Karen He

Klue and Crayon are both great tools to collect competitor information from various channels (website update, social media posts, PRs and related mentions) in a single view. This is particularly useful if your PMM team is dedicated to competitive analyses and sends periodic competitive reports to the field. These reports can also show the macro trends of the competitors rather than just product/feature capabilities. Additionally, you can enhance these competitive analyses with competitive information obtained by other teams in the organization added to these platforms. 

The PMM team structure depends on the size of the company, how technical the product is, and the GTM model. * Company Size: As the company grows and scales, PMM tends to fall under the Marketing org and they may segmented by Core Product PMMs where they focus on the overall messaging and positioning, Industry/Solution PMMs that focus use cases for those specific industries ,and solution areas, and there may be PMMs that will focus solely on sales enablement, competitive intelligence, or pricing. For smaller companies, PMM teams will play a more 'full stack' PMM role. For example, AWS has different PMM roles (Adoption, Engagement, Advocacy) to adopt net-new customers, increase usage within existing customers, and increase customer proofpoints. * Product Technicality: PMM may roll into PM org if the product is very technical and PMMs may serve as front-end PMs but still work very closely with the Marketing team. In my past experience, this doesn't change the role but gives the PMM team better insight and knowledge on the product to enable the marketing and sales teams. * GTM Model: This point correlates to the size of the company. If you are in a larger company where there are multiple product lines or portfolio of products, the PMM team may focus on a set of products or a specific portfolio. This will cover breadth but not depth into the product so you'd rely more on the PMs. However, it helps with messaging and positioning of a core set of products rather than specific products. For example, at one point IBM had PMM roles as Portfolio Marketing Managers that focus on specific messaging, positioning and GTM for specific portfolio of products. 

It is critical to include Product Marketing in customer calls to understand customers' pain points, challenges, and the benefits they'd gain if they can remove their pain points. Product Marketing can then identify buyer/user personas, and business needs/challenges/use cases that span across customers across verticals, which can help finetune messaging, positioning, and sales enablement of the product while Product and Product Design teams can get feedback on the specific product features, capabilities, and UX/UI. Additionally, you'd build closer relationships with customers where you can ask for customer references or events in the future.