Rayleen Hsu

In my opinion, competitive intelligence is one of the most impactful ways product marketing can help inform product roadmaps and ensure your company has a differentiated and unique offering in the market. By digging into what competitors exist, what their value props are, what feature sets they offer, how much they charge, etc. competitive intelligence can become a critical resource for informing what to build, why to build it, who you're building for and how to message it. Plus, doing competiti ...Read More

I love that product marketing sits at the intersection of Product and Marketing and that we're able to help inform the product roadmap in a meaningful way by bringing consumer insights to the table. Our ability to influence the product roadmap and to really understand the why behind product development enables us to develop customer-centric marketing plans that bring products to life and really resonate with consumers. It's also incredibly fulfilling to be part of the process from start to finis ...Read More

Regular check-ins with your product partners is a critical part of being an effective product marketer. If you don't know what big new initiatives are top of mind, when new products are launching, what optimizations the Product team is working on, you'll have a really hard time partnering with them to help inform the product roadmap, properly preparing for GTM and knowing what marketing campaigns and messages to prioritize. When thinking about cadence and types of check-ins with Product, I would ...Read More

To embed PMM into product teams, PMM should strive to do the following: Build strong relationships with product partners by ensuring they know your objectives are aligned and demonstrating value add from the get-go. If you are not top of mind for your product partners, you won't get a seat at the table. So, set up those regular touchbases with your product partners, proactively bring data and customer insights to the table and raise your hand to support the team whenever you can.  Act like an eq ...Read More

I like to think about a dedicated customer research team or a hired 3rd party researcher as a huge boost to your research superpowers! In my experience, even when working at large companies with significant resources, there is always enough work to go around and having more resources and more support is always a win. The main things to consider when dividing and conquering with other research partners are the following: Coordination across the different research teams on what key research needs ...Read More

There is a tremendous amount of research that you can get done with limited budget, it just requires taking initiative, being scrappy and prioritizing what research is going to be the most useful and insightful for your team. Aside from finding the time and prioritizing amongst all the other things on your plate, there are a number of ways you can do robust research to help inform product strategy and roadmap. For example: Competitive intelligence and market research, especially for consumer fac ...Read More

Product Marketing sits at the intersection of many cross-functional teams, especially when it comes to go-to-market and marketing campaign planning. This means that PMM has the benefit of collaboration across many teams but it also means that PMM is dependent on a lot of cross-functional partners in order to actually get things done. That said, great project management and communication is key to managing timelines with your cross-functional partners to drive towards successful outcomes. What I' ...Read More

This is definitely a tough one. It can definitely be hard to break through to a product team who is either unaccustomed to the PMM role or who is just not interested in PMM feedback. But I'll start by saying hopefully PMM exists at the company in the first place because someone with influence, someone in leadership, understands and believes in the value PMM brings to the table so there's always hope that PMM can break through those silos. That said here are a few ways I would try to help product ...Read More

Moving up the ladder from an IC or manager role into a director role is typically dependent on a few factors, some of which individual PMMs are very much in control of, some of which they are not unfortunately. At a high level, some of the requirements needed to progress include the following: Clearly defining your team's purpose and strategy and clearly articulating how your strategy aligns with the overarching company objectives. I will start by saying I am fully in the camp that the words 'st ...Read More

Whether you are an experienced or aspiring product marketer, these are the qualities I look for in product marketing hires:  Customer obsessed. Product marketing is the voice of the customer and a successful product marketer is one that is customer obsessed and keeps the consumer at the core of all that they do. Product marketing's role is to help inform the product roadmap and market new products and features to consumers. If we don't have a deep understanding of who our customers are and what ...Read More