Osman Javed

While I'd love to say "You'll know when you need more PMMs!" most reading this will know it's not that easy. The ratio of PMMs to PMs or AEs is typically influenced by: 1. Product complexity: More complex products require additional PMMs to effectively market them 2. GTM motion: Sales-led models require greater focus on sales enablement, whereas PLG models require greater focus on user onboarding, adoption, and campaigns. In my experience PMM scales more closely with PM. * Early-Stage (Series A/B): 1 PMM for every 2 PMs * Mid/Late-Stage (Series C and beyond): 1 PMM for every 3-4 PMs Additional hiring considerations: * Once teams exceed 12-15 AEs, they typically add 1 PMM to support Sales Enablement * In highly competitive markets, PMM teams may hire someone dedicated to competitive intelligence * For companies with Fortune 500 customers, it's common to see a PMM dedicated to analyst relations - or even a dedicated Analyst Relations Manager.

Great question! Measurement for PMM has been a long debated topic and vary greatly company to company, but here's a framework for thinking through it. Key Considerations: 1. PMM should align itself to company objectives. If a company is focused on driving renewals, PMM should be focused on driving renewals. 2. PMM shares ownership of metrics with other teams. For example: 1. Product and PMM share adoption and launch metrics 2. Sales and PMM share revenue and sales efficiency metrics 3. Marketing and PMM share campaign results 3. PMM should revisit its goals and objectives based on company stage/maturity. The earlier the company, the more frequently PMM measurement should be revised. (This might be controversial!) With that said, here are a few examples of leading and lagging indicators, by business objective, which you can use to measure PMM. Use leading indicators to track progress during execution. Use lagging indicators to measure impact on a quarterly basis. * Brand Awareness * Leading Indicators: * Share of voice (mentions compared to others) * Social media engagement (followers, likes, comments) * Website traffic growth * Lagging indicators * Message pull-through (typically done through customer surveys) * Analyst mentions & reports * Conversion rates from site traffic to MQLs * GTM and Sales Performance * Leading Indicators: * # of meetings booked * Time to opportunity * Sales enablement asset utilization * Lagging Indicators: * Revenue growth * Upsell/cross-sell performance * Average deal cycle length * Sales conversion rates * Win rate improvements in competitive deals * Product Launch Success * Leading Indicators: * Launch announcement engagement rate (e.g., email click through, demo video views) * % of users who engage w/ new feature within 30 days * Time to "aha moment" (for PLG co's) * Lagging Indicators * Demo requests (SLG) / product sign ups (PLG) * Feature adoption after 1 quarter * Campaign & Marketing Performance * Leading Indicators: * Campaign engagement rate (e.g., email click through, demo video views, etc.) * Web traffic growth * # of MQLs after launch * Lagging Indicators * MQL-SQL conversion rate * SQL-opportunity conversion rate * Campaign cost vs. attributed revenue Don't get lost in measurement - sometimes surveying people can be more telling! * Set up rules in Gong calls to see if your sales team is using key messaging and if it's resonating * Certify or test the sales team on your messaging * Get feedback from sales and product teams * Interview customers to get direct customer feedback * Ask your Customer Advisory Boards (CAB)

What are some surprising ways that candidates have stood out to you in PMM interviews? What are your biggest watchouts? PMMs are notoriously difficult to hire. The best PMMs I've worked with are * Balance left and right brain * Are equally adept at fast thinking and slow thinking * Can maintain the 10,000' view while understanding the details at 1,000' It’s important to identify the 1-3 skills that will be most important for your company and domain. Then look for experiences that suggest they’ll excel in those domains. A few examples: * Large enterprise sales force - Here, being able to enable and hold court with a large sales team is critical. Does the candidate have leadership experience (in PMM or outside of work)? One PMM I worked with organized a 1,000 guest annual fundraiser for a non-profit they were involved with. Their ability to corral multiple stakeholders, drive sponsorships, and drive to a productive event suggested they’d be great at enablement. * Technical products - Here, having the hunger to dig into technical details is key. Does the candidate have a personal interest in a complex domain. Perhaps they’re savvy investors in their personal life. Perhaps they’ve built demos or software in the past. In one interview, a candidate came having used our product with dozens of recommendations for how we can improve the product and our marketing. Ultimately, the things I look for: * Grit: Have they demonstrated resilience in high-stakes environments and persistence in the face of volatility? * Leadership: Can they influence peers and leaders across Product, Sales, Marketing, and e-staff? * Persistence: Can they operate in highly ambiguous and variable environments. This is especially important in the early stages. * Domain/Persona: Do they have past experience with your domain/persona? Not necessary but helps accelerate their path to becoming opinionated. * Tenure: Have they been able to build tenure and have impact in their past roles * Pace: Can they hustle in a fast paced environment? * Portfolio: Can they produce a portfolio of high-quality work? * Stage Experience: Have they operated at your stage of company before? * Revenue: Have they operated at the revenue target you are looking to reach in the next 12 -18 months. Be mindful of planning for the future and not today. Candidates should pull your business forward. * GTM Motion: This one is critical, but have they worked with your GTM motion before (PLG vs. SLG)

Great question. In the early days, focus is key, so be wary of taking on too much in PMM. With that said, here's how to think about scaling. Nail the Basics Set the Foundation: First and foremost, you want to ensure your team is united around a compelling strategic narrative, brand messaging, and core brand pillars. It's crucial to validate your product market fit, as many companies are still in the discovery phase at this stage. Aligning on product messaging, product pillars, differentiators, and value propositions is critical. Evangelize Your Core Message: Once you've built your foundation, you’ll want to evangelize your message through core content like your sales deck, one-pagers, and your website. Enabling your organization on this content is critical. Next, it’s important to bring your message to life through customer proof points. Case studies, quotes, ROI metrics, and more are critical to buildling trust with your audience. In the early days, this can be tough to gather, but the ROI on these efforts is way greater than any internal content you create. In the past, we’ve formed tiger teams whose sole focus is to go out and get early customers and partners who will sing our praises. Get creative with how you incent them! Show Them You Know Them. Then Give Them a Framework! Everyone loves a good framework! Start by showing your audience you know them. Develop a deep understanding for their status quo. Understand their tools, their workflows, their goals, their challenges. From here, provide a framework for how they can go from point A to point B. Assets like customer maturity models, operating frameworks, or decision frameworks are great ways to help your customers before they ever purchase your product. Be sure to embed your product capabilities into this framework to show them how you can help them advance faster. Scale Up Inspect the Data, Validate Your Hypotheses Once you’ve nailed the basics, it’s time to scale. PMM teams typically scale their strategies in a few ways: * Double down on core messaging and positioning * Persona marketing * Industry or vertical marketing * Solution marketing Pursuing any of these strategies is quite labor intensive, so you want to make sure you take time to process the data. Look at customer data in your CRM, look at product usage data, talk to leadership, product, and sales, look at competitors and market trends. The goal here is to identify what’s working today and match that with where you think your business is going. It’s really easy for PMM to scale in a silo and miss the mark. Once you’ve aligned on one of the above strategies, start with a small bill of materials (e.g., datasheet, webinar, blog, sales enablement) and see whether it resonates. If it does, double down! If it doesn’t try a different tact. More often than not, at Series A, your best bet is focusing on your Core Message. Wait until Series B (or beyond) to test more segmented strategies. One More Thing You should start to layer in things like competitive intel, win/loss analyses, analyst briefings (if applicable), and in-app messaging along the way. If you’re a team of one, start with the most impactful activity. Again, focus is key and be mindful not to bite off more than you can chew!

Great question, here are 3 potholes to AVOID when building 1. Not becoming the undisputed expert on your product, market, and audience: * Great PMM teams form strong opinions through rigorous research across market, product, and competition * Focus on three areas: market/persona understanding, competitive intelligence, and deep product knowledge * My favorite research methods: win/loss analysis, paid expert interviews, Gong calls, customer interviews, using competitor’s products, and podcasts 2. Not embedding with Product Management early enough * PMM should join product management discussions early in the product development lifecycle. This ensures PMM can: * Effectively scope and plan launches with full context * Develop and review differentiated positioning before go-to-market * Have time to conduct market and competitor research and course-correct if differentiation isn't strong enough * And in many cases, influence the product direction based on market insights 3. Not getting radical alignment on your messaging house * In the early days of building PMM, it's easy for PMM to think the foundational messaging is complete and understood by the company. More often than not, this is not the case. * It takes more discussions, collateral, and enablement sessions than you'd think making sure everyone, from exec leadership to ICs are fully enabled and aligned on your brand and product messaging. * It's easy to move quickly and skip this step, but it is crucial you spend enough time evangelizing the messaging before calling it done. * Certification programs go a long way to ensuring this is done well.