Natalie Louie

Research and get smart on your positioning, message, personas, competitors, customer journey, ICP (ideal customer profile), market sizing with TAM (total addressable market), SAM (serviceable available market), SOM (serviceable obtainable market). Know your customers, the pain point you are solving and have an opinion backed by the data you’ve researched. My PMM 100 day plan here has a comprehensive list of areas you should be researching. Get alliance with the Product and Marketing org first. You are a Product Marketer – in your title you are equal parts both, regardless of which group yo...

1. Positioning 2. Messaging 3. Personas / Competitors Always focus on the top 2 first, as this will impact how everyone talks and writes about your company – which ultimately brings in users and wallet share. Good templates for positioning and messaging are here. And these are different, PMMs control positioning through our messaing. Positioning creates an image of our product in the mind of customers. Messaging uses words that help customer understand our value, brand promise and desire for our product.  Then dive deep into your personas and competitors -- use this data to iterate on ...

Understand the needs each leader has as they will be different from your CEO to your CFO, CRO, CMO (personas), etc...and mental map what value you can bring through your playbooks, framework and content (customery journey). You are bascially running your own integrated marketing campaign and you are the product. Launch yourself with the right data and strategy that you would want for a successful product launch.  Build relationships and find your champion in each of their orgs. I talk more about managing different stakeholders here.    When you present your ideas, make sure you aren't goi...

Hire contractors to fill in gaps as they pop up and if they are rockstars and you find yourself with open head count, convert them to full time. Know what your weaknesses are and hire PMMs who balance those. Hire PMMs with different superpowers – you want a well rounded team. PMM teams are in constant reorg pending what our marketing, product or sales teams are doing, given we support them all. You will want PMMs with different skill sets to be able to dive in quickly when needed. Spend time developing your PMM’s into full stack ones who can then hire and train junior ones. If you know y...

Being a launch project manager is part of the job – PMMs own product launches, the creation, strategy and management of it. Being a strong copywriter for releases is also part of the job. We write a lot of content or partner with writers and clean up their content so we can use these for our product launches. If you don’t like writing, then being a PMM may not be for you, it’s a core skill set and PMM leaders pass on candidates that tell us they don't like to write. Both these skills are needed in a full stack PMM. If you are asking how to be more strategic and be seen as more strategic,...

FKO, SKO, RKO, AKO to ZKO, put whatever letter in front – they are all company kickoffs. Sales teams are now being called Revenue teams –- I've also seen marketing departments rolling up into a larger Revenue org. Take the stakeholders going (personas) and map their typical and ideal work flow (customer journey). What information, resources and content do they need to be successful at their job? Your answer is your RKO Schedule. Not sure? Talk to them and interview the most successful ones in each department. How do you replicate them? Take the data and plan out your sessions around what t...

Remind them that in your title 'product' is first, you are a Product Marketer. You see yourself as part of their org and are an active participant in all their meetings. You are team members who always need to be aligned. Initially you rely on them for KT (knowledge transfer) of the product roadmap so you can help with GTM activities and launch the product. But over time, you are talking to customers and you need to collect feedback and bring it back to PM’s to help influence the roadmap. A circular relationship is the goal.  You also help improve the roadmap by always asking why they are ...

You can switch from right brain to left brain activities and fire both at the same time. You have to be analytical and strategic, you like art and science, numbers and words. You have to be able to go 1 level deeper than marketers to understand the technology, make sense of it then explain it in a clear manner that is well positioned for your customer’s pain. You are a storyteller. Example: 1. You can go deep in research and analysis to create charts and define your TAM, SAM, ICP, persona and competitors. Then you can take the data, glean insights and turn it into an actionable p...

I start with my phases of success for a PMM in my first 100 days here. Through this process I create my priorities and ensure I have executive alignment on them. I always get feedback from my leadership team. I find that people often want the same thing but are saying it differently – identify this when it happens to bring alignment back on your priorities. Before any cross-functional meeting to get alignment or approval, make sure you’ve already shown your ideas to one or more people to get their advanced feedback and buyin. Some people, especially leaders have other context you don’t hav...

Map and tie yourself to the company level OKRs, mirror the ones in marketing and product or create and define your own KR’s if they don’t exist. Every Marketing Dept has 2 focuses: 1. Customer: # of signups, downloads, purchases, engagement, interactions, industries/verticals, you define the usage metric, etc… 2. Revenue: goals for new, renewal, upsell, expansion, you define the type of revenue etc… Product can also own similar metrics as marketing. They also care about shipping product, so you can show your ROI by launching products and tracking the marketing metrics and engag...