Chad Kimner

I'm going to take this question in a slightly different direction and make a pitch for collaborating with Product (and many other teams) on a comprehensive "Understand Synthesis" as the basis for annual planning/roadmapping. This can be a transformative way for teams to generate better shared understanding and align on market research priorities for the next planning cycle. How it works: 1\ As a kick-off to annual planning, align with Product and other key stakeholders on the biggest questions you need to answer in order to be successful in the coming year-plus. 2\ Scour existing research to figure out what data and insights you can already bring to bear on those questions. In many cases, you might find that you can generate a decent answer to one of your fundamental questions without doing any new research! 3\ Where there are major disputes about existing data and/or gaps in understanding, create a research roadmap to generate new insights that should answer the big questions. Aligning with Product on the research roadmap and more important generating a shared POV on key questions - perhaps without having to invest any more time in answer them - can turbo-charge the roadmapping and annual planning process.

The answer will depend on the size of the organization and the resource network available to PMM teams. Today, my team enjoys dedicated Marketing Insights and UXR teams and so the critical work is writing an excellent brief that clearly defines: * What we're trying to learn? And why it's important to solving a business problem. The reality of large organizations is often that research teams are getting multiple requests for projects with significant overlap in purpose. Clarity around these topics might allow you jump on board another project that has already cleared organizational hurdles and save your budget for other research. * The target audience. If this is exploratory research, the audience may be less socialized and understood across teams so defining great personas for research teams to go find is critical. * Legal, ethical, competitive constraints. We're closest to understanding the challenges research teams may face in getting work into field given limits on what certain teams are comfortable sharing outside the company walls. * An expected plan for socialization. Who will care about the results of the work and how can we make sure we're tailoring the project to generate the kinds of data that will influence your key stakeholders?

When you join a new organization, always invest in some anthropology work to figure out what works best for the culture and don't assume that whatever has worked for you in the past will translate to new teams. And I might suggest re-framing the question from "storing" to "displaying". How can you merchandise these foundational ideas so that they stay top of mind in every conversation you're having with product, sales or other teams? Consider: * Putting them in the header on the agenda for regular GTM check-ins * Asking someone on the xfn team to name them before you kick off roadmap discussions * Finding ways to bring them to life in posts that describe real-world interactions with personas and how the messaging and positioning spoke to solutions they needed Developing these ideas is critical and difficult work. Keeping them vital and actionable inside an organization is often harder. Experimenting with ways to make them the basis for decision making and ideation might lead you to promising results.

I like this kind of question because so much time is spent at work getting humans to agree that we're talking about the same thing. My particular answers are less important than creating a shared lexicon with the teams you need to mind-meld with. That said, I do like precision and so here's how I parse some of these terms: Value Proposition: This is the reason that your target audiences should choose you instead of your competition. It's the thing that you do uniquely well and it's the reason someone who lands on your site decides to learn more. Sometimes your value prop emerges so clear and forceful that you don't need to put it through rounds of wordsmithing, but more often than not you probably will. Using an example anyone who has ever seen a single TV commercial break will relate to, Geico's value prop has always looked something like: "we make it easier than anyone else to save significantly on insurance". That used to get translated a lot in their marketing to this famous copy: "15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance". Substantiating their value prop that way made it crisper and more compelling. Messaging: Typically an outcome of a product positioning process, I think of messaging as the step in which we identify the specific things we want to say to our audience that support that positioning. What are the compelling arguments that make your value clear relative to competitors? What are the features and benefits you need to make clear? The common confusion about messaging is whether it's the same as copywriting and in my experience, it's wise to distinguish those two steps. Messaging is the "what", copy is the "how" in our communiation approach. The question doesn't ask about positioning statements, though I often see that term used interchangably with value proposition. I tend to see a couple areas of daylight between the two ideas. I think a value proposition can be broader than a positioning statement that is going to define, in detail, an audience, their unique needs and the competition. 

The first step is to anticipate this ahead of time by developing a stakeholder analysis as part of your research brief. Identifying potential detractors who may be intent on fending off challenges to their own theories and trying to get buy-in on the project might help down the road as you debate research findings. You don't want to be arguing over methodology and whether or not you "asked the right questions" after the work is done. At the same time, recruit a few senior leaders who can help push back against unfair criticism. Make sure you've got a team who supports the brief and the methods. And seek alignment with them on your conclusions and recommendations during the synthesis stage. Also, be humble in recognizing that most market research is far from a silver bullet. Embrace that ambiguity as you roadshow the findings, while also standing by your own analysis and using the data to support your own arguments.

Because the role of PMM can vary greatly between organizations, your best bet may be to find the company where the PMM contribution is weighted more to inbound, product-development work. I've also structured teams with one or two roles that focus on inbound work across a portfolio while most of my team's energy was tied to GTM efforts. So, I think you can stay a PMM who specializes in research, insights and product development, it just may require digging a little deeper to find the right fit. And, depending on where you are in your career journey, you might consider taking a rotation in a purer research-heavy role (e.g., Strategy, Marketing Insights, Policy) to see if its a better match for your passions.

There's very little I can say that someone like April Dunford hasn't said better and I find her approach relevant across b2b (where she developed it) and b2c. The following homework is required, in my experince, to generate a high-value positioning that can drive messaging, brand, and all gtm strategy, planning and execution: * Hopefully, you've got some customers who really love your product and it's essential to understand what they think is so amazing about it. * Understand your true competition - if these customers didn't have you to solve their problem, who would they turn to? * Perform an objective and very sober comparision between your product and those competitors. What is truly different and unique about your product? Think functionally here. We know how hard this can be and how much pressure there can be on us to exaggerate our differentiation. We must resist - the business needs us to be truth-tellers. * Play our role as translators and describe those functional/feature differences in terms of the benefits and value they provide customers. What's the point of our differentiation? What does it enable that nothing else can? * Identify the segment(s) who will care about unlocking that value. * Help that segment understand who you are by picking a frame of reference for the category you play in that makes conceptual sense to them. Here, it's really worth just picking up Obviously Awesome for the discussion strategic choices in picking marketing categories. In terms of alignment, the number one thing we can do is stop saying things like "product marketing owns positioning". This doesn't help anyone. Instead, make it a team sport. When you can help everyone in the business to be a truth-teller and get everyone sharing the same set of assumptions, you'll be amazed at how much of the usual back and forth between product/sales/marketing goes away. Make your key stakeholders accountable to the creation and success of positioning and listen their feedback after you launch. You're most likely going to change positioning frequently and look at each change as an opportunity to build better alignment.

This partly depends on the role that PMM is expected to play, and we know that this can differ pretty dramatically from company to company, even within the same space. At Meta, we have a clear mandate - probably the clearest I've ever seen - to truly lead as GTM "captains". Leadership relies on us to lead the business, defining goals and strategies, driving cross-functional execution and shouldering accountability for all GTM execution. In an environment like this, the business goals are our goals, though of course we cascade those down across the team quarter to quarter, breaking them into more manageable, shorter-term goals that individuals can own. Will some of those goals be shared with other teams? Possibly. I recognize that this PMM-as-"GM" model is uniuqe. In addition to core adoption metrics that PMMs commonly take on, I've found value in setting goals like: * % of observed sales calls where prescribed messaging is used * survey's of cross-functional teams to rate quality of PMM leadership (How clear is the mission? How connected to changes in the business do you feel? How fast are decisions made? Is product getting actionable insights?) * Launch coverage sentiment These are less satisfying in some ways than something like cost per lead, but they reflect the value PMM adds.

As a start-up, there really can't be any daylight between your mission, strategy and initial product manifestations. That is, your company positioning and your product positioning are the same. A disciplined, successful company will continue to invest in new products that pay into the company mission and don't require major strategy shifts in order to successfully get to market. Of course, strategies will shift as companies and markets evolve, but innovation bets should, in my experience, be tethered pretty tightly to the purpose the company wants to play in the world. And though this sounds obvious enough, I bet most of us can tell stories about major investments in new businesses that looked too attractive to pass-up, even if they were patently off-strategy. I've never seen that work well. So if management is sharp, the portfolio of products will make conceptual sense and play to company strengths. That makes the job of selling the portfolio easier; the portfolio positioning and the company positioning should look a lot alike. The product positioning is richer and more specific, but you should be able to see connections between each product positioning and the portfolio positioning. And once you have a portfolio positioning, I'd employ the same process to develop messaging that I use on a product level. In terms of a process, I think what changes most from product positioning is the number of stakeholders you have to bring along for the ride, both in creating the positioning and in shipping portfolio assets. Better to find ways to bring them into the process than deal with sometimes myopic, product-centric objections that miss the point. Too many of us have probably also been tasked with back-rationalizing a portfolio message to make sense of a portfolio that was cobbled together for less than strategic reasons. I don't know that there's a right way to do that, but I think it's a good opportunity to highlight the lack of coherence and the problems it creates. 

Starting in CPG brand management I had the good fortune to wear both of these hats (and many more!) early in my career. This ignited a love for both disciplines and started me down a path where I'd jump back and forth between them for about a decade (thanks to all my incredible managers who never forced me to choose a lane!). There are similarities in the roles - which sometimes creates confusion and tension - in the ways they focus on the end user, influence through storytelling, sweat positioning and facilitate within complex xfn environments, so it's natural for talented individuals to be curious about both jobs. If you really want to know which you like best, you'll have to try both. But there are proably signals available to you that don't requires such a high-cost commitment. In XFN conversations are you drawn towards technical discussion and thinking through solutions with your eng team and can you build great relationships with them? Are you obsessed with dogfooding and constantly thinking through UX optimization? Maybe you'll love PM. The caution I'd offer is that I've seen some of my best PMMs make this jump because they believe that Product is closer to the center of gravity or PMs are "mini-CEOs" who get to make a lot of decisions. And I've been in cultures where this kind of model is glorified, if never successfully implemented. Great PMs, in my experience excel at creating decision opportunities, not making them. They excel at bringing teams together under a shared vision, not necessarily creating that vision.