Kelsey Nelson

Ultimately what you're looking for is for a true partnership: to be more in the loop on what product is building, why, and what initial feedback is from early customers -- a closer teammate to the product development lifecycle. To get there, I've found the most success building trust by proactively bringing market insights to the product team so they see you as a value add in their development work. For example: are you hearing customers talk about a new use case? Capture the feedback and data and share with your product counterpart. Are you seeing win rates rise or fall in their product area? Flag this to your PM, and engage in win/loss interviews to unpack what's going on. The more you can be a partner and add value to the relationship, the more they'll bring you in as well.

Most PMM's I've worked with have done a great job identifying market signals: * New competitor release * New partner release * Analyst research published * Customer/prospect news * etc. The challenge is synthesizing all these signals and quickly recommending action where necessary. I've seen teams capture these insights into a dashboard of some sort (maybe in Google sheets or a slide format), and also in Slack channels where they can flag frequent updates. With exec readouts, some leaders may want to be a part of these channels and see the news as it comes in -- could create a channel like #competitor-news so they get the real time updates (and there are options to automate posting those updates from various sources as well). I've also found that those channels can be noisy so it's helpful to send out a weekly/monthly tl;dr with the top 3-5 takeaways -- and then link to the relevant channel or dashboard should someone want to dig in more. Most important if you take this route: keep the takeaways concise and directly backed relevant data!

Definitely. Like many companies, we've always sized our launches (S/M/L/XL; Tier 1/2/3; etc.) and follow different templates for different tiers. The foundational differences usually align to the volume (not value, volume!) of activities surrounding the launch. Not every feature may need a standalone webpage, or a standalone live sales enablement session. Tier 2/3 may be more effective when bundled into a bigger story, or included only as a blog. I like to scope a Bill of Materials (BoM) to these Tiers in Google Sheets, and make it sortable by tier. (Plus, this way, partner stakeholders can see that it's not that one feature or product is more important than another -- it just may necessitate more assets to achieve the goal of this launch.)

I would not say it is wildly different from a PMM's role in a more traditional sales-led company -- you still need a deep understanding of your customer, market, and product. You still are partnering closely with your product and demand gen teams to drive pipeline and support sales. However, you may have different channels for activation of those messages: unlike a traditional sales-led company, where you (hopefully!) are spending a substantive portion of your time on field enablement, you will now need to leverage direct channels (likely via your digital / demand gen teams) to help prospects progress through their journey. To be successful, spend even more time understanding your customer's communities -- what are their digital 'watering holes'? Where do they go for sources of insight? Ideally these are already on your radar, but with PLG motions, you rely more heavily on the product selling itself, which means you want to understand exactly which problems each prospect wants to solve, work with demand gen to surface your solutions in those relevant spaces, and, when they land in your product, ensure they can see how to achieve that mission.

PMMs have two key superpowers that I'd lean on here. Demonstrating excellence in each has been a major driver in my experience for building credibility and shifting out of execution and into a more strategic role: 1. Customer/market insights: Data talks, and I've found the core of many PMMs' individual successes to be grounded in deeply understanding their customer, market and product. By proactively and regularly bringing forward insights from direct customer conversations, insights you hear from sales calls, research from analyst and industry reports, and more, you'll demonstrate a depth of subject matter expertise that makes your input invaluable. 2. Amazing storytelling meets business strategy: Once you've shown that you know your customer and product space inside and out, then bringing forward recommendations about which needles need to move and how you can best do so will be the key to getting out of just launch mode. For example, say you are asked to launch a new feature for a product that's been in market for a few years. How is this product performing overall in terms of new business/upsell? What is the customer sentiment? What does adoption look like? Which of these presents a major opportunity? (e.g. might be a product that is frequently sold but has low utilization.) Launches are just moments for broader visibility -- it's understanding the product lifecycle, what's needed to drive growth, and the most impactful narrative to drive customers toward that action that will be the meaningful formula.

Ideally both a PM + PMM have a shared north star metric, e.g. revenue, potentially in the form of free trial conversions; adoption/usage; upsell/cross-sell; etc. (this should be true regardless of whether they are in a traditional product area or in growth). As a few examples of where I've seen overlap/handoffs: Shared: * Deep understanding and detailed definition of customer journey, e.g. from first touch to 'Hello world' moment, steps to adoption of a key feature, etc. * Metrics aligned to key steps in that journey, e.g. 'Hello world', key markers of sophisticated usage, etc. PM: * Understanding customer requirements and determining development plans for features/UI requirements when the metrics show a dropoff or slowdown in the customer journey * Development strategy for features that unlock new use cases, persona, etc. with your product or platform/suite * Development of in-product guides and use cases PMM: * Strategy to accelerate acquisition/adoption with GTM teams, e.g. would better discovery in post-sales onboarding help improve awareness/value of key features? Would short form demo videos of templates drive more relevant interest in the free trial experience? * Development of assets, pricing/packaging* (definitely in partnership with PM; may also fall under a separate P&P function but PMM should be a close partner on strategy) for driving adoption/growth * Market research on new use cases or persona that may be a fit for your product in the future to help inform PM roadmap

Events/activations and community-based initiatives can provide interesting avenues to try something new to build buzz for a new product. For a simple idea: can we take the 'influencer' idea and build something for your specific product purpose? E.g. if you're a solution for project managers, can you explore a play on the organizational skills of Marie Kondo, and work with a few early customers to create a fun social campaign spotlighting how they 'let go of old processes that did not bring them joy?' For a bit more involved ideas, I think you can look at creative ways to infuse new products into in-person events. Work at a company that does governance (who has access to what)? Host a fun event where they have to 'request access' to get in, using your product. Work in collaboration software? Create a giant painting with instructions in your collaboration tool, and see how well the painting comes out at the end of the show. You could also try to tackle these virtually as well: 'request access' to get some sort of reward or invite.

There are a few different ways you can do this (and also a lot of tools out there that can help! Pendo, Chameleon, and Braze as examples.) The top three that I've seen include: 1. A push notification or in-product pop-up will get the most urgent visibility for a new feature. 2. You could also use a banner or in-app message can help you get visibility for the new feature without 'interrupting'. 3. The least obtrusive would be to include in a self-service feature manager, e.g. if your app offers the ability for admins to self-service access and turn on features for an EA. This would have less prominence but could be an effective way to introduce and gain early feedback on a new feature before more widely rolling it out. In the first two, these will perform even more effectively if they've been personalized and/or leverage customer usage insights to showcase the relevance of this new feature to the customer's use of your product. For example, if a customer is already using an adjacent product/capability, they may be more apt to try and adopt quickly -- so a tailored message that explains how this new feature is additive to their existing experience could motivate them to move quickly. Alternately, you could use this feature launch as a 'carrot' to drive adoption of core features by creating a tailored message that shows ROI of brands already further along this maturity path.

I'd leverage your Growth partners to help you show quantitative value of PMM initiatives. Often as PMMs we are the fuel for other parts of a GTM motion: we provide training/enablement so sellers can prospect, navigate, and close deals. We provide thought leadership narratives to help corporate marketing and demand gen teams build awareness and pipeline. We provide market insights so product teams can define a roadmap. As a result, it can be difficult for PMMs to set KPIs that aren't 'output' oriented: build a new BoM for product launch. Create new thought leadership narrative on industry trend with a report/blog/infographic/etc. Research new industry trend and recommend point of view for company. Growth teams can help validate these recommendations and show ROI for certain initiatives. E.g. How do we know if that thought leadership narrative is effective? Can growth teams help us more quickly a/b test this story versus a different narrative? Can we get any insights into how it's performing relative to competitors on the same topic via public channels (SEO, etc.)? Ultimately we are all beholden to the same KPI: growth! Which likely means pipeline, sales, and retention. By partnering with growth teams, you can start to glean insights into relative impact of your initiatives -- and refine your programs for more impact in the future.

The magic here is getting very specific as to the steps that are required to achieve 'hello world' and sophisticated adoption. Is there a key integration step that is causing most customers to get stuck on their adoption journey? Are they only getting to the point of a basic use case, and not experimenting with more sophisticated outcomes -- why? Are they unaware they can do so? Are they feeling overwhelmed by how to get started? If you deeply understand the granular steps required to get to 'adoption', it'll become much more obvious where the friction (or acceleration!) points are in the journey, so you can quickly diagnose and take action on resolving those pain points. The resolution could require a range of solutions: an in-product guide that shows where the API keys are to set up that integration; a post-sales playbook to help a customer understand why and how to set up your SDK; a set of new templates or guides to show the art of the possible (and reduce fear of a blank canvas); and so on. From there, it's all about measurement and iteration!