Brianne Shally

Since PMM is the voice of the customer, it is vital to always be talking to customers. Here's a couple of approaches: - Schedule "Voice of Customer Day": Have day full of customer calls with a specific theme. Bring in cross funcational stakeholders (e.g. Product, Eng, Design, Product Ops, Brand, Comms, etc.) to participate and sign up for roles: notetaker, interview key takeaways, interviewer, etc. Host a kick off in the morning with interviews through out the day and and wrap up at the end with key takeaways and then formalize the insights and recommendations to broader audience. - Have a OKR each quarter that focuses on talking to the customer: A research project, feedback on a recent launch, etc. - Offer incentives if it's hard to get customers' participation, such as a $25 Amazon gift card. I've seen it increase conversion rate. Also, personalize outreach to customers, using their name in the email and share why their feedback is important. - NPS interviews: Run NPS and ask participants in the survey if they are available for a follow up convesation. Follow up with these individuals to identify deeper qualitative insights, and the rationale for their answers to form deeper insights and stronger recommendations. 

* B2B and B2C are both H2H (human to human) marketing at the end of the day. I’ve seen folks try to say there's a strong distinction and to ‘pick a lane’. I’m of the mindset that B2B and B2C are more similar than different. I’ve found my experience in B2B especially, in demand gen, has helped me with B2C thinking through app store activations and vice versa. * That said, here’s the minor nuances that I’m oversimplifying: * Sales Enablement: You must work closely with the Sales team to ensure they are prepared with a deep understanding of the marketplace, personas, buying process, positioning, and product. Also, Sales is a great channel to test messaging and gain customer feedback. * Target Audience: In B2B there are usually multiple personas in the decision making process, while B2C is usually just one person, though there are influencers in B2C. * Sales as an input: Sales is a great channel to test and iterate on messaging. For example, consider your top sales rep. They have already iterated and optimized the messaging more than an a/b test. (ok, maybe not that much, but you get my point). Partner with these reps to test your hypotheses and iterate. Also, Sales is an input for voice of customer and product input. Leverage Sales, win/loss reports, and customer calls to capture the top themes for product development.

It’s difficult to define growth by titles since titles vary greatly by company and company maturity. Also, more and more companies are shying away from title heavy culture. When you consider growth and trajectory, I encourage you to evaluate it based on your goals, what you want to learn, and what you want to do next vs. a title. Focusing on obtaining a title can be short sighted and may result on you being lost after you achieve it. That said, with career progression top of mind, here are some tips: * Perform at the next level: Companies want to see that you can demonstrate performing at the next level before being promoted. It is helpful if your company has a job level to review it and understand your strengths and opportunities and where you need to focus on. It may be helpful to get a mentor at the next level to help provide guidance, advice, example deliverables, etc. * Own -> Lead: Transform your approach from owning an initiative to truly leading it. Identify and bring forth the strategy, establish the vision, ask the hard questions, identify and address potential barriers, define success, and bring key stakeholders along. * Know the Business: Understand the overall business, including business drivers, company goals, and overall strategy, even if these are outside your specific role. In knowing how the company operates, you are well informed to make decisions that align to the company’s overall goals and increase your impact. * Cover the Basics: be collaborative, nail your day job, and go above and beyond.

* Be a Product Marketer: Understand the marketplace, trends, and competitors. * Use the product: Use the product, sign up for emails, check out their SEO and social presence, and interview current users to form a point of view on the product and opportunities (e.g. opportunities in the onboarding process, use cases, etc.). For an interview with a company, I interviewed a handful of their customers to understand use cases, pain points, and their target audience. From these insights, I developed recommendations and brought an informed point of view to the interview. Also, I demonstrated I was interested in the customer, the product, and willing to roll up my sleeves to get insights. * Bonus Points: Conduct an analysis (competitor, messaging, segments, etc.) to provide value and demonstrate your skills, and show your interest.

Top 3 Soft skills * Be collaborative: Be open to new ideas, raise your hand to help, lean in to new areas, and have fun while doing it. * Build strong relationships: Invest in your cross functional partners, get to know them personally and professionally, know what is most important to them. * Develop a point of view, clearly communicate your point of view, and influence others with your point of view Top 3 Hard skills * Analytical <-> Creative: Navigate this spectrum to be both analytical and creative in your problem solving, go to markets, and develop recommendations. Demonstrate the ability to get deep into numbers to uncover insights. Then test something unscalable to see what works. * Strategic <-> Execution: Set the strategy, align cross-functional partners, execute, measure results, incorporate learning, and do it again! * Storytelling: Be the product storyteller in evangelizing the product both internally and externally to truly inspire. Bring the product to life, through user stories and highlighting the impact.

Sharing the product roadmap externally is a great way to share the company's vision, investment in innovation, and upcoming features to get prospects and customers excited about the potential. It can be a strong selling tool to get prospects on board and a resource to get current customers to invest more. What's important is that the roadmap isn't standing on it own, but partnered with an overall vision to show how product efforts later up to a great vision. This is where Product Marketing can play a strong role in storytelling and positioning to bring it all together. I've seen this executed successfully at customer events, executive briefings, and executive prospect closing meetings. Side note, also a great recruiting tool to close potential candidates. All that said, you need to be thoughtful in sharing the roadmap to avoid any implications to press from product launches, have customers / prospects sign NDAs when needed, and align when, with who, and how you share the information. Your legal and comms teams will thank you. 

* It’s most valuable to align the PMM team to the Product team structure to drive stronger alignment and integration. Back in the day, when we worked in person, we strived to have Product Marketers sit directly with their product teams. In some cases, this has meant that I’m in a different building than my manager and some of my team members, but I find this integration extremely valuable. * Nextdoor is structured by the following Pillars: Member Experience (Consumer), Neighborhood Vitality (Trust, Safety, & Groups), Business Solutions (free to paid products for businesses), and Agency (government and organizations). * As a result, Product Marketers are focused on B2B or B2C and integrated within a pillar team. That said, it is important they have a holistic perspective across both, especially in marketplace platforms. For instance, when we launched Business Postings for SMBs, the PMMs also had to take into consideration the implications to members seeing Business Postings and partner with the Member Experience PMM to coordinate the go to market efforts.

Here are a few of my approaches to influence product leadership on the product priorities: * Work cross-functionally across UX, research, Data Science, Product Operations, Sales, etc. to incorporate everyone's input so Product Marketing's list represents all input and is the source of truth. One of the challenges Product faces is distinguishing signal vs. noise with all the input that comes to them. Product Marketing can take a leadership role to collect, analyze, and synthesize the input to provide one source of truth. * Prepare synthesize a list of Voice of Customer to help inform the planning process, so it is timely. For instance, if your company invests in 2H and annual planning, ensure that the cross-functional synthesized Voice of Customer report is finalized before planning starts so it is top of mind as planning begins. A reminder planning always begins informally before the formal 'kick off' on the company calendar, so be earlier rather than later. The first time I did this, the meeting was standing room only as everyone was excited to hear the insights. * Quantify the impact of recommendations. For instance, if you know from win/loss reports that a specific feature will drive $1M in revenue capture it or there are 5K monthly cases on a specific bug. * Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize. A list should always be prioritized based on the impact. * Identify both tactical recommendations (bug, feature requests) and strategic recommendations (new vertical entry, etc.) so you address both short and long term and prioritize each list separately. * Include insights to validate recommendations, including customer quotes, 3rd party data points, internal data including usages, win/loss reports, case volume, etc. * Create a 1 page executive summary that captures top recommendations and why. I've done this historically where I see the one page printed and on PMs desk as a reminder of the top opportunities. Make is memorable, clear, concise, and impactful. * See other questions on the inputs into the process. 

* Get creative! Need insights quickly to inform product development, build a survey and put some dollars behind it on Facebook, or have the company share with friends and family that fit into the ICP. * Determine how the insights will impact decision making. Have a deep understanding of how if you know the answer to X, how it will inform Y. If it won’t change decision-making or the output, revisit if you have the right research or if you even need to do it in the first place. Often I find that if we hold ourselves to be stricter on understanding how the research will impact or inform the outcome, it will be more productive. 

* Understand the strengths of each org and what skills and resources they uniquely bring to the table and understand where the skills and resources overlap. Have a healthy discussion of RACI / RAPID to understand who owns what. If there’s resistance, encourage to explore a pilot for a quarter / half to see what works/doesn’t work and revisit it to further optimize it. Usually, folks are less resistant to a pilot since it’s not set in stone. * Capture when to involve who: It’s important stakeholders know how and when to engage with product research, product management, and product marketing. I’ve found it helpful to tie to existing frameworks or processes and identify when it makes sense to loop in key functions in the process. For instance, in the product development process, identifying upfront the segment, JTBD, etc. and for product launch, testing messaging, and positioning. * Proactive Research Quarterly Planning: As part of the quarterly planning process get together with key stakeholders (research, design, Product, PMM, finance, etc.) to identify what questions / research you need for the quarter. Then identify based on the questions / hypotheses the best way to approach it across stakeholders (e.g. quant survey, user interviews, etc.) and the owner for each initiative. Some initiatives may be iterative, where you start with qualitative research to inform hypotheses and then quantitative to validate the hypotheses, so there may be different owners based on the approach. I’ve seen too often research done piecemeal without the right stakeholder involved upfront.