Gregg Miller

30 days: Balance being an absolute sponge and learning by doing. Be a sponge by reading every doc you can get your hands on (enablement materials, case studies, team quarterly/annual plans, research studies, etc.), talking to as many prospects and customers as possible, and scheduling 1:1s with both stakeholders and company leadership. Learn by doing by getting involved in low-risk, low-hanging fruit activities where a PMM touch is needed but perhaps don’t require a ton of context.60 days: Hopef ...Read More

There’s two main drivers I think about with respect to org structure. Important caveat on the below being I primarily have worked at smaller organizations where org structures across the company are often highly nimble. How established the function is - When the PMM function is new, oftentimes you might be the only Product Marketer or have just one report. In that scenario I think it’s important to keep yourself and your report as generalists and prioritize the most important projects across the ...Read More

At Zapier I approached this by starting with a mission statement to describe why our team exists and the work we aim to uniquely do for the company: “PMM exists to maximize Zapier’s market opportunities by (1) clarifying where we win and (2) driving GTM strategy for product success.” I then defined responsibilities that align to (1) like TAM, market segmentation, personas, positioning, competitive analysis, etc. and separately to (2) like working with Product validate market opportunities, desig ...Read More

I’m assuming this question is about moving from a focus on the “last mile” of the go-to-market process entailing sales enablement and product launches to more “upstream” go-to-market strategy activities like identifying market opportunities, defining target segments in the market, partnering with product earlier in the development process, etc. There are many ways to navigate this transition, but a fairly common thread I’ve seen enabling those various paths is insights — insights on customers, c ...Read More

I'll try and answer each of these three questions separately. My philosophy is short and sweet. If you're making battlecards longer than one page or using size 5 font it's going to be impossible for your sales reps to get the high impact at a glance insight they need. Battle cards work best when they are reference docs a rep can use to find what they're looking for in <30 seconds. If they get lost in the amount of detail you provided, they will not use the battle card after the first attempt. ...Read More

One of the biggest surprises is that the vast majority of people at smaller companies have little idea of what product marketing is. Your new colleagues may have never worked directly — or even indirectly — with product marketers before. This means that you as the new head of PMM have a much bigger leadership challenge ahead of you than when working at a larger company that likely has had a fairly defined PMM function for years. Further complicating the challenge is that product marketing looks ...Read More

This will vary depending on how important a given product is as well as its degree of complexity, but for a decently robust feature/product I think you'd want some of the following as a minimum. [Internal] Product one-pager: Succinct asset that explains what customer pain points we're solving for, what the product does/how it solves them, the value prop and top benefits of the product, how it's different from what competitors have, the pricing and packaging guidelines, and any other product-spec ...Read More

GTM kickoff meeting: It is absolutely essential to get all the right stakeholders in the same room to get on the same page around what we're doing, why, by when, and with which owners. I like to have my team run these meetings roughly three months before a given launch and use them as an opportunity to share out a preliminary GTM strategy they've developed in partnership with the product manager. The goal of the meeting is to provide a concrete rough draft detailing strategy and assets and timel ...Read More

In an ideal world product and product marketing should be embedded in one another’s efforts from start to finish (see my other response on “customer needs” and getting PMM further upstream). In this world product marketing has played an active role in helping set the vision for the feature, doing research to support its validation/market opportunity, and coordinating the launch priority (e.g. is this a “nice to have” vs. a tentpole launch). In such a scenario it can often be appropriate for prod ...Read More

There's a lot that goes into effectively measuring success. Defining what success looks like ahead of time (e.g. what KPIs you're trying to influence)  Recognizing that the definition of success will look very different depending on the initiative (e.g. a messaging overhaul of an intro proposal might have % of reps passing certification as a KPI while a product launch might have attach rate as a KPI)   Making sure you have a means of measuring that KPI (e.g. closed/won opportunities in Salesforc ...Read More