible to show impact to the organization.  This is not PMM specific, but there is an app that I use called the "The First 90 days" which I use to help me think through different elements of my new role. The information is useful enough that you can adapt it to a PMM role. 

Copied over from a similar question: There are a lot of things you could do - and it's easy to get distracted as a product marketer. First 30 days - Listen, listen, listen. Ask a TON of questions. Hold back from providing ideas unless you are really sure about it. Help others behind the scenes on ongoing projects with work you are good at - like writing or editing copy, preparing slides, etc. Help them look good and make allies. This is also a great way to learn the business. Talk to customers - jump in on existing calls and ask good questions. Get familiar with basic analytics and KPIs - need to know what needle to move and what drives it. 30-60 days - Make a success plan & set concrete expectations. Create a list of things you are going to focus on to make the most impact on the business. Separate quick wins from strategic work. Have a healthy debate with your boss and cross-functional leaders in sales, product, and customer success. Focus on your first big win that can be accomplished in under 30 days. Get an A in that even if you let everything else fail or push to the next 30 days. Figure out which fires you are going to let burn. Also, do most of your work in the open - it's often not a good idea to wait for the "big reveal". Surprises are not your friends. We tend to miss out on helpful feedback others can provide when we are missing context - this is critical during the early days. 60-90 days - Create momentum. Ask leadership for informal feedback - how you are doing and where you can tweak things. Once aligned, I would focus on the next big win while delivering smaller, tangible outcomes that line up with your success plan. The most important thing a product marketer should be doing through this journey is saying "no" enough. Smaller companies tend to see everything that is not about generating leads to be product marketing's job. While you could make that argument, it is important to say no to those seemingly urgent things and let those fires burn. Jumping on things because the CEO/CMO said so without considering the tradeoffs to your current priorities can be your biggest enemy.

First 100 days in a job quite important. The First 100 days are your opportunity to ask questions, make some bold moves, build trusted relationships, and set the tone. I would focus on the following things: Build a solid understanding of your industry and target market: As a PMM, you need to bring unique perspectives to the table. PMMs are fortunate that they get to interact with customers, sales, analysts, product managers and gain insights about competitors. In the first 30-60 days, I will focus on understanding things like market opportunity, competitive differentiation, why people buy us? or why they don't buy us?, TAM, Your core market, your adjacent markets. Trust me, invest your time in understanding these things better and you will get payoff in the next 12-18 months. So, although this will never be part of your initial projects, make sure you save time to build your own point of view o the market.  Think of your lack of knowledge for processes/tools more as a "fresh perspective" you can bring to the team: As a PMM leader, it is important that you invest in building scalable processes and you invest in building some foundational templates. So, while it's important to understand current processes/tools/SLAs, don't be afraid to propose new things that could save hours and hours of your team. People who are already following set processes tend to miss out on improvement opportunities. You can add tremendous value here. One of the best pieces of advice I got was from a PMM leader at Salesforce. When I was moving to a new company, she cautioned me to stay away from saying that the things are really broken (in her words - that the kitchen sink is dirty). Be mindful that the team has been using/working/following their own processes that may not be the best, but they got work done. Focus on building relationships: You have a blank slate. Use it wisely. Build solid relationships with sales, product leaders, CS leaders, your team, your managers, extended marketing org. Try to listen before jumping to conclusions. It's difficult to do it during COVID time but casual coffees and happy hours can forge good relationships with your colleagues. 

I don't know about you, but I think there's so often a tendency to jump right in and start delivering. I encourage everyone that starts working on my team to spend their first 30 days learning! If you can work with your boss, try to buy yourself some time just to soak up knowledge and develop a point of view. The key things I try to get to know as much as possible when starting a new job are: the product (spend time using it, get certified if that's an option), customers/prospects (listen to Gong calls, shadow sales calls), the business (dig into your dashboards -- what's your average deal size, how long are sales cycles, which segments are performing well or aren't, what's your pricing...), and your colleagues (product managers, sales RVPs, CS, enablement, demand gen...). At the end of 30 days, share a SWOT with your manager, and identify a few quick wins for days 31-90. The quick wins should be tangible deliverables that have some visibility with cross-functional teams. Maybe there's an in-progress launch a colleague is leading that you can contribute to and present deliver part of the enablement. Or maybe there's an under-served area (a persona, a part of the product) where you can collaborate on with a few people to build out the storyline, materials, and training on. 

The first 90 days is such an exciting and sometimes overwhelming time in a person's career.  The best way to set up for success in 90 days is as follows:  Day 1 - 30: Learn, learn, learn The first task I complete (and subsequently ask my newbies to complete) is an end-to-end product audit. The goal of this exercise is for newbies to learn the product and marketing flows inside out, from the perspective of one of our customers (ie. not looking up internal docs of what the flows are meant to be). While on this journey we want our newbies to use their fresh set of eyes to scrutinize the flows for anything which doesn’t make sense, was confusing, is broken or could be optimized. This audit is shared with the product and marketing teams and suggestions are factored into the roadmaps. This task celebrates the person's new and unique perspective on your product and helps them share their ideas with a wide range of stakeholders.  For the remainder of the 30 days, become a complete sponge and absorb as much context as you possibly can before your workload starts to creep up on you. The key areas to explore to help build context are:  * Identifying and meeting with all your key stakeholders for a listing tour * Diving into key dashboards and reporting * Reviewing the company and your teams' strategic focuses for the year * Immersing yourself in your audience: reading reports, recorded interviews,  * user testing, feedback channels, speaking with customers   * Understanding the ways of operating and processes of the business  * Reviewing all the sales enablement content, sales goals  * Reviewing and understand the product roadmap and the current product functionality  * Understanding the competitive landscape of your company and product offering Days 30 - 60: Getting some quick wins Once you have all this context you’ll be in a much better position to start executing your workload. Work with your manager to identify your key deliverables for the next 60 dates and a prioritization framework. Identify some quick win projects you can quickly execute to help build your confidence in the new role and build rapport with your colleagues.  In many of the roles I’ve started, I’ve often been brought in to help wrangle a large GTM or group of stakeholders from chaos to clarity. If this is the case, evaluate all angles of the GTM from the perspective of each core stakeholder to help formulate an understanding of the project holistically. Spending a decent chunk of time understanding the blockers, challenges, and misalignment from your key stakeholders will help you build relationships with these folks and ultimately help you develop a GTM strategy that brings clarity to the situation. Helping to bring clarity to any project is a surefire way to have a big impact.  Days 60 - 90: Executing Based on your project list, this is the timeframe where you might start to see some of your bigger projects come to life and be executed. Now that you have a better understanding of the company and you’ve got some wins on the board, a great way to make an impact is to seek out new opportunities or problems to solve for your team. Be the person that sees opportunity in a problem and proposes a solution or experiment to try and resolve it.

Here is what has worked for me in the past. This pace below is relevant for smaller teams/orgs. You can pace this out for larger teams/orgs as needed. 30 DAYS Goal: Establish credibility and define your goal and priorities Key tasks: * Build relationships with key stakeholders and understand expectations * If you are a manager, get to know your team (obviously!) * Understand the business - products, market opportunity, business metrics * Define your draft year 1 goal, strategy and priorities and get sign-off from stakeholders  * Deliver any critical (and time sensitive) initiatives to show an early win (if needed)  Deliverables: * Overall goal, strategy and priorities * Any critical initiative (if needed) 60 DAYS Goal: Start executing and define the plan Key tasks: * Continue building/strengthening relations with stakeholders, extend to co-workers * Build the plan (initiatives/projects, timelines, metrics, resources) aligned to the priorities * Understand the market - customer insights and competitive landscape * Fill any urgent sales content gaps/needs * Start executing on a few key initiatives aligned to your priorities Deliverables: * Customer and market observations * Critical sales content gaps  * PMM Plan aligned to priorities * Put tracking mechanisms in place * Make resource asks  90 DAYS Goal: Validate your strategy/plan and start ramping to your peak efficiency level Key tasks: * Based on everything you learned so far (and resources available), iterate on your goal, strategy, priorities and plan * Get into full execution mode * Start delivering early results/wins  Deliverables: * Any revisions for your strategy and plan  * Completed initiatives and results Pro tips for near term impact (depends on your focus) If the near term focus is internal, then understand your stakeholders biggest pain or need and put a plan in motion to address that (assuming you agree with it of course). But ensure all the key stakeholders agree on the biggest pain to solve first. For example if the biggest problem is the sales enablement mechanisms, then work on that, and do market research and positioning later.  If your internal stakeholders are not screaming, then you have the luxury to focus on the external market. And you can follow the classic PMM sequence of initiatives (as they tend to be sequential) - understand the business, gather insights (customer, market competitive), craft positioning and messaging, build sales content, drive/support sales enablement, and start evangelizing (social, AR, PR, marketing content). I also liked what Suyog shared during his AMA. 

Time for some radical transparency.  I'm in the midst of this right now. Tomorrow is my 30-day milestone at Cisco Meraki. It's been an awesome first four weeks, and I'm really looking forward to what's next. (Shameless pitch - we're hiring, too!) The size of the company and team adds a layer of complexity here, but in general, this is your best chance to really focus on learning your customer, product, and market here. It's hard to go back and do this again, especially in growth mode, so don't throw this away! Also, don't limit yourself to 90 days. I like framing this as a "First 100 Days." It sounds more presidential and breaks you out of the calendar a bit. First 4 weeks: Product, Team and Market - Learn everything you can about the product, what's in flight, and what competitors are doing overall - Read research, talk to sales, get demo-ready if you can - Exit mindset: "I understand what we do, and for whom, and how we're doing it today." Mid-term 4-5 weeks: Customers and Message - Now you're getting into it. Meet with as many customers and prospects as possible - Build your point of view on the message, the gaps, and what needs fixing - Data, data, data. Now that you have context on the business, the numbers will make more sense - Exit mindset: "I believe I know what we should do next, and what the big problems are." Closing 4 weeks: Start your Execution - By now, you've got a sense of problems and plan - Dig in and start doing. Pick priorities carefully, and line them up with near-term company objectives - Ideally, have 1 early win under your belt, and 2-3 more on the horizon - Exit mindset: "Follow me - here's where we're going to go, and how we're going to get there.  Finally, don't lose sight of key wins you can deliver. These are great ways to contribute, build trust, and start working towards that bigger impact. Starting in Month 2, can you: * Get a "big topic" on the blog * Contribute an article to PR for publication at a third party * Speak on a webinar or customer event * Refresh the EBC/Exec deck * Fix a broken or inefficient process * Update an unloved or overlooked part of your site

There is a ramp plan that I like & have used many times, both for myself and members of the team. Like most things that are awesome, it takes the form of a very simple looking table. 3 Columns: * People: Meet with stakeholders and the team I will be working with, understanding their needs & determine how to best work with each person * Product: Learn the product, value prop, messaging, pitch and know how to do a killer demo * Business: Understand the buyer journey, key metrics, market and all the "math camp" things 4 Rows: * 30 Day: List of activities I will do in my first 30 days for each column * 60 Day: List of activities I will do in my next 30 days (more advanced) * 90 Day: List of activities I will do in my next 30 days (even more advanced) * Deliverables: These are "contained projects" I will take ownership of each month, so that while I'm learning things, I'm also shipping things. This plan is focused on successfully ramping during the first 90 days, its not focused on making a big impact during th first 90 days. This is because you are only the "newbie" for a limited period of time. The first 90 days are the time to ask all the questions, re-ask the same questions and have people spend hours explaining it all to you. This is not time that will come back, so its important to take advantage of it. TLDR: Don't short circuit your ramp, it will be the investment that will make the big impact possible. If your stakeholders see you asking insightful questions, ramping well on the business and mastering the product in the first 90 days, you're already winning.

Congrats on the new role! Very excited for you. I agree that it is good to have a 30-60-90 day plan and to make sure you can show progress and positive impact early yo make a good impression. That said, I would suggest you give yourself some time during the first 30 days to absorb as much as you can about the company, the interpersonal dynamics, the challenges and opportunities so you can then define and priorities in month 2 and deliver something of value in month 3 on the top 3 opportunities you identified in month 1 and worked on month 2 and 3.

It depends a little on what the situation is with PMM in the company you join (i.e. size and maturity, what the team is currently doing, what your role is going to be, whether you're an IC or a manager), but here's some things to think about: 30 days - this first month is all about getting the lay of the land and meeting everyone you'll be working with, building relationships and establishing your credibility! You won't get all of this done in the first 30 days but it's good to get started on these areas.  I think it's really important to listen and understand in this early stage, rather than come in and start immediately changing things - every business is different, and what you've done before might not necessarily be right at your new place. So seek to learn and understand first, before making a ton of changes.  * Build relationships: Meet with stakeholders across the business to understand how they work with PMM, what's working, what's not, and what they think is the highest priority. Ask lots of questions! This is also a great opportunity to start establishing how you'll work together. Identifying some small 'quick wins' can help establish your credibility and build relationships with those stakeholders. * Get to know your team: If you're starting in a management role, start getting to know your team and building a relationship. Establish with each person how they like to work, what support they need, how they like to be given feedback etc, and set expectations about how you like to work also. Get up to speed on what they're working on, what they think is working in the team, and what could be improved. Also get to know them as people! * Get to know the product: Understand what it does (actually use it!), what's good and bad, and understand the journey customers go on from prospect>customer  * Start to learn the business strategy and goals: This will help you know what you're working towards, and then you can prioritise what to focus on. Understand from your manager what the expectations of your role and team are, and start to identify where you can have most impact. * Get to know your customers and your market: understand your current position in the market, how your product is perceived, how you stack up against competitors, what your customers say about you and so on. Read everything, listen to calls, talk to your sales team, research your competitors etc 60 days - as you begin to understand the current state of things, start to think about what you want prioritise working on and build out a plan. I like to identify some small quick wins and some bigger meatier longer-term projects. If you're a manager, you'll likely be building out a roadmap of sorts on what you want the team to work on, what your goals will be, and then getting buy-in from your team and other stakeholders. You'll also want to start having more in-depth discussions with your team members about their career growth and ambitions. 90 days - start executing on your plan! It really depends on what you've identified as the highest priority things to work on but hopefully you've got some quick wins under your belt and are starting on some of your meatier initiatives. 

I actually did a presentation on this about a month ago, which you can watch here. I don't split it out into 30-60-90 day increments, but within that period, these are the things I'd suggest doing: 1. Get to know your product - get demo certified, the same as your AEs 2. Start building key relationships internally - have lots of 1:1s 3. Create battlecards for your top 2-3 competitors 4. Put your positioning on paper 5. Define a product launch process 6. Set up your internal communication channels 7. Perform a content audit and find the gaps that need filling 8. Gather the tools, templates, frameworks that will accelerate your success Another late edition to this (added after my presentation) is to create your own PMM Charter. This is a foundational document that lays out the goals and objectives for your product daprtment. It helps you create guardrails for your team around the things that are in your wheelhouse, which will come in handy as people start firing projects at you.

I break up my 30-60-90 day plan into 4 phases of success for Product Marketing – it also includes focus for after your first 90 days, all outlined below.   You may not get to everything in each phase, or you may move through things faster – I use this as a guide and checklist to keep myself accountable. Following this has helped me identify what wins I can crush every 30 days. You can tailor it to your needs at your company and the level you are entering at. The key is to actively listen in interviews and cross-functional meetings and if anyone is working on something that syncs with your superpowers – speak up, ask questions about what they are doing and trying to achieve, schedule a 1:1 with them and volunteer to collaborate with them or take it off their plate. When you ask lots of questions and get to a point they don’t have an answer – that’s the signal to raise your hand and offer your help. Don’t go in guns blazing, it needs to be natural and collaborative. Show humbleness and mastery. PMMs are the strategic glue between product, marketing and your customers, we are not the main show and final end point. I also treat all internal stakeholders as one of my personas – get to know their pain points, what brings them value and how to speak to them. Also, during my 1:1 interviews with them, I’ll also ask if they have worked with a PMM before. If yes, I asked what worked well, what could’ve been better and discuss how we can work together to show the value I bring. If they’ve never worked with a PMM, I share with them what value I can bring and discuss how we can collaborate together. Tips here on how to approach all your stakeholders.   PMM Phases of Success The first 3 phases include execution (your wins) and they ramp up. See here for examples on quick wins.   30 DAYS: DISCOVERY * Listen, Ask Questions * 1:1 interviews with cross functional partners * Customer Interviews, ICP, personas, map customer journey * Product training, roadmap, launches to date * Analyze existing content, strategy, data * Research competitors 70% Discovery + 20% Strategy + 10% Execute 60 DAYS: STRATEGY * Think, Create, Iterate * Buy off on business plan: vision, headcount and OKRs, and PMM roadmap * Create PMM playbooks: * Messaging and positioning framework defined * GTM and product launch strategy defined * Pricing and packaging roadmap * Competitive intelligence framework / Amplification 60% Strategy + 30% Execute + 10% Iterate 90 DAYS: EXECUTION * Produce, Operationalize * Roll out PMM playbooks and frameworks * Have or identify how to get a team in place to fully execute * Uplevel existing team * Iterate and create efficiencies * Cadence established for customer interviews, GTM meetings, PMM standups, Working sessions, 1:1 80% Execute + 10% Strategy + 10% Iterate 91+ DAYS: SCALE * Refine, Scale, Expand * Focus on refining and tailoring playbooks and frameworks * Team in place is able to scale so we gain efficiencies * Ready to expand scope * Deep partnerships with cross-functional partners * Uplevel areas of development 30% Scale + 50% Execute + 10% Strategy + 10% Iterate

Here is what mine looked like roughly when I started about 9 months ago: 30 days: 1. Product onboarding and learning 2. Meet key people in PM, Sales, Marketing 3. Get introduced to tools used in the org 4. Understand the current messaging and positioning of the product(s)  5. Listen for key problems that we solve and internalise the personas and brand-level messaging 60 days: 1. Embed yourself in a customer conversation 2. Ride shotgun on monthly product updates 3. Study competitors and their market positioning 4. Review the state of sales enablement and plan for updates 5. Plan messaging updates if and as necessary 90 days: 1. Form opinions on current strategy and present an updated GTM back to the stakeholders 2. Create a GTM plan for any upcoming product changes in your portfolio This was how it went down for me and I think it covered off almost important bits of getting introduced to a new product, new target personas, and a new market. 

First 30 days -  Meet with key staholders across the company - ensure excitement for the mission and what you're about to take on. Ask key questions about their responsibilities, what they are working on, and describe a bit on how you plan on working together with them. Product marketing is all about relationship building, in fact its key to be succesful. Ensure you're speaking with and understanding the pain points of each stakeholder you speak with, and make sure you listen. Listen in on customer calls and recordings - Its imperative you start familiarizing yourself with the products and customers alike. My best approach is to get a complete recording of customer conversations that your sales team has, and start jotting down pain points you hear and truly understand how the product is being positioned, this will help you connect the dots down the road.  Acquire quick wins to show your chops - Quick wins are always nice. What is the biggest low hanging fruit you can take on in order to show your chops? Typically I like to work with the sales team early on, identify what they need, and build it. This helps establish relatioships with the team early on, and also helps with familiarizing yourself with the company.  60 - 90 Days:  Keep the 30 day momentum going. Continue to listen to calls, fill gaps, and familiarize yourself with the company. I would add a few more to the list now that you further understand whats happening:  Learn the product - Now that you understand whats happening across the company to a degree, make sure you get a sales engineer to show you details of the product. Talk to customers - get on a customer call and start surveying. Its important you hear first hand what your customers want and need.  Take Ownership - WIth whatever you're assigned to do, ensure you are taking ownership and leading the charge on what you're given. 

This is a great question, and one I thought deeply about prior to starting at Mode. Thankfully, I had a nice long break between Intercom and Mode which I leveraged for lots of down time 😉 but also as a time to reflect on how I wanted to approach those first 90 days. First, I'd recommend reading 'The First 90 days' by Michael Watkins. There was a lot of great information in here that I definitely borrowed from. Here is a birds eye view of how I applied it:  First 30 days - Listen! This can often be the hardest part of starting any new role. The urge to jump in and start proving value is very strong but without context and an understanding of the company, teams, problems, customers etc - this can be a detrimental move. So my goal was to spend the first 30 days building as much context as I possibly could. I met with as many people as I could - with the goal of learning about their roles in the company, asking for as much historical context they could provide, and digging into what challenges they were currently faciing - and how they saw product marketing playing a role in tackling those challenges. The goal was not to commit to anything, it was simply to listen. I listened to customer and prospect calls. I read, and read, and read - blogs, competitor sites and blogs, industry repots, substacks, internal docs, etc.  I joined right before a big product launch and a rebrand launch, so the urge to jump in was strong - and I did in fact pick up small pieces that I could help with, to start building the cross-functional muscle, but ultimately I measured the success of my first 30 days by how well I was able to start identifying gaps, and what priorities I was able to distill out of those gaps.  It is very important to align with your manager at this stage (and the rest) on their expectations - to ensure there is alignment - and pull up together at the end of those first 30/60/90 days.  First 60 days - Longer term goals / early wins Building context will continue well into the 60 days, but at around the 30 day mark there is a transition into taking action. What small wins have been identified, that you can start taking action against? Smaller wins usually can be accomplished without large x-functional buy in and without heavy internal resourcing. What larger gaps have been identified and how to start building a plan or brief to tackle those gaps? This is the time that it is also important to start setting up your strategic alliance. Who are you x-functional peers - and what standing meetings should you be joining, and reoccuring 1:1s should you be having? This is critical as you start to build out your plans as you'll likely need buy in from these peers, so set up the right working structure ahead of any plan execution. Bring them into your early thinking and ASK FOR FEEDBACK!  First 90 days - Rhthym and results By the 60 day mark you should be moving into a rhthym of work. You've established your aliances, you've implemented team rituals, you've identified gaps and problems to be solved and translated those into a plan for the next 1-2 quarters that outlines:  * top priorities * goals (success metrics) * specific milestons to achieving those goals * what outputs are associated with each priority  * alignment from manager and cross-functional counterparts  This is the time to start promoting yourself and your team as well. Build and share your team charter. Share your priorities, and set up the right structure for sharing out results. ASK FOR FEEDBACK and iterate.  There's a lot packed into each of these 30 day segments - but hopefully this provides a high-level overview of how to start a new role focused on optimizing for long-term success by setting up the right foundation first. Go slow to go fast. 🚀

* Conversion rates across the funnel - Did the messaging drive the desired actions at each customer touchpoint from initial engagement to sign up/trial/purchase * Landing pages, emails, posts, and ad performance - How did individual assets and channels perform relative to benchmarks?  * Sales asset usage and engagement - Which assets, talking points, and messaging were used, and how did prospects and customers engage? Highspot will show you which sales assets are being used the most and which are driving the most customer engagement, while Gong.io provides sophisticated insights into sales calls to determine what’s working and what’s not. * Finally don’t forget to capture qualitative feedback on your messaging from customers, prospects, and internal stakeholders. While presumably, you’ve done this pre-launch, another round of feedback post-launch will provide further insights you can quickly apply to post-launch campaigns for a fast follow.

It's pretty difficult to get a straightforward read on the effectiveness of your messaging and positioning but there are a few things you can do to ensure your messaging is more likely to succeed. 1) During the process of creating the messaging, work with your market research team to test aspects of the messaging with prospects and customers. This can be both quantitative test of words or descriptors you use as well as qualitative tests where you actually test aspects of a pitch with customer. 2) Get input early and often from your sales, customer success, and support teams. 3) Use A/B testing to evalute how the messaging resonates on your website, search, social copy.   Once you've created the messaging, you can use your channel metrics to track how well it's resonating but give it time. Any change of messaging takes a while to take hold with the audience (be it sales or customers) so don't be in a rush to make an update just because you see metrics dip initially.

The ultimate KPI for great messaging and positioning is always the health of your business and your most important business metrics. Great messaging can doe everything from increasing conversion rates, accelerating the sales cycle, lowering acqusition costs to improving win rates. Those would always be the P0 OKRs to me. There are great leading indicators too, which are more tangible and direct. Things like ad click through rates, email click through rates, site bounce rates, time on site, and more, that speak to how engaging and action-inducing your messaging is.

This is probably one of the toughest problems we face as marketers. A lot of times, teams will look at a combination of leading quantitative indicators (clicks, conversions, time spent, etc.) and qualitative signals (from buyer interviews, listening to sales calls, etc.), to take a best guess at what’s working and what’s not. There are lots of problems with this. It’s tough to isolate messaging as the primary driver of these results, and assign quantifiable measures that will clearly indicate improvement if you make changes. Qual feedback takes a lot of time to gather, especially if you want to validate your messaging across a number of buyer personas. A/B testing can help, but you and your GTM team need to be pretty careful not to change anything else (including upper-funnel stuff like ad copy and targeting) that might impact results, which can be paralyzing. Worst of all, while you’re doing all of this, you’re already in-market: the train has left the station and you’re losing opportunity if you’re not sure your message is connecting. Instead, my recommendation is to validate your messaging before you go to market. (I won’t do too much self-promotion here, but it just so happens we make a Message Testing solution at Momentive, and it’s one of the products we leverage the most internally.) With a message testing solution, you can get a number of messages in front of your target audience — we tend to target a broad array of business buyers — and get real data on which messages resonate across a attributes like overall appeal, uniqueness, and, importantly, desire to learn more (as well as segmentation across buyers if you like). This is the kind of thing that, a few years ago, you’d probably need to engage a research agency to run, but modern survey-based tools like ours have purpose-built methodologies built-in, and you can get a clear signal on your key messages in just a day or two. We ran one of these recently to test new headline messaging for our Momentive homepage and it paid off in spades. It validated a messaging direction with our target buyers that was different than what internal leadership was advocating for — so we had some data to bring to the table justifying our positioning (see another of my AMA responses on gaining XF alignment on positioning). If we hadn’t tested, there was a strong risk of going to market with a losing message on one of our most important properties. Instead, we were able to go live on Day 1 with a message that we already know will resonate. In fact, two of our test messages performed strongly, so we were able to run an in-market A/B test to find a winner without really risking any traffic to a poor performer. tl;dr: I recommend using a survey-based solution to test your messaging before you go to market. You’ll get quantifiable information about what works and what doesn’t, aid internal buy-in, and gain a lot of launch day confidence. You will influence other performance KPIs driven by the GTM team, but PMM’s biggest responsibility is ensuring you have messaging that resonates with target buyers.

THE SHORT ANSWER TO YOUR QUESTION IS THAT I AGREE WITH YOUR APPROACH -- LADDERING THE TEAM UP TO A LARGER NORTH STAR METRIC AGAINST WHICH ALL ACTIVITIES CAN BE TIED IS A GREAT SOLUTION. I THINK A SIMPLE RULE OF THUMB IS, IF YOU’RE WORKING ON AN INDIVIDUAL PROJECT THAT ISN’T TIED TO A COMPANY OUTCOME, YOU SHOULDN’T BE DOING IT. EVERY OKR SHOULD BE TIED TO SOLVING COMPANY CHALLENGES, AND SHOULD BE MEASURED BY OUTCOMES FOR THE BUSINESS. THIS IS A GREAT NORTH STAR THAT KEEPS TEAMS MOTIVATED, EVEN WHEN DOING SEEMINGLY MINUTE OR THANKLESS TASKS.  PMMS NEED TO UNDERSTAND THAT THERE IS NO COOKIE CUTTER FORMULA FOR SETTING OKRS. THE FOCUS I’VE SET FOR PMM HAS BEEN DIFFERENT IN EVERY COMPANY, AND IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHERE THE COMPANY IS IN ITS GROWTH JOURNEY, AND WHERE IT SITS IN THE MARKET. ARE YOU STRUGGLING WITH SALES EFFICIENCY/EFFECTIVENESS, ROADMAP PRIORITIZATION, LEADGEN, PRODUCT ADOPTION/CUSTOMER RETENTION, PARTNER PROGRAMS, ETC.? ALL OF THESE CHALLENGES TIE BACK TO THINGS PMM CAN IMPACT THROUGH MESSAGING, ENABLEMENT, RESEARCH, AND CONTENT. AND ON AN EVEN MORE DETAILED LEVEL, UNDERSTANDING WHERE SALES BREAKS DOWN CAN HELP YOU DETERMINE WHERE IN THE FUNNEL THE EFFORTS SHOULD BE FOCUSED. ULTIMATELY, DETERMINING THE OKRS AND GOALS I SET FOR MY TEAMS STARTS WITH A STRONG UNDERSTANDING OF WHERE THE BUSINESS SITS, AND AN UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT THE CHALLENGES ARE FOR EACH PRODUCT LINE OR BUSINESS UNIT. FROM THERE, YOU CAN START BREAKING DOWN THE GOALS INTO STRATEGIES AND TACTICS THAT COME WITH MEANINGFUL OKRS THAT CASCADE BACK UP INTO REVENUE RESULTS AND BUSINESS IMPACT.

It's a fun project to take overall quarterly objectives like sales enablement or new feature launches and tie them back to OKRs. In fact today, I was talking with my team about how we can measure success for a sales enablement next quarter. We're going to do this a couple of ways:   1. Sales confidence -- Are sellers using decks, scripts, etc more (track this through CMS) than they were previously 2. Competitive wins -- what percentage has our win-rate increased from the previous half  Aside from this, my team currently has a lot of new feature releases. Since new feature adoption isn't tracked through a typical KPI like revenue or bookings, we've opted to track adoption metrics -- how many users choose to 'opt in' for a feature or provide feedback for a public beta feature. From that we can assert a 'win' on a quarterly goal, AND it helps the product team as we build out new features and updates to current ones. 

We match internal promotion based on the level of the product announcement. Small updates are little features that mostly existing customers are excited about. Medium updates are larger changes that potentially open up a small new audience or unlock new revenue potential. Large updates are major product changes or brand new products that require significantly adjusting our go to market strategy.  Small updates: Monthly email to sales, slack message to success Medium updates: ^ + dedicated email to sales/success + all company slack channel + join sales all hands recurring meeting to train Large updates: ^ + dedicated trainings per Account Executives, Sales/Success Engineers, CSMs, Marketing Team, present at the company all hands, create certification for sales, retrain after launch

Internal comms is sometimes undervalued, but in my opinion, it is one of the most important parts of a PMM's role, especially because product marketing is one of the very few roles that are extremely cross-functional and sits between multiple teams. Here are few ways I've seen it work best: * For major XF projects, have regular update emails so that you can make sure you are bringing everyone along the journey and it does not feel like you are working in a black box. * Internal newsletters (whatever cadence works for your org). We partner with the product team on a monthly newsletter where we talk about updates from both teams, but also talk about what's coming next. This goes to the entire company because we are still a small team but for bigger orgs you want to select your audience. * Whether you use Slack or Teams or something else, make sure you have communication channels where you are regularly posting updates on key projects. * At the beginning of every quarter, I draft a plan and share it with all cross-functional teams to make sure they are aware of our goals and priorities - but also give them a chance to give you feedback so that you can make sure you are prioritizing the most important initiatives. 

Internal newsletters, revenue org all-hands, relevant slack channels, and team-specific meetings. Of course, not every activity is shared through every channel. Depending on the "size" of the project or deliverable, we choose which channels to broadcast through. Thankfully we have a well-organized enablement team that manages these channel logistics, so we're able to efficiently streamline internal comms. On a personal level, it's critical that I provide key executives and other team leads with visibility of what's coming, so that they get their teams' attention and start a network effect for PMMs. Frankly, communicating across & up is something that I (and any leader) can be better about. Ultimately, you can broadcast every which way, but ensuring that recipients are attentively listening is the bigger challenge.

I think this depends largely on the size of an update - and the audience.  For our largest releases, they are communicated early and often - to drum up excitement. Through company all hands, sales trainings, slack channels, etc.  For mid-sized and smaller updates, we'll leverage the internal channels that make the most sense for the internal audience. If its sales, we'll update via our bi-weekly newsletter, slack channels, internal knoweldgebase docs on what to know, as one example. Each internal audience has their own channels and communication styles they prefer - and usually we work within their preferences. 

We are a slack heavy company. So we have our own announcement channel for all things Marketing that I actually started so that we could share our updates!  We also do quarterly roadmaps and retros where PM + PMMs present their upcoming roadmap and a retro on their activities from the past quarter. All of Product and PMM go - and we invite our key stakeholders across the business, including the leaders from other areas of Marketing. 

Why do you want to communicate updates and activities? If the goal is to communicate just the work the team has been doing, then I don't think that you should be communicating this to a large audience. This may be a good weekly summary email to your manager (Also, why would your manager need it?, the manager should already know it and it should be in your 1:1 doc), anyway, my point is communicating just WHAT you or your team is working on is waste of time for you and the reader. I would rather communicate the impact and how other teams could leverage the work your team has done. This can be done in different forums. For sales, that could be training. For product teams, that could a roadmap review meeting, for gtm teams, that can be launch messaging and GTM meeting. For demand gen and the rest of the marketing team, you can help them by sharing how they could roll out your work in the market to drive more demand.  We use different forums - sometimes it's 1:1 with other functional leaders, sometimes we plug our work into existing enablement programs, sometimes we create a new training, we participate in campaigns planning process, we join team meetings for other teams to share how they can leverage our work.

The key here is consistency. Find a channel that works and stick to it. Else it becomes to fractured and fragmented. You can use a slack channel, you can have a dedicated section in your sales enablement platform, you can issue regular emails with links to content. Just make sure you stick to an appraoch so your GTM teams get conditioned to the process.

It depends on the size of your company. This will become more challenging as the size of the company scales. At a company with less than 200 employees it is pretty easy to maintain relationships with executive leadership to keep them in the loop via regular meetings, Slack, and internal newsletters. No matter what the size of your company is, make sure you are spending enough time educating others on your value, contributions, and successes. Don't try to hide your failures, though. Nobody is perfect. Be honest about your lessons learned and help others learn from them as well. 

I'm a huge fan of slack messages. I usually create a public slack channel and add key stakeholders to it. I'll bookmark resources to the top for easy self-serve access. Then, I'll post an update once a week to inform others of progress, wins, blockers, etc.  In launch retros I've done in the past, this has been the #1 thing everyone points out as being a huge contribution to the success of the launch. It's so simple but I can't recommend it enough!