Maureen Sitterson

One of my favorite brands' marketing is Reformation. They lead their marketing with the sustainability of their products and they do it in such a bold way that it immediately grabs your attention. Their marketing is clear, provocative, and consistent - you always know without a doubt who and what they stand for. Their tone also evokes a sense of personalization at scale - it feels like they truly know their customers and are talking directly to them in a way that shows that. In terms of Product Marketing leaders, I'm also consistently impressed by the full Airbnb team and the way that they bring features to market and have created an expected cadence of launches with their seasonal releases. The launches are always strong, cohesive narratives that pull potentially disparate features together into a story. I love how they use Brian Chesky's history with the company and voice as a lever - it feels authentic and strengthens their brand story.

Leaning on research and data to project the impact of new messaging and show internal teams why it will matter to customers is most effective. This could come in many formats - showing the potential size of the business opportunity or showing how customers are currently responding to messaging are a few different ways that can help others clearly see your point of view and why you believe a change is necessary. Without a clear articulation of the "why" behind what you're proposing, it's much more challenging to influence others.

This happens a lot as a Product Marketer! While it's great to take multiple stakeholders opinions into account, product marketers have a unique vantage point in their organization that enables them to see the broader company context in a way that not all teams have access to. To manage conflicting opinions, I like to ground teams in what we're communicating, why we're communicating it, and the outcome we want to drive. Usually grounding conflicting voices in those 3 things - and aligning together - can help to move the group toward a shared understanding and hopefully agreement. Strong research can also prove or disprove messaging hypotheses and help to mitigate internal disagreement -- having an unbiased opinion from customers always goes a long way!

I don't have a specific formula for re-iterating on messaging, because I firmly believe that it's important to critically evaluate messaging through multiple lenses with several stakeholders throughout the messaging development process. Landing a strong brief and aligning on it with all key stakeholders as the foundation is the first and most important step - that way, you can challenge whether the messaging is aligned to the brief throughout the development and revision phases. Without a strong brief it's much harder to zoom into exactly what you should say and how you should say it. While that foundation is important, it's also OK to adjust to maximize impact. Especially in a business where things shift rapidly, you have to be comfortable with making quick pivots throughout messaging development.

Identifying the impact of your messaging is critical to determining whether your GTM strategy, and specifically your value props and messaging, were successful. That being said, it can be challenging to isolate the impact of messaging. In order to effectively isolate how a particular message performed, we often do an A/B test between 2 different messages and assess the impact of each. Once you have results from the test, you can incorporate messaging results into future marketing.

We've seen success with data - driven personalization. Beyond customer segmentation, for marketing to small business or business customers, helping to provide them with insights and data-driven recommendations for how to grow their business is one of the most engaging messages that we can deliver. I've also found that showing a customer what they could have earned or saved by using a specific product feature you can use opportunistic / "FOMO" - like messaging to drive product/feature adoption and/or a behavioral change in customers.

I think this all depends on where you personally see your career going. If you love product marketing and want to stay in the product marketing function, I firmly believe it's a function that enables continuous career growth. If you want to eventually become a CMO, typically you need to hone other skills outside of product marketing. One way to do that is to develop close working relationships with other marketing leaders and learn their craft from them. Product marketing is a function that could also be combined with others (like CRM) - taking on a hybrid role like that as a promotion opportunity could be a great way to gain marketing channel expertise while continuing in PMM.

You can segue into product marketing by either 1) strategically taking on projects in your current role that give you product marketing adjacent experience (like helping to develop positioning or a value prop, helping to launch something) or 2) offer to do a 10-20% time commitment project to help the product marketing team. Chances are, the product marketing team at your company is lean and will welcome the extra help! There are a lot of creative ways that you can gain product marketing experience in your current role. If those options aren't available, another great way to get experience that would be valuable is to become an expert on the customer of your current company. Become an expert on current research and customer pain points and find a way to be a part of solving them. Doing so will give you a great foundation for any marketing role and will be valuable as you continue to work toward a move into product marketing.

A head of PMM needs to have a birds eye view of the overall customer experience and the road map for improvements and be able to translate that into a strong narrative. A head of PMM also needs to be a great leader focused on developing excellent talent. To hone both while being a senior PMM, you can: * Take on a step-up project to help your team develop an overall narrative for how the product experience is changing and improving your product for customers. * Offer to mentor a more junior member of the team to build leadership skills * Build strong relationships with senior level partners and help your team strengthen collaboration with those partners

This is a great question! As a new PMM on a team or new to a company, the most important thing that helps build credibility is trust with partners in product and marketing. Building a strong foundation with your partners is critical in every PMM role. Spend time getting to know your partners and their teams - what are their goals? what is important to them? How do they like to collaborate? After you've established that foundation, the next most critical thing you can do is start to critically evaluate the current customer experience and ask questions that will help you inform your strategy and where you focus. If you do those 2 things well, you'll quickly build trust and credibility.