Jasmine Jaume

It depends a little on what the situation is with PMM in the company you join (i.e. size and maturity, what the team is currently doing, what your role is going to be, whether you're an IC or a manager), but here's some things to think about: 30 days - this first month is all about getting the lay of the land and meeting everyone you'll be working with, building relationships and establishing your credibility! You won't get all of this done in the first 30 days but it's good to get started on these areas. I think it's really important to listen and understand in this early stage, rather than come in and start immediately changing things - every business is different, and what you've done before might not necessarily be right at your new place. So seek to learn and understand first, before making a ton of changes. * Build relationships: Meet with stakeholders across the business to understand how they work with PMM, what's working, what's not, and what they think is the highest priority. Ask lots of questions! This is also a great opportunity to start establishing how you'll work together. Identifying some small 'quick wins' can help establish your credibility and build relationships with those stakeholders. * Get to know your team: If you're starting in a management role, start getting to know your team and building a relationship. Establish with each person how they like to work, what support they need, how they like to be given feedback etc, and set expectations about how you like to work also. Get up to speed on what they're working on, what they think is working in the team, and what could be improved. Also get to know them as people! * Get to know the product: Understand what it does (actually use it!), what's good and bad, and understand the journey customers go on from prospect>customer * Start to learn the business strategy and goals: This will help you know what you're working towards, and then you can prioritise what to focus on. Understand from your manager what the expectations of your role and team are, and start to identify where you can have most impact. * Get to know your customers and your market: understand your current position in the market, how your product is perceived, how you stack up against competitors, what your customers say about you and so on. Read everything, listen to calls, talk to your sales team, research your competitors etc 60 days - as you begin to understand the current state of things, start to think about what you want prioritise working on and build out a plan. I like to identify some small quick wins and some bigger meatier longer-term projects. If you're a manager, you'll likely be building out a roadmap of sorts on what you want the team to work on, what your goals will be, and then getting buy-in from your team and other stakeholders. You'll also want to start having more in-depth discussions with your team members about their career growth and ambitions. 90 days - start executing on your plan! It really depends on what you've identified as the highest priority things to work on but hopefully you've got some quick wins under your belt and are starting on some of your meatier initiatives. 

We've changed our structure several times over the years as the business has grown and priorities have shifted, but because PMM at Intercom works very closely with product we have always largely mapped PMMs to specific solutions or product areas. Our current team structure roughly mirrors that of the product team. That means we have 1 or more PMMs mapped to each specific product group, which are either focused on a solution (for example our support solution) or a product area (for example, platform which covers our data platform, app ecosystem etc.) Some groups have multiple PMMs, depending on how big the group in R&D is - we aim for a ratio of 1 PMM to 2 or 3 PMs. These PMM roles are what's typically called 'full stack' - i.e. they do everything from inputting to the product strategy, to taking those products to market including messaging and positioning, launches, and enabling marketing and sales. We do this because we've found that lots of PMMs find satisfaction in being involved in the whole product lifecycle. We also have some additional groups within PMM that aren't directly tied to a specific solution or product area. These include our Enablement group - focused on enabling our sales and demand teams - and our 'Core' group - which owns our overarching positioning and GTM strategy (inc. personas, support analyst relations etc). I recently wrote a post on the Intercom blog that gets into a bit more detail about how we work.

I don't have a set framework as such, but this is the approach I'd take: * Meet with stakeholders across the business to understand what's working, where the gaps are that PMM might be able to fill, and ask what they think is the highest priority. Ask lots of questions to understand what the underlying need/problem is, as the 'solution' people ask for might not always be the best way to solve the problem or might be better solved by another team. This is also a great opportunity to start educating others on what PMM does and how they should expect to work with you, if it's a new function. Identifying some small 'quick wins' can help establish your credibility and build relationships with those stakeholders. * Understand the business strategy and goals. This will help you know what you're working towards, and then you can prioritise needs based on whether they will help towards those goals. * Get to know your customers and your market. As well as understanding the pain points internally, it's also helpful to understand your current position in the market, how your product is perceived, how you stack up against competitors, what your customers say about you and so on. This should help you identify the highest priority areas - especially where these align with internal needs (for example, if your sales team is complaining you are losing deals to a specific competitor, and then you also find that the market doesn't know how you're differentiated, that may be a sign that you need to strengthen your messaging and enablement against that competitor) * Think about what you want you and your team to be focused on. It's easy for PMM to end up as a 'catch all' and end up doing a ton of things that aren't really product marketing, especially if the marketing team overall is small. That might be what the business needs at that time, and that's ok, but knowing where you want to get to will help you advocate for more resources and moving that work out of the team in the longer term. 

In general, PMM roles at Intercom are more of the 'full stack' variety - i.e we cover the whole journey from feeding into the roadmap to launch, including competitive research, buyer/persona/market research, GTM strategy, positioning and messaging, enablement, launch planning etc. Our team sits in marketing and reports into a Senior Director of PMM. Our team structure has shifted several times in the time I've been here, based on changes to the company strategy, product team structure and where we most need to focus resources,. Currently, we're split into 3 'groups' based primarily around product areas and segment: * Solutions (a Group PMM + 3 PMMs): Each PMM is focused on one of (or part of) the 3 solutions/audiences we position Intercom for specific solution. Each PMM owns positioning, messaging and GTM for their solutions, and partner with the relevant product managers for their solutions and product areas. * Platform and Core (that's my group - me plus 3 PMMs) - we look after overarching/high level positioning and messaging, and cross-solution features such as the Messenger, data platform, and our partner ecosystem (incl. apps and integrations). We often partner with solution PMMs on things like launches for platform features. We also partner closely with the platform group in R&D, as well as the Business Development team on partnerships. * Pricing and packaging (a principal PMM) - fairly self explanatory, owns pricing and packaging strategy/decisions, as well as buyer personas and research

I think the first step is to understand your buyers and market, so you can define who you're targeting and how you want to position your product. So as you say, competitive research, understanding the pain points of your buyers and customers, talking to your sales team to understand why you win/lose deals and creating an outline of your target buyers (or personas, if you're into those!) I'd then develop a GTM starategy, including defining where you want to position yourself in the market, and a messaging guide to outline how you want to describe the product, outline benefits, key differentiators etc. This also includes gathering any evidence you can such as customer testimonials. It's important to get aligned on this with all stakeholders incl. product and sales leaders. From there, create a PMM roadmap of sorts, defining goals and intiatives depending on the needs of the business, what already exists and what needs to be prioritised. For example, if the company is focused on outbound sales, there might be a need to prioritise sales enablement activities. If it's very inbound, it might be improving the website, or increasing adoption. If the product hasn't launched yet, this will likely be working with product on their roadmap, developing a pricing strategy, and defining a plan for launch. Look for where PMM can add the most value. Given that in early stage startups, PMM may be the only - or one of very few - marketers, this plan may need to be more of a 'marketing plan' than just a PMM plan. It really depends on the business model and stage, but hopefully that gives some ideas!

This is a big question! It would be impossible for me to detail all the ways we work with these teams, but at a high level: * Sales & CSM: I'm bundling these two together, as the type of work we do with each is similar at a high level. We work closely with sales leaders and the sales enablement team to understand sales' needs, develop messaging and content for them to use with both existing and prospective customers, understand how that messaging is resonating, and creating training and other enablement materials. We have a sales enablement group within PMM who drive the strategy here and work with other PMMs to create the content for specific solutions/areas. * Marketing: We work with all parts of marketing (at Intercom, marketing is split into 4 main areas - PMM, Corporate Marketing, Demand Marketing and Growth). This includes everything from partnering with our brand team on our narratives and campaign strategy, enabling the demand teams on who to target and what messaging to use, co-ordinating launches across the whole team, working with growth on improving our web journey and landing pages, and so on. In short, we work with all areas of marketing very closely, both on an ongoing basis and on specific projects like launches. * Product: PMMs are partnered directly with PMs for their specific product area and meet regularly (usually weekly). They work closely together, with PMM providing market and customer insights, and inputting into the product strategy and roadmaps. PMM also develops the positioning, messaging and launch plans for our solutions and new features, ensuring the PM is aligned along the way.

I believe that the ability to build relationships with stakeholders and influence others is key to being a successful PMM. As you've noted in your question, due to the nature of our role PMMs are often drivers of very cross-functional projects, which involves co-ordinating peers and potentially people more senior than you too. Really, it comes down to all the classic relationship-building things: * Build trust - spend time with the people you need to influence (and not just when you need something!), be helpful and reliable, do what you say you will, ask for their input and feedback, and look for opportunities to help them achieve their goals. This will all go a long way when you need their help with a project, need to give feedback, need them to help advocate for something etc. * Know what their goals are and what drives them, and then make it easy for them to understand how what you're asking for will help them achieve them * Adjust your communication style - everyone has their preferred communication style. Some people love reading docs, some like to talk things through, some just want the 3 bullet highlights. Understanding how your stakeholders like to communicate will make it more likely you'll get your point through * Focus on the impact to the business, not why you need it - similar to the point about knowing your stakeholder's goals, you'll likely get a better result if you can clearly show how whatever you're asking for - a project to be prioritised, or feedback to be actioned for example - helps the business, because everyone should want the business to be successful. This also helps makes it less personal (you're not asking for yourself, you're asking for the business!) * Data, if you have it - if you have data, research or any kind of evidence that helps back up what you're asking for, that can make it significantly easier to get buy-in

In the past we've used things like Google Sheets/docs, but for the past 18 months or so we've started using Coda and it's been a game changer. We do all our launch planning in Coda, which means there is one 'source of truth' where all stakeholders can see progress, timelines, who's responsible for what etc. This has been much easier than our previous world of having loads of different docs and no one ever knowing where anything is! I actually published a template of our launch plan in Coda , which you can make your own copy of if you like. Outside of Coda, for bigger launches we usually have weekly syncs with key stakeholders to keep things on track and use slack channels to coordinate async. For our biggest launches, we have support from program managers (on the R&D side) and campaign managers (on the marketing side) who help coordinate comms, update emails etc to keep everyone on track. Before we had those teams in place, PMMs usually played that role!

I'm biased of course, but I believe PMMs should be one of your first marketing hires. The insight PMMs can bring in terms of product-market fit, positioning and messaging are just as valuable, if not moreso, at a smaller org as in a big one. Having a PMM early on will help you set the foundations for the future, and help ensure you have the right product, the right target audience, and them messaging that's going to resonate with them before you start spending a ton of money and resources on marketing and sales activities. Plus, you need someone to help you launch things right? ;) Of course, often this work is already being done to some extent by others in the company - but this is PMM's area of expertise so, why not hire an expert?