Catlyn Origitano

In-app copy does fit with Product Marketing - and Product! So technically, our PM team owns the in-product experience but PMM has full access to the tool. We have a slack channel for all in-app messaging and anyone who wants to do one posts in there following a format that says the purpose, how long it will run, to whom it will be shown, and a preview. Folks can ask questions, offer suggestions, and then we give the approval to set live. The results of these go into our quarterly retros. 

If it is on our website itself - we use a Drift bot. That mostly lives with our Demand Gen team but we have lots of access and support there - we are responsible for a lot of the copy on key, technical pages and again, we monitor that on a quarterly basis and report out. 

I am a project manager at heart. So I push the team to be the same. We have our roadmaps which we present and then turn into tickets for overall tracking. We also have a monthly reivew on areas of the business - so this let's us check in on how things are going and what is getting done. 

For messaging and materials in particular, we do a quarterly review of our materials. We try and make it fun - we listen to different music, everyone picks a song, and we go through and update and verify our materials. Building in those mechanisms are important so that they actually happen!

We work with our PM team to create a quarterly roadmap. This helps us align with them on the major releases that are happening, discovery work we need to do, and align on key activities to influence growth. 

We also then do a big marketing team-wide planning every quarter to ensure that, for example, those big product releases are also on Content & Demand Generation's calendar.

We then have a ticketing system where folks can input requests. We review these on a bi-weekly basis to see if someone has bandwidth to support. 

If it is a new product or feature, we use promotions to get customers to adopt asap. The other tactic we look to weave throughout our messaging is the promise of what their workloads could look like if they adopted this new system, tool, feature, etc. If we make it about them, about what they could have or achieve - as opposed to just what their larger business can have - we have found it resonates better and creates a greater sense of urgency. 

200%. The way that, when necessary, I defend messaging is with customer feedback and validation. For example, with our website copy and billboard - I got some push back that it wouldn't really resonate. So I scheduled some sessions with customers to get their feedback. With that in hand, it was a lot easier to defend my positioning - since what the others had was just a feeling that it wasn't right, while I had names and quotes about why it was. 

But ultimately, I, and the rest of the team, tries to adopt a test and learn mentality. So we try not to over invest mentally or emotionally in my messaging. Let's try it out, see how it goes, and be open to change quickly. That attitude makes 'defending' less likely to be necessary or happen.

Ultimately, we make both kinds of information available - or at least we try to! So for example, our website has a lot of high level messaging about our secruity capabilities, for example. But we also have links to our security whitepaper - which most security teams need to read as part of the procurement process. So we try to make it as much as possible a choose your own adventure - that is easy for them to find what they need. If they want to go deep, we don't hide that information and our Documentation team does an incredible job here. 

We are a slack heavy company. So we have our own announcement channel for all things Marketing that I actually started so that we could share our updates! 

We also do quarterly roadmaps and retros where PM + PMMs present their upcoming roadmap and a retro on their activities from the past quarter. All of Product and PMM go - and we invite our key stakeholders across the business, including the leaders from other areas of Marketing. 

Absolutely! I have been hearing more and more PMMs being the first hire - or leading the team. Our own CMO is a former PMM. I think a lot of it has to do with the industry - when you talk to a technical buyer, having a PMM as your first hire can really help accelerate your ability to find the right messaging, pitch, website copy, and more. 

Our PMM intern - who is now a full-time Associate PMM - has this exact background! And we will be hiring another such intern in a month or so! :) 

If you don't have the PMM experience per se, try to do activities associated with PMM work - like creating sales enablement, doing customer interviews, creating sales materials. At a smaller company, many marketing folks have to do it all - so you can start at a place like that and lean into projects that are more PMM-y.

We do - but we are also iterating here as we speak! In the past, I have reached out to some customers and folks I know in the industry to sit down and do some quick validation on messaing. For example, when we launched our new website and put up our first billboards, we had a good sense of what we wanted to say but wanted to confirm that the direction we were going would resonate. So we schedulded some quick meetings and got raw feedback on some key phrases. We've done the same with changes to our pricing page.

Now this is of course manual and only with a few folks so it isn't validation at scale. That is what we are looking to move to next. We are currently creating a process that will have us partner with Demand Gen to run paid ads testing out some of our messaging around big products and campaigns earlier on in our development process. We are hopeful that will give us more direction too!