Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann

We just went through this exercise at Momentive, focusing specifically on building buyer persona "packs" – a collection of materials to help our broader organization understand our target personas. Depending on your project timeline, you'll likely want to conduct a blend of primary and secondary research as well as both quantitative and qualitative research. Quantitative research (industry reports, surveys, etc) can provide great stats, but qualitative research (interviews, recorded calls) is wh ...Read More

We JUST revamped our GTM framework & process at SurveyMonkey and you're in luck - I drove this process at the company & am coming off the project pretty fresh. Ultimately, product marketing should own the go-to-market launch framework and process. So you or someone on your team should be a driver, with several cross-functional partners consulted. We got drafts in front of product leadership, marketing leadership, sales enablement (whole team in our case), sales & success leadership, ...Read More

It's been a while since we've had an integrated marketing function at SurveyMonkey, but here's how I'd envision this working: Product marketing owns: - Buyer persona research, development, and enablement - Product messaging/positioning - Go-to-market strategy (e.g. by persona, industry) - Product/feature launches - Bottom-of-the-funnel product content/collateral - Competitive intelligence - Analyst relations Customer marketing owns: - Customer advocacy: customer stories, customer participation i ...Read More

Honestly, just ask them for what you need! It will make them better PMs to understand what’s involved/required for successful product marketing. There are certain things, like what problem(s) the feature solves for the customer or why our way is better than the competition is simple good product management, not just fundamentals for product marketing. If your team consistently calls this out as a problem, PMM and PM leadership can get involved in co-outlining a product launch brief— what’s inclu ...Read More

For almost every feature launch, you have to evaluate the amount of market- and customer-facing activities it makes sense to do. For features that don't warrant a market launch (i.e. they aren't a differentiator, don't support a strategic partnership, or open up opportunities for new business) but DO warrant customer communication and customer-facing team readiness, it's still important to have launch tiers. Is this something that adds value & could enable up-sell or upgrades? Is it a major ...Read More

As part of our GTM launch framework & process roll out, we created a GTM strategy & execution plan templates that correspond with different market launch & customer impact tiers. If you nail the GTM strategy, the plan will fall into place if you have the foundational framework. Here are some of the things that make up a highly effective GTM strategy & plan. You can pretty much tackle each of these in order, starting with aligning on the process goals & timeline, then working ...Read More

Managing timelines is a fundamental part of cross-functional project management. For any project to be a success, everyone needs to know who is doing what and by when. Here are some tips for sticking to your timelines. Start with your final launch date and work backwards. Make sure that launch date is clearly and frequently stated so everyone know what they’re marching towards. It helps when this is immovable (like a public event date). Know the dependencies. When are final assets due? What’s th ...Read More

Frankly? Don't. :-| Messaging doesn't exist in a vacuum, and at the very least you'll want to do some light research to gut check against existing messaging (if launching a new feature that would alter how you currently talk about your product) and to understand how messaging stacks up against competitors. If I am really time-strapped, I'll visit competitor websites to see how they talk about a comparable product/feature. Both to see if there is anything consistent across competitors (industry l ...Read More

Category creation (or making the decision to join an existing category) should be a joint effort between brand and product marketing leadership (and sometimes comms leadership), with an ultimate approver in the C-suite, either the CMO or CEO.  Here are some of the things that brand and product marketing would own as part of the category evaluation process: Product Marketing: - Competitive intelligence: how are competitors referring to themselves? - Research/advice from industry analysts. Where d ...Read More

One of the MOST critical parts of onboarding (honestly for any employee, new to the company or even internal promotion) is establishing relationships quickly. When I bring on a new hire, one the the main sections of their onboarding plan is booking 1:1 time with people to do an informal meet & greet in the first 30-60 days. I prepare a list of key partners they’ll work with more frequently (like product, marketing, and sales partners) plus peripheral partners they may work with less frequent ...Read More