Alexa Schirtzinger

Head of Marketing, Watershed

Content

How do you structure your Product Marketing team?

Alexa Schirtzinger

Watershed Head of Marketing • July 22

A lot of it depends on the types of products you're marketing. Some teams can be easily organized into solution-based pods, so if you have a lot of products in your portfolio, you might have product marketers who focus on individual products reporting up to a solutions marketer, who represents a ......Read More

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How do you update stakeholders, and the company as a whole, on the recent activities and achievements of product marketing?

Alexa Schirtzinger

Watershed Head of Marketing • July 22

The thing I don't do is a weekly/monthly team-based newsletter. I find that these generally take a ton of work, aren't read by many people (we're all busy!), and can too easily veer into a kind of self-promotion that can build resentment within other teams. Instead, we generally focus on cross......Read More

645 Views

What kinds of ongoing, cross-functional meetings do you think are important to have? Which teams are involved, and what agenda items do you recommend?

Alexa Schirtzinger

Watershed Head of Marketing • July 22

Ah yes, the meeting trap! Unfortunately, my answer is that it depends -- on how mature your PMM team is, what your priorities and key projects are, and how you're structured. That said, a couple of guiding principles: 1. Keep it light. I try to let most meetings be ad-hoc or project-based, ......Read More

511 Views

What advice do you have for dealing with other departments 'taking' major projects and core product marketing responsibilities for themselves simply because they have resources and product marketing has a weak stance in the company, without supportive leadership and has only one or two Product Marketing Managers (who are therefore barely staying on top of product launches)?

Alexa Schirtzinger

Watershed Head of Marketing • July 22

This is a tough one! I'd probably start with a simple start/stop/continue. So for exmaple: * STOP: One thing you might want to do is try to get the team out of “keep the lights on” mode. When product marketing is relegated to pushing launch after launch out the door and doesn’t have time ......Read More

468 Views

How do you get the Csuite team to buy into a new pitch deck?

Alexa Schirtzinger

Watershed Head of Marketing • July 22

Bad content is so frustrating! I generally use one or all of these tactics when I’m facing headwinds like this: 1. Try to understand the cause. It sounds like what's behind the c-suite pushback is fear of change, and in my experience, CxOs (like the rest of us!) sometimes just need to b......Read More

352 Views

What's your advice on improving a historically tense relationship between functions?

Alexa Schirtzinger

Watershed Head of Marketing • July 22

First of all: patience. Lots of it. :) As you start to unravel the history of the relationship, you’re likely to find norms that were established so long ago that no one knows why they’re there. And with every new person who comes on board, you have the opportunity to start building new, more pos......Read More