Kacy Boone

Growth Product Marketing is an emerging role, especially impactful at companies that have a strong Growth Product arm. As a Growth PMM, you should be mapped to a Growth Product team and support the team in the same ways that a traditional PMM does. As a Growth PMM you’ll be working closely with the Growth Product team on experiments, tests, and research to improve user metrics. As a point of distinction, I wouldn’t expect a Growth PMM to be doing a ton of “big launches” for core products. To demonstrate expertise in Growth PMM, I would lean into your ability to analyze data to understand opportunities for growth and pair that with your deep understanding of the customer. You’ve got to be data-driven, understand the fundamentals of experimentation, and have solid marketing channel performance chops. That's what will set you apart in Growth PMM.

This is such a great example about how you can’t necessarily take a standard playbook and apply it to every company. The dynamics of team size, resourcing, stage of company, all factor in to how you approach defining the role of your team. To answer your question, it starts with finding ways to align your quarterly (or ideally bi-annual & annual) goals and getting clear on the unique value each team brings to the table. The last thing you want is to have competing time and resources, so you want both teams to be really proactive about sharing goals, priorities, and roadmaps in order to ensure you’re not duplicating efforts nor have competing priorities. Secondly, I think it’s important that there’s a shared understanding of the unique value each team brings to the table. In growth marketing, you’re going to have experts on channel strategy, performance, and distribution. In product marketing, you’re going to have experts on positioning, voice of customer, competitive differentiation. Get clear on that as a team. One last super tactical idea for you, I love a shared team brainstorm ahead of mapping goals and programs for the quarter. On the product marketing side, you could compile some research on customers, share the product roadmap, or do a competitive deep-dive to inform that brainstorm and help set up your teams to be aligned from the start. Hope this helps!

Product marketing is deeply aligned to the product team and is focused on maximizing the adoption of the product suite. Product marketing can also be split into “inbound” and “outbound” functions depending on the stage of the company. Inbound being responsible for research, strategy, and insights to inform product roadmap decisions while outbound is responsible for launches, sales enablement, messaging, and distribution. At a smaller company, product marketing is responsible for both inbound and outbound but their focus on either might shift depending on the stage of the product. Growth marketing is composed of channel experts that are focused on various stages in the user funnel and closely linked to revenue. Growth marketing typically has a variety of functions and it may differ from company to company. For my team, growth marketing includes paid acquisition, demand gen, website optimization, lifecycle marketing, and events. Growth marketing is also typically responsible for the “execution” of marketing work. E.g. building emails, ads, in-product notifications. The overlap exists where growth marketing and product marketing may both want to drive the adoption of a feature (for example, through lifecycle automation) in order to improve core user metrics. In those cases, product marketing and growth marketing should work together to inform strategy and growth marketing will likely take on the execution.

Totally! I’ve helped multiple growth marketers make this jump before. You’ve already got the marketing channel performance chops, so I would lean into that. If you’ve built out a strong understanding of what messaging works for your audience, that can also be highly applicable to product marketing. In terms of areas for self-development, I've found that those moving from growth to product typically need to shore up their customer research & insights skills, as well as crafting positioning and messaging. 

If there’s a Growth Product & Engineering team that has enough work to support a growth product marketer, then I’d say it makes sense. Their work and scope should be closely mapped to the roadmap of the Growth Product team. Typically will be focused on experiments to improve core user metrics through product adoption, rather than big GTMs / product launches. 

Make sure it makes sense first! Do you have a Growth Product team to pair up with? Is Growth well resourced at your company? Is there already a Product Marketing team? A growth marketing team? I obviously have lots of questions in order to be helpful here, but I think reading through the other answers here on this AMA might also point you in the right direction. If you answered yes to the questions above, then I would start by making it crystal clear what the Growth PMM team will do, establishing swim lanes, and get lots of feedback from cross-functional stakeholders. If you want to follow up with more details, I’m happy to provide thoughts. You can write me at [email protected].

I think the core definition is still the same but in pure B2B you’re going to have a much stronger emphasis on sales enablement and think of sales as one of your core channels for communicating with customers. In PLG or B2C, you’re going to have a stronger emphasis on communicating directly to users via marketing channels. In PLG, you’ll still have sales enablement as a core part of your responsibilities, but there’s more of a balance of your time spent on direct-to-user communication and sales enablement.

Great question—thanks for asking! One thing to get out of the way first: Most products will have both users and buyers and those users and buyers can live across self-serve and enterprise. Users: Individuals that get value from your product (either actively or passively) but don’t have the power or need to purchase. Buyers: Get value from your product and also have the power to purchase–buyers can exist both in self-serve and enterprise plans. Now to get into the nuances… Customers, no matter whether they live in self-serve or enterprise, need to be led to value in your product, it’s really their needs that differ. Self-serve customers typically have less complex needs. Perhaps they have a smaller team or fewer security or setup requirements. They could even just be using simpler versions of your product! Their needs can be delivered on with a hands-off product-led approach. Enterprise customers have more complex needs—whether that be the need to manage thousands of users, integrate with their tech stack, or if their using products that require a hands-on setup and success process. There should be significant, incremental value of having an account team in order to support them. It’s critical that the move to Enterprise financially makes sense—the company should deliver enough incremental value to the customer so they are willing to pay a higher price point that covers and exceeds the additional overhead required to service them.

Oh, I love this question! I’ve been tasked to overhaul many onboarding programs and customer insights are integral to my approach. I believe the best insights are validated through multiple sources so here are a few methods I’d recommend using to inform your strategy: 1. Customer Interviews: Talk to your customers! Make sure you’re not just talking to the successful ones either. While they might be harder to get in touch with (and you may need to offer some $$), interviewing customers who churned early in their lifecycle can open your eyes to challenges or missed expectations—which then become opportunities for improvement. 2. Support Tickets: In particular, looking at support tickets that customers file in their early lifecycle can help you proactively hedge off any painful experiences by providing help or training content in onboarding. 3. NPS & Satisfaction Survey Data: Take a look at your promoters and understand why they’re happy while also understanding how you could have improved the experience for your detractors. I would look at this for all users and also narrow in on the early lifecycle to see if there are things you can address in onboarding that would put someone on a successful path with your product. 4. Product Data: Working with your Data Science team, you can uncover key actions that correlate to higher success with your product. If you can identify those key actions, then the onboarding path’s job is to lead users to taking those actions. With a bit of a strategic lens and synthesizing from these sources of insight, you’ll want to answer some of these questions (which you can also ask a customer directly): * What expectations did they have when they discovered your product * What were they trying to accomplish when they first signed up for your product * What challenges did they run into * What surprised them * Were they able to accomplish what they set after? Why or why not? Ultimately, we want our customers to find success—so understanding what success means to them and figuring out how your product helped (or eek! hindered) their success is what you’re after. Once you understand that, you can curate an onboarding flow to support them.

There may be times that a product marketer has qualitative goals, but I’d say product marketing (in my experience) has had quantifiable goals more often than not. I think it’s good practice for both growth marketing and product marketing to think critically about how they are driving value to the business that ultimately moves product adoption, user engagement, and subsequently revenue. More tactically, I’ve often seen growth and product marketing create shared goals on user engagement metrics (e.g. increase user activation by X%) or on product adoption goals (get X% of active user to adopt XYZ product).