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 their first job out of college. Some large companies have associate product marketing manager (APMM) or rotational programs that give new grads exposure to this work and, honestly, I wish I had known this existed when I was getting into marketing. For most, myself included, a PMMs career started in a different type of marketing or on a customer-facing team. For me, that was a social media coordinator role for a telecom company. It wasn’t what I wanted to do long term, but it was an important foot in the door. From there, you build up your marketing skills. I was able to transition into partner marketing as my next role, which gave me the ability to flex my product marketing muscles through the partner efforts I ran. Other roles can be in digital or content marketing or even as a marketing generalist. The key is to build up the foundational skills you need to excel in marketing as a whole. After 3-5 years of experience, many marketers are then able to move into a PMM focused role. This might be a more junior role to start than other PMM roles on the team but gives you the ability to do product marketing full time. From there, you’ll often stay in an individual contributor (IC) PMM role for a few years and get promoted into a Senior PMM position. This can often represent a fork in the road. You don't have to lead a team to be a successful product marketer. In fact, I know many PMMs who have become very senior, specialized IC PMMs who are at the top of their field without ever leading a team. For those that want to move into management, the next step is often to move into a Group Product Marketing Manager role, where you’ll oversee a team of product marketers focused on one specific part of the business. This helps you learn how to lead without being responsible for all product marketing. This is also the time where you have to decide if you like leading a team and getting one step removed from the day-to-day work or if you’d like to go back to IC PMM work. From there, you can move into a Director of Product Marketing or Head of Product Marketing role which is where I’m at now. Depending on the size of the company, this role is responsible for all product marketing (smaller company) or a specific product line or line of business (larger company). Moving forward, there are Senior Director and Vice President of Product Marketing roles and, eventually, the opportunity to lead the entire marketing function as Head of Marketing or CMO. I can't speak too intelligently to that since I'm not quite there yet, but that's what's on my mind as I look to become an expert at the Director level and continue to grow in my role! 

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 telling people exactly what they want them to do. They’re able to create strong relationships across the company, with product managers, engineers, designers, marketers, support folks, and more. They’re natural connectors who know who to go to in an organization to get things done and can influence cross-functional stakeholders to support and prioritize projects. * Executive presence and clear communication: As you get more senior, you'll spend more and more time presenting plans, public speaking, and communicating with executives in the company. The stronger you are at presenting and public speaking, the easier this will be for you. Executive presence also means knowing how best to leverage an executive’s skills to get feedback that will help your project, manage their expectations, and ensure they feel like they’re in the loop about work that matters to them. * A pitch in, get-it-done attitude: Being a PMM can be unglamorous at times. Sure, you get to run the big launches, but what people don’t see are the hours you spend writing support macros to ensure the team has what they need to answer incoming tickets, the amount of times a day you have to field seemingly random requests that don’t always fall neatly into your scope of work, and how often you get looped into last-minute, urgent projects that you didn’t plan for. PMMs that can approach this type of work ready to pitch in and help are often those that are seen as the most dependable and trustworthy, which helps them create strong relationships across the company. In my career, I've always made sure I'm never above doing the grunt work that's needed to get something across the finish line. While I don’t do it every day, I’m happy to roll up my sleeves to take a screenshot for a help article or write a macro if it means the team will be more successful and I reward members of my team that have the same attitude. Hard skills: * Market, competitor, and product expertise: PMMs should know their product inside and out, be an expert on its features, capabilities, and limitations, and be able to help partner teams figure out solutions to customer problems. This takes work, and it shouldn’t be overlooked. On top of that, you should know your competitors' products almost as well as you know your own. What does the competitor’s product have that yours does not? Where do you lose? Where do you win? How do they position themselves? These are all questions you should have an answer to. Last, you should know your market. What are the trends in the market in which you operate? What are the factors that influence decision making for your buyers? What’s coming down the line in terms of regulations or industry shifts that your company might want to get in front of? The better equipped you are to answer these questions, the more strategic value you'll bring to your company. * Positioning, messaging, and storytelling: Messaging and positioning isn’t a soft skill - this is something you hone and work at. This skill is all about being able to create tight, clear, compelling messaging frameworks that identify the target customer, nail their pain point and the benefits your solution provides, and clearly explain how you're different than what else is on the market today. A leader I used to work under said “The person who most accurately identifies the problem earns the right to solve it”, and I think that’s a really clear articulation of how specific and focused you should be in your messaging. You always know when a messaging framework is ready for prime time when you would defend every single line of copy, are able to explain why each line is necessary, and can show how each phrase ties back to the feature or product itself. * Know your customer: There are two parts to this. The first is knowing your personas. Specifically, you should be an expert in who buys your software, what their titles are, where they sit in an organization, what matters most to them, and how to market to them. The second is connecting that customer persona with actual customers who use your product. If you’re not talking to customers throughout your day-to-day, how can you represent the voice of the customer to the product team? I have OKRs for my team to have a certain number of interactions with customers each quarter to make sure that customer empathy doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. The key is getting these customer insights and then doing something with them to make sure that those insights are driving your roadmap and activities. * Go-to-market planning and execution: PMMs are responsible for creating unique, impactful, cross-channel GTM plans that will help your product or feature hit it’s launch goals and drive sustained adoption and revenue. Product marketers should understand which channels drive success and identify the metrics they want to move so they consistently hit their goals. Another part of this is studying how other companies run their launches and taking inspiration from that for your own launches to up-level your approach. * Process management: It’s often said that PMMs should act as the quarterbacks to a launch. A big part of this is ensuring there’s a process in place within the marketing team and with partner teams in order to make sure that everyone has the information they need and clarity on what’s expected of them to make the launch a success. If there isn’t a process in place, it’s up to the PMM to create and drive new processes to fix problems. It’s also up to PMMs to point out when a process is no longer working for your team. * Making data-driven decisions: The need for data and analytical skills continues to grow in the product marketing space. I personally wouldn’t call myself a “numbers person”, and I don’t think you need to have the data skills of an analyst to do the job. That said, I do think you need to understand your company's baseline metrics, be able to pinpoint the data that would help the team make a decision, and back up your plans and initiatives with data that supports your proposal in order to succeed in your role and provide value to your organization.

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 more than any other. * Tier 2: These are big product developments that either apply to your current customer base or will apply to a specific subset of the market. They don't warrant the big efforts of a Tier 1, but are still a big deal. Usually 1-2 per quarter depending on the size and speed of your org. These deserve standalone activities and effort but are usually a smaller, more focused list of activities to your current customer base. * Tier 3: These are relatively small product updates that a subset of your current customer base will care about deeply. Usually, 4-5 per quarter that can be bundled together if needed. The launch is usually a very targeted set of activities to a subset of your customer base. * Tier 4: These are small updates (often usability improvements) that do not warrant comms. They should be either unnoticed by your customers or straightforward enough that a customer can see them and understand what to do without prompting. Based on the above, here are the main components of a GTM strategy that my team uses for a launch: * Product launch tier and strategy brief: You cannot execute until you have a clear plan, a clear goal and audience, and a clear POV put into a brief that your product team is aligned with and your marketing org can understand and act on. This includes a pass at a bill of materials that your channel owners review and contribute to. * Messaging: This is, in my opinion, the most important part of a product launch strategy. Nail the messaging, nail the launch. Write your messaging in partnership with your PM and validate it with your customers. Messaging is not final copy and does not need to be 5 pages long. A tight, clear framework that helps everyone understand what we’re trying to communicate is the most helpful thing you can create for the launch * Pricing decisions: If your PMM team leads pricing, you need to be clear about what the pricing plan for this feature is, how it interacts with other features, and if you’ll be pushing any upsells etc for this launch. Even if you don't leave the pricing decision, you need to create a plan that accounts for it. * Channel execution: PMMs should partner with their channel experts and partner teams to execute the materials they’ve set out in their bill of materials. Often this is, at minimum, a launch announcement (blog), email, in product announcement, and social/Community posts. Your bill of materials can also include things like video, AR/PR activities, webinars and gated content, tutorial videos, and more. * Enablement: Training for internal teams (sales, CSM, and support) as well as internal comms coordination to ensure everyone knows exactly what is happening, when. I’ll caveat: every launch is different. There is no formula you can follow every time, your GTM plan needs to be created for the product you’re launching.

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 person succeed and the other fail. Is it a difference in motivation? Skill level? Use case? Once you’ve got your group of users, here are some questions I’d think about asking: * What were you looking to use <product name> to accomplish? For a horizontal product like Airtable, people’s use cases vary wildly. Having this intel helps you spot common problems across user groups * How important is a tool like <product name> to your current workflow? This helps you get at people’s motivations and intent. If this is something they need in their role or something they’re just trying on for size. Another great question to ask here is ‘What happens if you don’t get a tool like set up?’ so you can gauge impact. * Where did you run into problems or roadblocks in getting set up with <product name>? In this question, I find it helpful to guide users through the steps of your onboarding process as they likely won’t remember themselves. This gives you insight into whether there’s a common drop off point in onboarding. * What help or resources would you have liked to see as part of your onboarding process? Rather than trying to use instincts to make updates, keep it simple and just ask folks for what would have been helpful to them. Some of the best suggestions I've ever gotten have come from this question. * (For inactive users) What are you using now to manage your process? If they are not successfully using your tool, it will be helpful to get insight into what they're using instead. Did they go to a competitor? If so, can you look at their onboarding process and get inspiration? Did they go back to not using a tool at all for this? At Airtable, people often continue using spreadsheets, so we focus on how to make the transition from spreadsheets to Airtable easier knowing that’s a sticking point for folks. You might get some similar insight to help people move from whatever their manual process is to your product. * (For successfully onboarded users) How long did it take for you to start seeing value out of the product? Sometimes products are complicated and it’s going to be difficult to get up and running. If you can get insight into how long it takes for someone to see value, you can understand how to help coach other users to that promised land and can potentially find opportunities to speed up that time to value Another suggestion I’d make is to focus on more than just surveys. Having a few conversations with users can be much more valuable than hundreds of survey responses. Sometimes we over-index on data and quantitative insights when really what we need are a few qualitative pearls of wisdom. Get folks into user research sessions and have them sign up for and get set up with the product while they’re on a video call with you. Have them talk through their thoughts, questions, and experience as they do it and I promise you’ll get a ton of insight into what it’s like to get up and running with your product.

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, especially if your customer is a small team. A land strategy is focused on getting the first foothold in a company. For us at Airtable, our “land” happens with the first use case that you decide to use Airtable to help you manage (ex: content calendars). When I was at Envoy, our focus was landing in our first product line, Visitors, and expanding from there. Tactically, the things you need for the “land” portion of land and expand is a strong acquisition strategy, an onboarding process that is as easy and frictionless as possible, and, as much as you can, messaging and information that tells the user up front that there is more to your product for the customer to discover so you can seed expansion from the get-go. For the expand strategy, the key is to make it easy for your product to spread. You can do this via a sharing and collaboration model, like Airtable, where you invite more team members to join you in the tool, via a feature-gating model where you incentivize customers to upgrade to higher tier plans for access to more advanced features, or via multi-product where you try to get your current customers of one product to start using another of your available products. There are two major ways expand happens: * Natural, easy growth within one team or company: The goal here is to make it so the user doesn’t even really think about expansion. Make it easy in your product to add more teammates, or to quickly try a new feature for a period of time that’s on a higher tier plan. You want the customer to expand because they’re seeing increasing value from the product, and all the communication you send via email or in product upsells are focused on the value and what someone can do with the product, rather than a hard upsell. * Viral growth and consolidation: At larger companies, you often have ‘pockets’ of usage of a tool across teams or locations. Usually, these teams have signed up for your product independently of one another without knowledge that anyone from their company is using the product. Once that growth becomes large enough, a sales team can come in and chat with a decision maker (often IT) to consolidate the use of the tool and give administrators more control over usage.

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 today without your involvement, what input is already being given, and how successful the roadmap is in its current state before you come in with opinions. If you’ve done this and you spot gaps in the current process, my recommendation would be to show how you can assist in this process, rather than just asking to be included. Planning takes up a huge amount of time and it can be an uphill climb to get something finalized, which means that there’s often a certain level of concern that comes up when more people are added to an existing planning process. I often joke with my counterparts across marketing, product, and sales that I will be in a near constant planning cycle for the rest of my career. So, rather than asking for an invite without showing why we should be included, it’s always worked well for me to do a little sleuthing and proactively provide something to the team in advance of the roadmapping process. For example, if you know that the roadmapping process happens one month before the start of the quarter, you can plan to share intel and insight with the product team a few days before that process. I’d recommend focusing on how you can provide intel that doesn’t exist today, rather than trying to sway existing processes. For example, if your sales, success, and support teams are already giving product input to the team, there’s no need for you to pile on there. Instead, maybe there’s a gap in sharing the feedback you’re receiving in the community and on social channels since those customers might not be represented in the feedback the product team is receiving. Spend a few hours synthesizing the feedback and insights and offering up suggestions in a 2-3 page doc, and you’ve successfully added new, helpful, relevant intel to the process. Additionally, one thing that is often missing from roadmapping processes is competitive and market intelligence. Can you put together an overview of where we are losing to competitors based on lost deals, feedback on third party review sites, and head to head feature comparisons to help give your product team insight on some opportunities to win against key competitors? Or can you provide some market trends that are impacting your target market and a recommendation for how the product team might be able to respond? The key with these suggestions is to not be too prescriptive with how the problem should get solved, but more to map out the opportunities, provide the insight and recommendations, and start the conversation. Timing is important here. If you provide that intelligence at the right time, right before roadmapping sessions happen, it becomes a helpful input to the process and can help guide decision making. If you provide it too late in the process, the information you share might be helpful but it’s also going to feel like a potential roadblock or hurdle to getting the roadmap finalized. Once you provide this input and the roadmapping process is complete, follow up with your product counterparts to see how the intel you provided helped, what was incorporated, and what additional intel might be helpful for future roadmapping sessions. Now that you’ve shown your value, you should have more opportunity to open the door for your continued involvement in the roadmapping process.

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 targeting users, but PMM should have a role in making sure we have the right message and consideration content for these users. This takes the form of messaging for paid ads and paid landing pages, as well as creating landing pages, explainer videos, and more for website visitors to consider pre-signup. We measure the success of this work by website conversion and successfully activated signups. * Activation and user education: Rather than enabling a sales team to sell the product, we focus a lot of our time on enabling our customers to use our product. This takes the form of in product communication, guides and onboarding content, best practices and tips, email drip campaigns, and more. We’ve got a great user education team at Airtable who serve as key partners in this effort and we measure success here by product usage in the weeks after signup. * Conversion and expansion: One of the things I love most about self-serve PMM is how close you get to be to monetization and revenue. A lot of time is spent looking at our pricing and packaging, running programs to increase conversion, and ensuring that customers are growing and succeeding in their use of the product. This is the type of strategy work that gets me most excited and where I focus a lot of my energy. * Internal team enablement: Turns out, you still do enablement in a self-serve PMM role, it just looks a little different. My team should have a very close line to our customer support team and spend time thinking through the types of questions that may come in through our community, support, and social channels and drafting responses that answer questions and ensure customers get what they need to use the product successfully. It’s less work on pitch decks and more work on FAQ docs and incoming pings asking how we should respond to a question we got asked on Twitter, but it’s still an incredibly important form of enablement.

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, but it took some soul-searching before I made that decision. If you decide that an executive role is what you want, you should also think about what level you’re shooting for. Of course, executive usually means the C-suite, but at a large company there are plenty of very high level roles focused just on product marketing, like the VP of Product Marketing or the SVP of Product Marketing. If you decide that yes, you want to be an executive and no, being a SVP of Product Marketing is not what you want, then there are a few options for you. If you love product, you can chart a course to being the Chief Product Officer. If you make this choice, you’ll need to move into a true PM role and build your career from there. Lots of people move from product marketing to product, and the PMM skillset can help make you a more well-rounded product leader. Don’t want to go into product but still want to be in the C-suite? Another route you can take is moving into a COO role. If that’s what you’re looking for, it’ll be incredibly important for you to get some operations work under your belt. That can start in marketing ops but you’ll also need to get insight into sales ops and customer ops in order to truly succeed at that role. Of course, there’s also the option to move into a President or CEO role. As a product marketer, you’re inherently a problem solver so it’s not an implausible jump, but it won’t be a straight shot from PMM to CEO - you’ll likely take a few stops along the way, including a few other C-suite positions.

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, tool tips, or updates right when they can and should use it. This means that instead of blasting the news right when someone logs in, you think through where you might give the user a bit of a nudge to use or try something new and empower them to take action right away. The pro of this type of announcement is that it seems less marketing-y and more helpful. The drawback is that it’s not seen by as many users since it only shows up when a user goes through that specific product flow. * In product empty states: Not to play favorites, but this is my favorite type of in product marketing. The empty state refers to the first time a user encounters a feature, or the state of the product or feature before any data/information is added to it. For example, the first time you click on Airtable Apps, you see an empty state that gives a hint at it’s value and why you should use it. These empty states give you much more real estate than a modal or tool tip and often you can help the user not just understand that there’s a new feature, but really help them understand the benefit of said feature and why they should use it. The most effective way I’ve seen empty states used has been with in product videos that explain the value of the feature and gets in a bit of user education before the customer dives in. Keep these videos short (under 1:30) and you should see your conversion rate from those empty states spike! * Announcement modals: These are the most ‘in your face’ of all announcements and should be used most sparingly, but they’re often the most effective. These are announcements that pop up for a user as soon as they login to your product, letting them know that you’ve launched something big, new, and impactful. That modal should be short, sweet, and easy to dismiss so you’re not interrupting a user’s workflow too heavily. CTAs on those modals can push a user to start a trial/use the feature or link out to a blog post or landing page that explains more about what’s new.

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 product usage than on lead volume. The role isn’t necessarily “defined” differently, but our focus areas are different, the scope of our roles reflect those differences, and we’re often more fluid in our work based on what’s needed from us in the org than a more traditional sales and marketing funnel.