Christy Roach

It’s hard to pinpoint “typical” because product marketing is a field that sets you up for a few different paths depending on what you want to do. Being a product marketer gives you problem-solving, strategy, and execution skills that can help you in so many different careers so I wouldn’t want to say there is one specific path you should take. That said, I’ll talk through the one that I’ve walked, and that I’ve seen many of my peers take as well: Very few people are product marketing managers as ...Read More

Everyone’s definition of soft and hard skills differs, but here are the nine skills that I think are the most important for a product marketer to have. I've used these skills as a compass to help me grow in my own career and have turned them into a success guide for my team at Envoy to use: Soft skills: Cross-functional excellence: As a PMM, you have the opportunity to lead without being a manager of people. A strong product marketer is someone who takes others along with them, rather than telli ...Read More

Your GTM strategy for a launch starts by determining the audience and “tier” of your launch. I use a framework that has 4 different tiers: Tier 1: Large, newsworthy updates that happen 1-2x per year. These change the positioning for your overall product, will appeal to your current customer base, and will attract new customers to your product. These have full-court press by the entire marketing team and usually utilize nearly all of your channels. You should rally your team around these launches ...Read More

I truly believe the onboarding experience is the make or break moment for your product, especially for a self-serve user base. You could have the most incredible product in the world, but if it’s a pain to get set up, you’ll lose your customer. To improve the onboarding experience, I’d focus both on the folks who did not succeed with using your product and have gone inactive as well as those that did successfully get up and running with your product. What you want to understand is what makes one ...Read More

I can’t speak for how a team at a company I haven’t worked for but here’s how I’ve seen land and expand work well in the past. The TL;DR is that your land strategy should be very focused on the initial purchase/use of your product and your expand strategy should focus on building on momentum from the existing product and making clear that expanding the use of your products will provide exponential value for your customers. With a “land” strategy, the big goal is to start small/manageable, especi ...Read More

You’re right that as a self-serve PMM, you’re no longer as focused on sales enablement as many B2B product marketers are. Here are some of the big areas my team is focused on that might be a bit different than a sales enablement focused PMM role.  Acquisition: My team is very focused on how we can help prospective customers understand the value of Airtable, what it can do for them, and why they should use it. We get a ton of website traffic, and our performance marketing team does a great job ta ...Read More

Buckle up, I've got a lot of opinions here. I think the first question PMMs should ask themselves is, what unique value do they want to provide to the roadmapping process? Oftentimes, PMMs feel like they should be included in things without having a clear POV as to why. I’ve been guilty of this. It's natural to hear hear about something that feels related to your work and wonder why you’re not there. In this situation, you need to be clear about what goes into the product roadmapping process tod ...Read More

I think the first question to ask yourself is, do you actually want to be an executive? After that, you should also ask yourself what an “executive” means to you. It turns out that a lot of people feel like they should be shooting to be in the C-suite without actually knowing if they want to be in the C-suite. From my understanding, it’s elite at the top but the air is pretty thin. It’s stressful work, and your neck is on the line when things go poorly. I've decided this is something that I want ...Read More

There are three main ways that I like to announce features in-product. Please note: I do not recommend you do all three at the same time unless you want your users to find you incredibly annoying. Each has their own time and place, but I find each to be effective in their own way. I've ranked these from least disruptive to the user to most disruptive to the user below:  Contextual announcements: One of the most seamless ways to help customers discover new features is to include the announcements ...Read More

One of the biggest changes is that I find the relationship with the product team to be different in a product-led growth company. It’s a much closer partnership, focused on more than just launch moments but ongoing work, and shared metrics. When it comes specifically to the sales and marketing funnel, I’d say the big difference is that we’re less focused on traditional demandgen work and we have a much heavier hand in monetization than we do in a sales-assisted business. Our work is tied more to ...Read More