Becky Trevino

The best way to retain talent is to create an environment where your PMM team is supported, trusted, and valued.  You do this by being a strong leader that adds value to the organization and is known for delivering results. People who are known for delivering often get bigger budgets (which means you can pay your people more) and get to expand their teams (which means you can create new opporunties for people in your organization). The best quote I ever read on leadership is from the co-founder of Rackspace, Graham Weston.  "What eveyone wants from work is to be a valued member of ...

If you're expanding a PMM team, you're likely growing as a business as well.  As you grow as a business, your Product and Engineering teams are likely growing as well. This means that these teams are likely going to be releasing more features. And with more features, comes the need for broader stakeholders (Customer Success, Sales, Partners) to understand what Product is building ahead of when these features get into production.  This to me means that a fundamental process for Product Marketing to get right is launch management and how this interwines with release managment. Finding t...

When I started in Product Marketing there were very few resources - like Sharebird and PMA - where you could learn the fundamentals of Product Marketing. At that time, there was Pragmatic and a couple of blogs here and there.  Today, there is a wealth of knowledge available online and even books on Product Marketing. I would have loved to have all of these resources available to me to learn from when I was starting out. I would have immersed myself in them and I would have used this content to help me identify the parts of Product Marketing that really sing to me faster than I did.  P...

What I would do here is to partner with your manager and key stakeholders to understand the top 3-5 problems the business needs your Product Marketing to solve. Basedo on the responses you receive, ensure you have people in the right roles to solve these concerns.  While there are general roles & responsibilities (e.g. Launch Management) that fall to Product Marketing, your aim is to ensure you're team is solving problems for the ubsiness. In your case, if Sales Enablement, Product Launches, and Product Insights are top 3 problems for the organization then you have the right structure in...

For me, the first thing I do when interviewing for a position or starting a new role is to understand what problems my hiring manager is trying to solve by adding me to the team.  If I'm new in role, I build my 30/60/90+ day plan off of these problems and build a roadmap/charter on how I plan to solve these.  What I've found is that there is often a tie-in between the problems my hiring manager is looking to solve and broader company problems.  At the end of the day, my manager is investing in me and my team to help him/her solve a business problem. And when I make traction on solv...

The first thing you need to do is understand the growth stage of your company. There are typically 3 critical growth stages for companies: 1) Scale to $100M ARR 2) Scale to $1B ARR 3) Scale from $1B+ ARR The organizational and cultural needs of Product Marketing differs at each of these different stages of growth. In Stage 1, Product Marketing is needed to partner with C-level teams to build company positioning, messaging, strategic/category narrative, and translate key use cases into critical assets for the marketing and sales teams. In this scenario, you're usually telling a one p...

The best part of the role is the high of a big launch. Bringing something new to market is an amazing feeling especially when you can do it wrapped into a larger launch event. There is also a great strategic element to the role that you do not find in all marketing roles that ties elements of comapny strategy, market intelligence, and GTM that is very unique to product marketing.  Biggest challenge of the role is the cross-functional nature of product marketing. You own a lot but you don't have direct ownership. You have to operate off of strong relationships across the board and getting...

I'd argue you should know the buyer persona early in the process - likely at product discovery. This should be an exercise done with Product Management (PM) at the onset of understanding the problem that the product is intending to solve. At that poin, in partnership with PM you should undestand the problem the product is intending to solve and who has it. From there, your job as a PMM is to dig in and understand who would be involved in the purchase. Is your target persona also the decision maker? If no, then who would be?  If this is a known persona to your business, I often go to Sales ...

I would recommend that person to draft a list of areas they are interested in working in (e.g. Security) and from there identify a list of companies. Once they've settled on a list of companies, I would target those companies for a role that fits their skillset (e.g. PR/Comm). Once in the door, I would learn more about the market strategy/products of those companies and network toward a role in Product Marketing. While they are on that path, I suggest they take some form of training (e.g. PMA, Pragmatic) to have some base skillsets in the field.