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 and analyst research Pricing & packaging i.e. product price points, bundling, tiering and discounting Sales enablement i.e. how is the product priced, deals structured and overcoming any sales objections Product Management: Product line tiering i.e. features ABC available to customer segment 1 and features XYZ available to customer segment 2 Product prioritazation i.e. based on customer feedback, market intelligence and companies what features will see the light of day Product requirements i.e. delivering epics, user stories and task with engineering

Here are some OKRs my teams track for product launches: Awareness - Web, social and blog activity (impressions, engagements and link clicks) Sales if not self-serve - MQLs and SQLs Time to value - how long does it take a customer to onboard and get value? Consumption - How often are new features being used (DAU / MAU) Renewals - NRR

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 planning process with PM and Eng

Product marketing should understand product requirements and feature velocity at a high level i.e. how hard it is to deliver a solution and how many features can your team deliver in a quarter. That way you can bucketize feature requests into t-shirt sizes; small, medium large efforts. The onus is on product managament and engineering to determine exact costs and timing of features. 

Yes, at VMware this is called Sales Kickoff. It usually consists of sales, technical pre-sales, professsional services and customer success gathering for a few days to discuss the company's strategic priorities, solution areas, product positioning, roadmaps and relationship building. It is split out by the functions above to dive deep into each phase of the customer lifecycle. 

By presenting a particular customer segement in the light of the total addressable market. You'll be in good shape if you can clearly show a business case that carries signifigance in the following areas. For example, how does addressing a particular segment move the needle on revenue, competitive positioning, company vision and customer satisfaction vs addressing other segments? 

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 the following metrics (for a cloud service that identifies issues before they occur using advanced proactive intelligence). 1. # of customers/companies registered 2. # of active users 3. # of features used 4. # of issues proactively remediated 5. # of qualified leads

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 leadership and product management.

First, changing a culture is hard. You can do your best by setting an example, being curious, solving hard problems and helping your peers grow the business. Second, you do not have a product without adoption. PMMs usually own or share the adoption goals with product management. PMM is in a unique position to capture and unify qualitative and quantitative data to increase adoption and usage. This process never ends and should be injected in every step of the product life cycle not just the start.

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 DAU and help PM / engineering drive product experience improvements to increase usage. There are tools Pendo that provide rich data on user activity and your platform while allowing you to create in-product experiences with guidance without engineering work. Here are some examples where PMM can use customer and product data to make a real difference in the product roadmap: * Trail experience and in-product guidance * Onboarding experience and in-product guidance * Most popular feature(s) guidance * New release experience and in-product guidance * Renewal experience and in-product guidance