Sonia Moaiery

I’ll outline where I see PM and PMM overlap and diverge, and what signals to look out for to assess the better fit for you. I had a chance to test out a PM role in the past and was a CPG Brand Manager which is similar to a PM. PM/PMM Overlap. They both: * Have the end goal of solving a customer/end user problem. This requires a deep understanding of who the customer is, their needs and the value they seek. * Work cross-functionally to get x-func teams bought into a vision, solutions to a customers' problem and plans for how to get customers adopting and using new products and features. * Require strong skills in distilling insights, storytelling and influencing a complex set of cross functional stakeholders. Both are often influencing people who don’t directly report to them. * Make trade offs between the following things: 1) building for prospects vs. existing customers 2) building new innovative features vs. optimizing existing features 3) when to announce vs. when to make available etc. PM/PMM Differences: * PMMs have the challenging job of translating the solution and value the PM/Eng teams are building into a compelling narrative for prospects and existing customers and what channels to activate that narrative in. PMs should certainly input into how we tell the story, but that is not their primary role. It's good for a PM to be aware of the 'marketing plan' for a new product or feature, but they're not deeply involved in the mechanics of the marketing plan the way the PMM isn't deeply involved in the technical mechanics of the product. * The main cross functional stakeholders they serve. PM works primarily with Engineering, Product Design and UX research, designing and building a solution and to deliver a coherent product roadmap. They’re often working with Engineering in tools like Jira and design in tools like Figma, to determine how to actually solve the customer's problem via the product. Their deliverables include product requirements, technical plans, JIRA product stories/tickets and roadmap rationales. * PMM works primarily with Marketing, Sales and Enablement to build a go to market strategy. They’re often working with Marketing in tools like Asana/Figma to track customer-facing creative projects, collateral and new landing pages, or in Google Slides coordinating training for sales, launch plans and marketing collateral. Deliverables include launch/adoption strategies, pitch decks, buyer insights / personas and market analyses. * PMMs tend to be more involved in the nuts and bolts of pricing and packaging, and may even own it entirely at some companies. Although if you’re at a PLG company, “growth PMs” may be more commercially-minded and responsible for driving acquisition where pricing and packaging are a big component. * PMMs are expected to have more of a pulse and eye on what’s happening in the market landscape, industry, competitors and buyer insights. They should be seen as the customer expert especially as relates to how to reach and engage them. PMs will benefit from a PMM who does this, but if they don't have a PMM counterpart, they'll often have to do it themselves and it can fall to the wayside. * PMs more often have to make hard trade off decisions around optimizing and maintaining existing feature/product challenges/bugs/shortcomings or building new innovative features. They are often translating the overall company strategy to their specific domain or area to determine where to invest. PMMs certainly input here but it is not their primary role. * PMs have to figure out where to start. They might have a lofty vision and roadmap but that has to be broken down into smaller pieces and parts to get to the bigger end goal. You have to be skilled at working with engineering to think about sequencing, prioritization and iterating.

It really depends on a few factors: time, resources and who the competitive research helps. I would answer these questions to help you gauge how deep you go. There are entire PMMs dedicated to competitive research and you may not have that type of time/resource so you need to determine the level of effort you put into this. * Time - is this an extremely urgent question that needs to be answered in the next week, three weeks, 6 weeks, 12 weeks? * Resource- do you have a budget, if so, how much is it? Can I do this myself or do I need an agency because it has to be run across several geos, segments etc. Or, do I need any other team's support to do it? Is desk research enough? * Who this research helps - Who is going to be using and consuming the research I do? Is it the sales team? Product team? Executive team? If it’s an executive team, it may need a higher burden of proof because it may be in service of really company-wide decisions. Once you’ve determine that there are various tactics you can explore but here’s a few tactics for common situations I’ve seen: * The sales team needs training on a new competitor on the scene and battlecards - This can be an urgent need and requires little budget. I would start to dig into a competitor's recent investor decks, webinars, YouTube channel, blog posts, new releases/changelog, messaging, set a google alert for them or use a tool like Crayon/Klue to track them. I’d also set a framework for your competitive set (who are top competitors, secondary competitors and up and coming) to determine how comprehensive the battle card needs to be. * You need a full tear down for execs / marketing take down campaign- You can do all of the above + collaborate with any internal research or competitor-focused teams, look into things like what roles/jobs they’re hiring, what conferences they’ve spoken at, what their executives are saying in press interviews / on LinkedIn, use a free log-in to their product or their customer community, identify customers who switched from a competitor and interview them! * Your product team needs to know a specific part of the product suite and what problems they’re solving in a certain space - A competitor help center / knowledge base often is a gold mine for how their product works and the technical nature of it that’s really helpful to product teams. Help docs can reveal a lot! Big announcement and launch events, webinars and customer newsletters are helpful ways to see what products are most important to a competitor. * Your sales team needs to know how to deposition your biggest competitor - Go really deep on their messaging and dig into win/loss data or G2 reviews to really zero in on where you win vs. this customer and where they win. Also interviewing customers who switched to you from a competitor helps here too.

Like any good working relationship, you have to take the time to build trust. Here’s a few things I do to build trust and position myself as a strategic partner to PM. * Meet regularly and come with a prepared agenda. It doesn’t necessarily have to be weekly but know how you want to use the time and deliver value to them as well. This might include asking them to walk through the latest roadmap rationale and asking them questions around what challenges they’re running into with testing, adoption and see if there’s an area where you can help them. Whether it's supporting some sales enablement, or connecting them with the product education team, help be a bridge to other teams. * Bring them value - bring insights from marketing that PMs don't typically get access to. Product often doesn’t get deep insight into how your website converts leads, the customer purchase journey, brand perceptions, marketing campaigns - show them how you’re showcasing their product in marketing and what learnings they may take from marketing's latest work. For example, "we know prospects spend 3X time on our pricing page than any other page in our site. Maybe we should consider surfacing pricing on that new product in our app to give customers the information they want" * Pull them into marketing meetings (if express interest in it) where you think their voice is of value. Show them that you understand their goals, what they’re working on and that you value their voice too. PMs want to know the products they're shipping are in good hands, so help them understand the marketing process. * If you have a PMM charter / mission - walk them through it. Help them understand what PMM does and doesn’t do. If it’s not well defined at your company or you’re the only PMM, I urge you to do this.

It depends on the company and if you have a formal research function or not! I've done everything from recruit participants, write discussion guides, field surveys, moderate research, synthesize insights. Or, I've given a researcher objectives and key questions and then sat in on a few interviews here and there. I think every PMM should have the experience of running their own research at some point - it keeps you close to the customer, helps you empathize with them and develop relationships with strategic customers (like if you run a CAB). But, as an org grows, you won't always have the bandwdith to do so. So, you have to find more scalable ways of staying close to the customer via Gong calls or collaborating closely with Research teams to make it easy for you to listen in on research or calls if you want. It can be hard to prioritize in the day to day but will make you a stronger product marketer and able to add more value to your product, marketing and sales counterparts.

I think it’s helpful to have a customer advisory board - this is a select group of 5-10 customers who you meet with every 3-6 months to talk about big strategy topics like - company strategy, product roadmap and problems you can solve for them. This high-touch tactic generally requires a lot of prep / work but the relationships you build will pay off as these are likely the customers that will participate in future betas and other studies. A few other tactics outside of leveraging your CAB: * Incentives can help - they don’t necessarily have to be a cash incentive or gift card. In the past, I’ve offered, free access to a new product for a limited time, discounts on our product or higher-tier product, or free add-on implementation services. * Networking oppys- When I’ve run focus groups, a lot of participants will join because they’re curious what their peers in other companies are doing. For example, when we launched D&I ratings at Glassdoor, I hosted a small focus group roundtable for CHROs and Heads of D&I at various companies to get feedback on how we should approach a new D&I rating. But we also reserved the last 30 minutes of the focus group for them to talk to each other to learn what new D&I strategies they were running. They loved learning from each other and commiserating about the challenges they were facing. I believe two of the companies started partnering together on their approaches to salary transparency after this and were grateful to Glassdoor for facilitating the connection! * Invites from an exec/CEO- When I have recruited hard-to-reach Chief Executives, we had our CEO/CMO/CTO be the one to send out invites to ask them to join - these messages always got a higher response rate * Sign ups in product - In your product, include a self-serve option for customers to sign up to “participate in future research” or be part of the Customer Advisory Board. Make it easy for them to sign up for these things!

It really depends on the stage/GTM motion your company is in. You might want to focus on the user if you are really focused on product-led-growth (PLG) and reaching that point of 'activation' - aka the aha moment when a new user gets the value of your product and why they need it. If you have no idea what I'm talking about I'd suggest exploring this article/site from the product-led collective- https://www.productled.org/foundations/product-led-growth-metrics. Other scenarios where you may want to focus on the user is if you're seeing typical product usage metrics declining (DAU, WAU, MAU, time spent, L21+/28 - percent of users are active more than 20 days of the month) Prioritzing research with buyers may be more helpful if sales if you're exploring a new sales/GTM motion like moving up market to enterprise, or down market to self serve, targeting new buyers outside of your core buyer, landing/expanding, cross-sell etc. It also can make sense to do research almost exclusively with buyers but also sprinkle in some power users who know your product really well and are a big champion of yours. 

I always start with positioning ideas as hypotheses (a fancy term for your hunches). This approach is helpful to show stakeholders that you’re open to their input/feedback, and potentially being wrong. When you have hypotheses, you come to the conversation saying “here’s something I have a hunch about, but I don’t have enough data yet to tell me this is a good idea or the right thing, I’d love to hear your thoughts or help me poke holes in this” I think about building consensus in three stages to bring stakeholders along the journey with you so none of your ideas feel like a surprise by the time you get to the last stage: 1. Shopping around your idea / planting the seed - These plant-the-seed conversations are most effective 1:1, it’s a safe space to throw around hypotheses, pressure tests and debate with your stakeholder. This is your chance to understand their goals, potential push back they’d have and even potentially get access to systems or data that help you prove/disprove your idea. Before you have this conversation, try to understand more about this person's function, their goals, team vision etc. Use all of the insights from these conversations to refine your hypotheses and get really sharp on potential impact you can create and the risks since your data is limited. 2. Building a draft proposal or case - Write up a draft of your proposal - key word being draft. It’s best if you can follow up on those 1:1 on conversations with “hey stakeholder, I wrote a work in process proposal for that idea we talked about and I sharpened it up after talking to other colleagues too, I’m following up with it here to get your thoughts” The key is to ask for their input to progress to the next stage of Consensus Building. 3. Consensus building - this isn’t necessarily one meeting and you’re done. You may have to jump back and forth between #2#2#2#2 and #3#3#3#3 a bit. This might look like bringing together a group of stakeholders to review a more final proposal, asynchronous feedback etc. By the time you get to this stage, the hypothesis and idea isn’t new to stakeholders and you’re aware of any potential challenges your stakeholders will have. Lastly, data doesn’t always have to be charts and graphs from big surveys you fielded or hundreds of interviews. There is so much customer voice lurking around your org -whether it’s NPS data, sales feedback, anecdotal stories from customers, win/loss feedback, industry reports and trends, dashboards on user analytics/behavior. There’s a lot you can unearth with what you already have but be careful to not only cherry pick only things that support your idea, but take advantage of the existing data that might be siloed across teams in your org.

Understanding the market landscape and how it breaks down is a good first step. For example, within the broader category of "customer engagement" there are sub categories like marketing and advertising tech, support/enagement channels, call analytics and contact centers and CRM. And then there are even more categories or sub jobs under each (read about the jobs to be done framework if you havent). To help create this 'market map' you can look to industry analysts or the Forrester / Gartner Magic Quadrants but I encourage you to not take these as boilerplate as it's really individual to your company and the way you uniquely view the world. Once you have the market map, I would identify where you play today and where there are potentially underserved markets. Are there few competitors, sub-jobs not well served, markets that would add value to your current offering, it could even be certain markets in certain geos. I would use this market map to connect with other teams likely already thinking about these questions like bizops and Product. The market map alone can be a good conversation starter. Ask questions like which of these areas do you think is underserved, where do you think our company is well positioned to play, how might we differentiate in these areas. I would then work with your bizops teams to size the TAM of your top list of 4-5 new markets and make some assumptions about how much share/revenue you could make in the next 2-5 years.

I think there’s a high degree of overlap. The two functions may cut metrics differently or over different time horizons but for the most part many metrics are shared. A few examples that are top of mind: * Acquisition / Conversion / Activation - if you’re at a self serve or PLG company, Growth PMs might be really focused on activation and getting customers to the ‘a-ha’ value moment. Whereas PMMs, may be focused on acquisition specifically tied to campaigns or a specific buyer persona (i.e. are we converting the right leads). * Win Rates - PMs will generaly know about win/losswfor their specific domain. For example, “we lose a lot/some/few deals due to XYZ feature/product gap.” Whereas PMMs tend to be closer to all the win/loss reasons and what those look like overall. * Adoption/Usage - PMMs might be looking more at big adoption pushes after a campaign or launch event whereas a PM is looking over a longer period of time. * Some KPIs/metrics that are specific to PMM : Sales Collateral Usage (what Sales is actually using in pitches or outbound outreach), Marketing Channel Performance (how effective demo videos on a Landing Page are vs. email vs. in-app messages).

At one point pricing and packaging sat in the PMM team at Intercom but as pricing and packaging became more complex for us with many, many plans, we actually now have a dedicated pricing and packaging team that PMM works closely with when it comes to new product releases to determine if they fit within existing plans or need to be an add-on, and which plans access given features. The P&P team tends to own P&P overall and for much bigger product releases, and for smaller tier 2/3 releases, PMM will still drive for those. Product will have input into these conversations but they're not the final decision makers. We have a "pricing steering committe" the approves all big pricing changes and this includes members of our exec team.