Joshua Lory

Great question with the most votes. In my experience, Product Marketing owns a large percentage of the market analysis, pricing and packaging effort. At VMware, Product Marketing works hand in hand with Product Management, executive staff, finance and sales to carve out pricing for new and incremental offerings. We split pricing related responsibilities in the following way. Product Marketing: Customer & market intelligence i.e. customer segmentation, addressable market, competitve insights ...Read More

Some best practices that helped my teams create a collaborate cross pollinating environment are: Standing 1:1 with PM and PMM leads to discuss major open actions with full disclosure PM contributes or leads customer feedback in regular product backlog grooming sessions PMM develops self service customer intelligence that PM can use to steer product strategy PMM leads customer advocacy efforts and invites PM and Eng leads to participate "hear from the horses mouth"  PM is included in Product PI p ...Read More

Think of a restaurant with front and back of the house. Back of house is prepping, cooking and organizing the food for front of the house to position, serve and engage the customers. Another way to look at this is front of the house understands what the customers want, thier expecations, reactions and provides feedback to back of the house to prioritze what food is being prepared. This symboitic relationship is anlogous to PMM (front of house), PM (liason between front and back of house) and eng ...Read More

In many cases product marketers are the window to the customer. We’ve walked a mile in the customer’s shoes. We have our fingers on the pulse of their needs, problems and feedback. We meet with customers, sales and partners regularly to understand the market forces at play. We are in the best position to synthesize vast amounts of inputs to help leadership, product management and our partners in engineering to influence product direction. With that for context, my team is currently measured on t ...Read More

Product marketers should leave there stamp outside and inside the product. What I mean is that traditional marketing always takes place outside of the product i.e. sales enablement, blogs, technical demos, tools etc . Now with the advent of SaaS PMMs can market inside the product as well. By having a pulse on the customers end to end journey PMM can shine a light on where the experience can be improved by highlighting moments that matter. PMM should also co-own consumption targets like MAU and D ...Read More

In partnership with the product leadership team, establish a 360 degree feedback loop that takes the plethora of feedback channels and terminates them into one like AHA or Jira. Once you have all the feedback and requests in one place for all to see, develop a criteria to prioritize. How many customers will this feature impact, how much perceived value will they gain, how much energy and cost will it take to build, etc. That way you can serve up feature requests on a silver platter for leadershi ...Read More