Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing, Inscribe

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Sendoso Former Sr. Director, PMM, Lauren Barraco on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

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Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing

Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing

Product Marketing Manager roles are inherently multifaceted. Is there one particular area of focus you recommend developing more than others? Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

100% agree - there are so many areas that you get pulled into as a product marketer. If you think PMM is the path for you, I'd recommend you start with the age-old question... What are YOU passionate about? What gets you up in the morning and drives you? Focus on that first. Like you said, PMM is...more

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Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing

I'm at a company whose PMM team doesn't have a clear vision for how they will grow next year (in terms of headcount). I'm a part of the customer success team, and I'm trying to do different things to prepare to apply for when something does open up. Do you have any suggestions for the kinds of things I should be reading/working on?

I would start by focusing your research internally - although the PMM team might not know what headcount they have yet, I can guarantee that they know where their gaps are / what areas they're struggling to keep up... How's their partner go-to-market strategy? Do they feel they have strong joint ...more

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Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing

Product Marketing can end up being a catch-all in terms of responsibilities. What would you say are the top 3 - 5 areas PMM should always be focused on that can make the biggest impact at a growing start-up?

I'll start by saying that there are two major variables on this one: 1) what the organization needs - this can be very different depending on size of the company, stage of growth, etc. and 2) the reporting structure of the PMM team - do you report to the CTO or CPO? Or do you report to the CMO? D...more

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Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing

What are potential career paths after Product Marketing?

Oh my gosh - the possibilities are endless! The skills required for PMM are transferrable in so many ways. Like you mentioned, there's the product route that you can build on and either lead a PM or PMM team (or both!). The other obvious one is in the CMO direction - for this, you'd definitely ne...more

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Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing

If you're trying to make a pivot into product marketing, what advice do you have for highlighting transferrable skills and addressing gaps?

It sounds like you already have a lot of the relevant experiences to make your first jump into product marketing. We actually have someone on the product marketing team who started in the same way - partner marketing. She leveraged her experience on the partner side to build on product marketing....more

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Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing

How can I improve my interviewing skills for a product marketing role?

First and foremost: practice, practice, practice. But at the end of the day, the key to product marketing is storytelling, right? You should think of your career in the same way. Run through your resume and build a storyboard to help you articulate why you made each move and what you were try...more

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Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing

You're the new PMM for a B2B SaaS company that has 40 people and is starting to scale. What should you aim to do in your first month and your first quarter?

Start building the foundational materials - product positioning, the pitch deck, messaging guides, launch processes, etc. and get alignment on these early! It's critical to get these pieces done first so that you can scale effectively. As a team of 1, you are going to need to rely on the other pe...more

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Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing

Do you have a favorite "stack" or go to tools for staying ahead of competitors?

We actually just implemented Klue for competitive intel. It basically gives you a single source for all competitive intel and then allows you to build real-time battlecards based on that data. The product marketing team has been really happy with it so far.. and more importantly, our go-to-market...more

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Lauren Barraco

VP, Marketing

What do you find most challenging about launching a new product that is also your company's first product?

I think this one all comes down to your framework. If you have a good framework that you've used in the past and a task management tool (like Asana, Jira, etc.), you're over halfway there. But the biggest thing is to socialize the framework with execs and your cross-functional launch team early. ...more

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VP, Marketing at Inscribe