🟧 Hugo H. Macedo 🟧

There is no typical career path :) As a functional that interfaces and leverages cross-functional work and expertise across Marketing, Product, Sales, CS, and so on, you can come (and go) to all these areas. Having exposure to all of these helps. IMO, Product Marketing should be a senior step in your career after getting experience with other functions. But of course, also depends on the type of org your are in. In a small company a PMM works solo or in very small team and gets exposure to many things this enables them to learn and experience many different things. While in a bigger company, you have some opportunities to specialize if that's what you're looking for. ANyway, you your direction is to go to the manager track and become a leader (Director+) you need the broad exposure - because when you get there you'll be interacting with Marketing, Sales, Product and CS leaders and you need to understand their needs, their mindset and how to best partner with them.

There's many ways to segment the market depending on situation, market, product. But consider 2 risks: * Too complex and hard to use - sometimes this happens because you have a lot of data, and you can use some fancy analysis techniques and "geek out" to find the "perfect" segments. The problem is that no one understands the result, and you have no way to operationalize that in targeting, qualification, or briefings. * Too broad - you define for example just by company size - this can be too generic and doesn't give enough focus, try to add more variables like company industry, region and department. How you segment can represent how you look at the market and give you insight and inspiration. Go beyond the obvious and try to see if it helps position and explain the product. For example, an e-signature tool can be segmented by the department/persona that uses it (Sales, HR, Marketing, Finance, Legal) or by the recipient (Customer, Employee, Supplier). These two POVs will shape how you market and think about the product.

Churn is a consequence, and most often, it is too late. You need to go backward and identify the problems. Segment the problem: * no usage * low usage * support/technical issues * competition Then, you need to choose what you will tackle first based on volume/value and hypotheses on how to fix it. For each, you need to dive deep and understand more of the issue. Who's the persona and/or use-case? any specific customer segment (e.g. enterprise customers) Some hypothesis to start with: * No usage - never passed the onboarding phase and was never adopted, the champion could purchase/subscribe but never to implement. * Low usage - only a tiny fraction of users or use-cases have activity not enough to deliver the value expected (and paid) * Support/Technical issues - how frequent and big is this? Does it relate to the same part of the product? e.g. Integration, SSO * Competition - is there a prevalent competitor? Is it price or features? What are the features/capabilities that are better? Work with the relevant team to understand the problem and evaluate its size and shape. Then, work on potential solutions and use an "effort x impact " matrix to prioritize. E.g., a new feature can solve the problem but can take 6 months to roll out. Sometimes churn can be a mismatch between Product and Go-to-market strategy, i.e. we're selling the product to the wrong segment with the wrong positioning. Examples: * Selling an SMB product to an Enterprise - a sales was made but then roll-out/onboarding hit some implementation "walls" due to lack of features/integrations or proper implementation/rollout management * Selling an SMB product to individuals - individuals use a fraction of the features until they get what they want or realize that it's too expensive, too much for them. This can be checked by analyzing churn by customer segment, in this case.

They all need to come down to revenue impact. How much revenue is the campaign bringing or protecting? This is especially true for Product Marketing that should work across the buyer journey - from attracting the right audience, improving conversion, enabling sales to qualify and sell successfuly. Nevertheless, revenue can take some time and be affected by many things, so you can add some leading indicators (that will lead to revenue) * new leads * new opportunities (volume and value) * win-rate: if there's a good match between who we attract and the product, this should be high(er) All of this depends on the actual campaign objective. Needless to say, Product marketing should share the KPIs with other functions that are partnering with - e.g. Demand Gen, Sales, Product

There is no right answer. It depends on the strategy - if it's more driven by self-service (PLG) or sales. In sales-driven organizations, sales bring revenue and, therefore, have a lot of power. This is even more true if there is a CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) that oversees Sales and Marketing. On many occasions, CROs come from a sales background, which means that sales get a lot of weight. The fact that compensation for sales is short-term may drive the organization to make more short-term decisions, and that's a problem and contrarian to the marketing mindset. The fact is that Marketing rarely calls the shots unless the Founder/CEO is a marketing-driven person.

If you haven't reached product market fit, then you don't have much to protect, to risk. That's a great position to experiment with your positioning :) Think of it as if you're searching to see what works - search in the problem and customer space. This means you need to figure out who you are going to solve and what problem you're going to solve. At this point, the question is still to open to give a precise and prescriptive answer.

this is a good reference for a PMM book - quite new https://www.svpg.com/books/loved-how-to-rethink-marketing-for-tech-products/ also read about Product Management - https://www.svpg.com/books/inspired-how-to-create-tech-products-customers-love-2nd-edition/ On positioning: the classic: Positioning from All Ries, Jack Trout the newer: Obviously Awesome - April Dunford

"How to eat an elephant?" "one bite at a time" That's how to approach when thinking about a Market. The question then is, where are you going to bite? First you need a good understanding of the market: * who's going after what customers/personas * how they position themselves * dynamics of the market - network effects, * When and how do customers change? * Is this a mature or fast-growing market You want to find a segment of the market that you can win - that you have the strength and the possibility to win. Most of the times you not going head-on with the leaders, you find a flanking move, a guerrilla tactic to go to a segment that is less contexted and you have what it takes to win. That segment can be defined by one or several: * Price - from discount to premium * Geography. * retail channel (digital, stores, supermarkets,...) * engagement channels - where you contact and engage with prospects - maybe you can be the King of TikTok, Reddit, or even a specific community on those platforms Find where you can win, even if the segment is small. And go from there. Now, all the actions need to be coherent with that target. But once you're committed to that, it will be easier to make choices and evaluate results. * Who cares deeply about your product/promise and is not being addressed by a strong competitor? * Who are they and where can you find them? With the market understanding and identification of the segment you can focus on, you should be able to maximize your results comparing to trying to "eat the elephant" all at once.

We're here to serve business goals - either from a Product perspective and is a product KPI, like Adoption. Or from a Sales perspective and is a sales KPI like Win-rate. We can't work in a vacuum. We're either helping set new initiatives or fixing things that are broken. The KPIs are tied to that. The shared KPIs with Sales, Marketing and Product are what ensure alignment and commitment.

You need to fill 3 buckets: * understand the business * understand the organization * understand the customer Your leverage point is to build an internal network and gain and sustain a reputation. You're going to set an aggressive 1:1 meeting schedule that will help you build those relationships but also to get inputs about the business and organization. The secret here is prepare this meetings - have a list of standard questions by department/level and you can add more depending on the specific person/title. Your head will start to confuse all the inputs and mess up things, so make sure you keep a log and find opportunities to come back to people (next steps) with more questions, references you used,... you need to keep in touch with most of them. There are 2 danger zones: * You're not learning enough * A lot of talk and no action hurts your reputation. Learning: is about method * log the conversations * do a daily review with key insights and learnings * use the insights with other conversation to check, and cross-reference * start building your report with your hypothesis and insights - your thesis Reputation: set expectations and deliver on them * make sure you tell everyone what you're doing, how and why * Share with them some of your outputs or key insights In terms of timing * 30 days - you have met the most important stakeholders and you have feedback on what is expected and the current business priorities in general and by department * 60 days - you're hands-on working on a specific project - * 90 days - you deliver meaningful changes leveraging existing knowledge, new research, and expertise. People should now see in practice what great Product Marketing looks like - you set the tone, and the expectations and they trust you to lead or be involved in higher stake projects. So, in 90 days, you have built the knowledge, expectations, and reputations. Depending on expectations, lean more toward delivering a specific project than just presenting a PMM plan and framework - "theory" sets expectations but not reputation.