Leah Brite

We break down product marketing’s work into four buckets and work with product as follows during each of the phases: 1. Market Strategy, Customer Insights & Product Roadmap. PMM leads market, competitive, and customer/prospect research to uncover key customer problems. We analyze market data, hone competitive intelligence, and draw on prospect and customer insights to illuminate product/market fit. We collaborate with the product team throughout this whole process to identify and prioritize big questions to answer and then share all the intel with them to influence and inform the product strategy and roadmap decisions. Product of course wants to solve customers’ biggest problems, so most find this research invaluable and welcome the thoughtful, data driven influence. 2. Positioning, Messaging, Packaging, & Pricing. PMM develops a customer-facing strategy to uniquely differentiate our offer in the marketplace. Product provides inputs on features, COGs, considerations, etc to help inform pricing and packaging - we generally co-pilot pricing with them. We also have them review drafts and provide input on the positioning and messaging, ensuring we’ve done a good job of highlighting all the ways we provide value and appeal to prospects and users. 3. Go-to-Market Strategy. PMM partners with product on defining the product market readiness criteria. We’ll present our GTM strategy, getting alignment on the level of the launch as well as goals and KPIs. Finally, we’ll make sure we’re aligned on all of the associated launch activities before handing the plan off to marketing and sales teams to help bring the campaign to life and execute against the strategy. 4. Amplification, Feedback & Refinement. Post launch, we’ll work with product to monitor campaign and product adoption metrics as well as check in with xfn stakeholders like CX, marketing, sales, rev ops, and data science to get the fullest picture of launch success. We’ll jointly strategize on how to make improvements, and host a retro so that we can be on a continual path of improvement.

Upfront, I just want to call out something that you all likely already know - PMM’s strategic and interconnected role makes it difficult to pinpoint and measure impact. Strategic, foundational work is hard to measure. And being so interconnected means that there are heaps of dependencies and variables. Shared goals and metrics are part of the job, so get comfortable with that. Build communicative, productive partnerships with the teams that have shared goals and align on the approach. Celebrate successes and failures together, do post-mortems, and learn and improve hand-in-hand. Now, onto the question. PMM should be responsible for all activities related to customer and market knowledge (market research, competitive research and differentiation, target audience definition, etc), messaging & positioning, and teeing up the launch by providing briefs and foundational materials that enable channels (web and marketing assets, sales readiness and enablement, PR, demand gen, etc). Demand Gen should be responsible for all activities related to the performance of the campaign (SEO optimization, SEM, promotions, direct advertising strategy, email marketing, and paid ads). Because demand gen will rely on product marketing to support campaigns by defining what products/features/experiences to highlight, for which audiences, and what language to use, the work is inevitably linked. It is clear why KPIs like CAC (customer acquisition cost), LTV (lifetime value), win rate, marketing/sales cycle length, campaign metrics, etc. are often used by both demand gen and product marketing -- they span the work of these two teams and many more. Imagine you have a goal of making a delicious cake. To do so, you need high quality ingredients (PMM) and a skilled baker (demand gen). If the cake doesn’t come out well, it will be impossible for the person eating the cake to understand what went wrong -- but, you can input tests along the way to get signal. Test messaging using surveys or a customer advisory board. Run small experiments before investing a lot into demand gen to understand messaging’s impact on conversion. This can be an indicator of whether you’ve got quality ingredients.

I’d start by doing a listening tour. Understand where they are in their PMM learning journey (have they worked with PMM before? How much do they know about the role?), needs or pain points they have, and their expectations of you in the role (not all of which will be correct nor need to be fulfilled). This will help you understand how much education and alignment you’ll need to build. Then, get to work crafting your PMM lane. Clearly specify what you will (and won’t) do, where the handoff points are, what the engagement model looks like and how people can reach out to you with requests, and who to go to for work that falls outside of your scope. Get alignment with your manager, and then do a roadshow so that all your stakeholders are aware and aligned.

Start with data. Ground your messaging in first and third party data that illuminates what is important to your target customers, key pain points, aspirations, how they like to be messaged to, language they use, etc. Show your work -- don’t just include the suggested messaging in the doc; add an appendix or reference section that demonstrates a thoughtful approach that is grounded in the data. Next, see if you can get some quick feedback from target customers on your messaging to further validate the approach before showing it to your exec team. This can be a great use of a CAB (customer advisory board). This can arm you with answers to questions that may come up or resolve differences of opinions that may arise. Finally, send the doc as a pre-read, ask execs to add in comments at least 1 day before you host a meeting to go through the doc. Also include a RAPID so it is clear who the final decision maker is. Use the meeting to get resolution and alignment live - this is generally much faster than trying to manage async. You might not get alignment on every last detail, but this is where the decision maker comes in.

Rather than a KPI, the things I see teams miss most often is looking at output rather than impact. Before setting KPIs, it is key to establish what you want to achieve and why at an organizational level. After companies set their north star and goals, that should flow into department priorities, team priorities, and individual priorities. Product marketers can then use an output to impact framework to plan their work. Start with the impact on the organizational level (ARR, new subscribers, churn, ACV, pricing tier adoption, CAC, win rate, LTV, etc). Then examine how you could help the organization achieve those impacts through your work. Map how your work will ladder up to the impact and identify what the leading indicators will be. So for example, if the company has an ARR target, you can impact by identifying and helping get a feature prioritized that is resulting in closed lost. Through a GTM campaign that drives awareness, you can use a combination of campaign and conversion metrics and win loss data to measure your impact -- closed lost for X reason decreased by Y%, increasing conversion by Z%, ultimately resulting in _ net new ARR.

A few things come to mind to try: 1. Create a brief for the sales enablement assets upfront. Succinctly outline what your objectives are in priority order, who the target audience is, and some brief details on what’s important and likely to appeal to them. 2. This brief is also a great place to outline your RACI/DACI/RAPID to create clarity on what each person’s role is in the project. 3. When conflicting opinions arise, try to leverage your brief to realign the stakeholders around what is important. Bring them back to the target audience, what they care about, and the goals of the sales enablement piece. Hopefully, the brief can help guide the decision making. Also, if the feedback is coming from folks that have different roles in the RAPID, that can also create clarity on whose opinion holds the most sway. 4. Finally, get everyone together in the same meeting. Outline that the primary objective is to make a final decision on XYZ, so that you can get the sales enablement asset out into the wild, helping your company serve more customers with your amazing product. Make sure the decision maker is in the room to close out the disagreement with finality if it comes to that. Good luck! Those dynamics can be challenging.

First 30 days: * Onboard and get all the context! Learn about your customers (firmographic info, top segments, their pain points, where they spend time, how they enter the buying process, who influences their decision, ICP, JTBD, etc. Consume all the research that has been done if anything exists), your company (org chart, how decisions get made, unwritten rules, values, how to get things done, etc.), market (trends, competitors, sizing), your product (how it works, top competitive solutions, gaps, performance info, etc). * Meet with stakeholders. Learn about them as people, discuss how you’ll work together, what their priorities are, where they think you should be spending your time, etc) First 90 days: Start to make an impact! * Align with your manger on top priorities and deliver against key projects * Build the foundations, such as: * Anything listed above that your company doesn’t yet have (e.g. ICP, market research, etc) * Positioning and messaging * Define launch processes * Personas * Buyer journeys * Sales enablement materials * Talk to customers! There is no better way to serve customers than to understand them deeply. This also becomes fertile ground to mine for case studies and testimonials. * Establish other core processes and operating mechanisms that will help you scale and get things done efficiently, while also being in lock-step with xfn partners. * Understand why you win and why you lose across awareness and consideration. Come up with an action plan that maps to the customer funnel and key friction points. 

The PMM org structure is highly variable based on the company – and also shifts and changes through a company’s lifecycle to best meet company needs. There are four primary structures 1. Product lines (i.e. Software, service, etc) 2. Customer segments (i.e., small business, mid-market, enterprise, accountant), 3. Functional (i.e. insights, product strategy, GTM, monetization, sales enablement) - Not my favorite as I think PMMs do their best work when they are deep on the customer problem and product solution and then bring full-stack PMM skills to the table. 4. Lifecycle (i.e. acquisition, engagement, retention) Here are some things to consider as you determine the right structure of the PMM team for your org: 1. Start with the right ratio. The avg is ~2.5 PMs to 1 PMM. The ratio tends to be lower for product-led and for earlier stage products that need more from an insights, rapid testing and iteration standpoint. 2. Align to how the business is organized and how stakeholder teams are organized 3. Map PMM head count to the top biz priorities that PMM can have the biggest impact on. 4. Consider hybrid approaches where, for example, you have PMMs mapped to product lines, but also have each person specialize and be the lead in a customer segment, functional area, etc. This allows for more opportunities for stretch projects and career dev. 

Internal comms are so key given the highly xfn role of PMM. I’ve also found them crucial given that some of the outcomes PMMs drive are less tangible than some functions like Demand Gen. The best channels to communicate updates depend on size of company, tier of update, and goal of the comms. For a moderately scaled org and tier 2 update, here is an example by stage of product dev. * Kickoff. Host a kick off call for everyone that will be involved in the GTM (e.g. channel partners, product, sales leads, etc). Communicate goals, get everyone excited and aligned upfront. * Development. * Slack/Email newsletters. Regular updates to share info and keep the core team engaged and on track. * Quarterly updates. Utilize annual and quarterly planning cadences to socialize team prios and status updates for projects in flight. * Launch (or right before). * Slack/email. Big post when the feature launches to a channel with a broad audience. Detail the target audience, problem to solve, solution, GTM plan, links to assets, etc. * Sales + CS training. Get them prepped and ready to serve and sell! * All hands. Paint the picture for how this product/feature and GTM ladder up to company prios. Showcase and early adopter to make the impact real for the team. Retro. Host a retro to extract and capitalize on key learnings.

Top three things to avoid when establishing or scaling PMM: 1. Working in a silo. PMM is a highly cross functional role, so make sure you are in continual communication with xfn partners and that you are in lock step on priorities and plans. Err on the side of overcommunicating and providing as much transparency and visibility as possible to establish trust. 2. Too much ambiguity for roles and responsibilities. A bit of gray area is totally fine – and it is also good to be nimble and evolve the PMM role as you go along. That said, because PMM is done differently at every organization, it is important to take time to do an intake with xfn partners, understand their needs, and craft the PMM role to deliver against top company priorities and pain points that PMM can help solve. Once you’ve defined this, take this on a 1:1 roadshow to gather feedback, get buy in, and get to work! 3. Saying yes to everything. Align with your boss on a prioritization framework and resulting prios. Then, as new requests come in, provide a way to let xfn partners know where their request falls in terms of prios and what is above and below the cutline – and why! I’ve found that transparency is key, as is the rationalization around the prioritization framework. While you don't want to say yes to everything, many times it is more about “not quite yet” vs no entirely.