Andy Schumeister

30 days: Prioritize understanding your customers, your product, and your company:  Shadow customer calls (or listen to recordings if they exist). Get to know your cross-functional partners - schedule time with people from product, sales, marketing, engineering, design, etc. This will help you understand areas of opportunity as you establish relationships internally.  Learn about your product - get access to a sandbox account, read the documentation, read case studies, etc. Educate your company o ...Read More

Every PMM I’ve ever talked to has experienced this: you spend a ton of time researching and crafting the perfect messaging framework only for other teams to forget it exists. It’s definitely happened to me.  While I’d love to create a concise messaging framework that the entire company uses, the reality is messaging frameworks are most helpful for marketers. Sales doesn’t want a messaging framework, they want a pitch deck and talk tracks. Demand Gen doesn’t want a messaging framework, they want ...Read More

Try to align your portfolio with the job description: If the job description focuses on messaging and positioning, share an example of a messaging framework or landing page that you put together. If the job description focuses on launching products, share an example of an Asana board or spreadsheet you'd use to coordinate a cross-functional launch. If the job description focuses on writing, share a blog post, case study, or e-mail you've crafted. If your portfolio doesn't align with the job desc ...Read More

I don’t think of this as an either-or situation. Instead, I’d think about the hierarchy of your message where both use case messaging and persona-based messaging are important.  While everyone approaches messaging differently, I like to lead with personas and have found it helpful to understand the following questions: Who are we targeting? What do they care about? What are their challenges? What do we want our audience to believe? What action do we want them to take? From there, you can develop ...Read More

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 ...Read More

Ideally, you’re developing messaging based on customer and market research. This allows you to test and refine along the way instead of going heads down and creating messaging in a vacuum.  Instead of sharing a messaging doc with a non-customer, the best way to test messaging with your target market is to put it in action by partnering with sales. Here is what this looks like: Create a few slides and ask a few AEs to use the new narrative on upcoming calls. You could consider creating a few diff ...Read More

30 days: Prioritize understanding your customers, your product, and your company: Shadow customer calls (or listen to recordings if they exist). Get to know your cross-functional partners - schedule time with people from product, sales, marketing, engineering, design, etc. This will help you understand areas of opportunity as you establish relationships internally.  Learn about your product - get access to a sandbox account, read the documentation, read case studies, etc. Educate your company on ...Read More

At the end of the day, you’re marketing to and selling to people, not personas. People have emotions. People don’t want to be more productive for the sake of being more productive, they want to be more productive to be better at their job so they can get promoted. Emotional benefits are just as important as functional benefits. At Mutiny, one of the messages we’re experimenting with is “marketing that sales will love.” This is both functional (we’re enabling marketers to create something of valu ...Read More

Product marketing can function and have discrete successes without a clear “core” business narrative. However, for product marketing to be successful long term, I think you need a clear and consistent narrative to serve as North Star and connector across each discrete moment.  Here are the benefits of having a core narrative: Every launch and campaign will contribute to and amplify a cohesive story. You won’t have to start from scratch each time you’re launching a new product or feature. It’ll b ...Read More

While there is no "one size fits all" metric that works for product marketing, my recommendation is to try to align your goals with either sales, demand gen, or product depending on what you're working on. Ideally, you'll have explicitly shared goals with one or more of the cross-functional teams you're working with. This ensures everybody is optimizing for the same outcome. For a new product launch, I'll typically have a shared adoption goal with product and/or an attach rate goal (percentage o ...Read More