Robin Pam

There’s no one typical product marketing career path. Product marketers are often utility players, and get into product marketing from a wide range of backgrounds like content, campaigns, sales engineering or enablement, or even product. Once you’re in a product marketing role, you can expect to put in your time as an individual contributor for several years. The next step might be to make the leap to leading a team of product marketers, then a broader team of marketers.  Many VPs of Marketing a ...Read More

In an enterprise B2B business, you’ll often be working closely with customer success and product management on driving adoption post-launch. Marketing can provide air cover in the form of email nurture programs, relevant content, regular product update communications, and internal trainings. But often customer success and product will need to take the lead in getting customers to successful usage of the product.    The answer to the second part of your question depends on the business model, num ...Read More

Apple is the gold standard in my book. They have a strong point of view and aesthetic, and every product has a story, launch, and campaign behind it. Square has emulated this model as well, and their website shines as a result.   In the SaaS category, Zendesk and Mailchimp are some of my favorite inspirations, and of course Salesforce. Zendesk has been very successful at leading a broader category of cloud customer service, and the product pages on their website are always smart and relevant. Ma ...Read More

As a product marketer, you’re often working across a business line, and a result you’re often responsible, on your own, for very few of the metrics that indicate the health of the business. That doesn’t mean you can’t track and influence them, though. In an early stage product or company, creating a complete picture of the business, from leads to pipeline to revenue, usage and retention, can be a way to create a lot of value as a PMM. Once you have set up this reporting, you can then help identi ...Read More

Become an expert in a data set that's close to revenue. Knowing as much as you can about how market interest turns into revenue (i.e. your entire marketing & sales funnel) is the easiest way to make yourself indispensible to both product and company strategy.  When you know more than anyone else in the company about how leads turn into pipeline turn into closed business for your product line or area of ownership, product will start to seek you out for your insights.  Also, be a good editor. ...Read More

Your list seems like a solid place to start. I'd categorize tools into a few areas: Collaboration and communication: Writing and presenting is a huge part of the PMM role, so Google Drive and Powerpoint are key Collaboration/planning: JIRA, Trello, Airtable, Asana, or any other tool (even Google Sheets!) for sharing priorities is the backbone of planning Design collaboration: InvisionApp (for revving on design feedback), LucidPress (for creating scalable collateral systems), Creative Suite (for ...Read More

Your product team is not unique! I've never heard of a product team that sticks to deadlines exactly. The best lesson I've learned on how to mitigate this in enterprise software is that you can launch a product many times.  There are different ways to do this: pre-announce at your conference with a preview/waiting list, beta launch, general availability launch, internal re-launch with your sales team with new training and collateral, momentum launch with PR on usage and metrics...it goes on. If ...Read More

In enterprise software, you can usually let the product and engineering team push new features when they are ready, as long as sales training is coming soon. Adoption of new features tends to be slower in enterprise software, particularly if using those new features depends on getting through a sales cycle. So, this is another area where it's ok to let go of a little control, and focus on the things you can control as a product marketer.  The other thing to note here is that feature flags (somet ...Read More