In this inaugural article in my new “Product Marketing Team-Ups” series, I’m psyched to start off by discussing the team that has the biggest influence on the first word in the Product Marketing Management (PMM) job title – Product Management (PM)!
I have had the pleasure of working with many extraordinary PMs throughout my career, and their partnership and support were always crucial to my own growth and development as a product marketer. In this post, I’m going to summarize many of the key areas of collaboration between PMMs and PMs, and also provide some recommendations for product marketers on how to build the most productive relationships with their product management counterparts.
Collaboration across the product lifecycle
In my first article for this newsletter, A B2B Product Marketer’s Worldview, I tried to summarize the large list of deliverables for which a product marketing team is responsible. I’m going to focus on a subset of those here because so many of those activities can only be effectively accomplished by working hand-in-hand with product management.
Let’s set the foundation.
In the earliest stages of a tech startup, your founders and R&D leaders will be the ones defining the product vision – with everybody working to prove that critical product-market fit exists with early customers. (Note: a product-market fit validates that there’s a viable market for whatever you’re building. A convincing product-market fit leads to investors, which then leads to resources for go-to-market and growth investment!)
During these earlier stages, it’s common for product managers to wear both PM and PMM hats – leading the market research, creating messaging, documentation, and content, and driving product launches. But once a B2B tech vendor is ready to go to market in a real way, product marketing is often one of the first “marketing” roles to be hired. This is also the first opportunity to derail this relationship!
PMM/PM Team-Up: Round 1 – The Room Where It Happens
Product managers rejoice at the arrival of the newly hired product marketers, who will take an extremely large workload off of their plates! But PMs who view these new PMMs as a downstream support resource miss the opportunity to nurture an extremely valuable partnership. If a PM kicks off their engagement with their PMM counterpart after the product roadmap has been finalized or a product is ready to launch, they are choosing not to include the PMM in planning and only rely on them for execution. Being invited by product leaders to participate in roadmap planning workshops and discussions is a critical experience in the development of a product marketer, and PMs should expect to be enlightened with valuable perspectives as well. (Insert overused but still appropriate “Blind men and the elephant” story here).
I was fortunate to have cut my teeth as a product marketer at Informatica, where a very strong relationship between PMs and PMMs existed long before I arrived. In addition to recurring roadmap and strategy planning offsites, the GM of the business that I supported (Shout out Dennis Moore!) would hold weekly meetings with product, product marketing, customer success, and professional services leaders to first discuss customer feedback/support escalations, etc, and then focus on what’s being developed and progress towards the launch as well as GTM plans. The customer-centricity of these conversations has always stuck with me as it was the antithesis of the “if we build it they will come” trap that some product organizations fall into. (And of course, you can’t achieve or sustain product-market fit if you don’t listen to customers). As a PMM trying to position and differentiate these products, it’s amazing to have early alignment on the customer challenges the company is working to solve so early in the product planning process.
This customer-centricity also informs how product marketing can really add value to product management early in the planning process. PMMs should be expected to enrich these conversations by adding additional customer and market insights for the product teams. Examples of contributions should include:
- Market insights: Any validation – or warnings – from media, venture funding, new competitive entries, global macro events, partner activities, and other indications that the product-market fit and potentially the ICP (ideal customer profile) is changing. Just because the product-market fit was determined once, doesn’t mean it’s stable.
- Win/loss/churn/adoption insights: Working closely with sales, CX, and data teams to understand and report on the trends driving customer purchase and post-sale behavior.
- Competitive insights: What’s on their roadmap? Important news or announcements? Why are they winning, losing, and churning? How many competitive incidents do we have, and what are our win rates? What prospects and use cases are not even considering us as an option?
- Industry Analyst and Software Review site insights: What are influential industry analysts (e.g., Gartner, Forrester, IDC) and review sites (e.g., G2, PeerInsights, TrustRadius) saying about you, your competitors, and the market opportunity at large? Do they know who you are? Are they representing you accurately? Are they recommending you to their customers?
- Customer insights: Product marketing – when done right – should have the opportunity to get in front of customers in a wide variety of situations. During events, supporting sales calls, hosting customer webinars, etc. These customer touchpoints should be additive to PM touchpoints and can help validate or question any assumptions.
I’ve also loved collaborating with product leaders on Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) or Product Advisory Councils (PACs). These are events usually run a few times a year where a small group of customers is brought together to provide feedback and guidance to the product teams on how to prioritize potential roadmap items – what’s important, what’s differentiated, and what’s missing. Product managers will typically own the agenda and the goals for these meetings, but product marketing can play a great role in helping to recruit customers, create presentation materials, and even facilitate the meeting itself so the product leaders can be active participants instead of being distracted by timekeeping and note-taking.
PMM/PM Team-Up: Round 2 – Set the Stage
Before building your go-to-market plans for any type of launch, there are two key decisions that product managers and product marketers help to drive: the scope of the launch and whether there will be any pricing or packaging changes as a result of the launch.
- Launch Tiering. One of the first and most critical collaborative processes for any product launch is launch tiering. This is the decision that scopes the relative size and impact of the launch to determine the amount of time, resources, and investment required to go to market across sales, marketing, enablement, support, etc. The product leadership team will define what products, features, or capabilities are being delivered, what they do, and why they matter for customers and the business at large. Product marketing (while soliciting feedback from other x-functional teams) will then help to advise on the level of effort required to prepare and enable the internal organization and “how much noise” to make externally. Launch tiering processes are unique to every tech company, and I’m going to dive deeper into what that looks like in an upcoming article.
- Pricing and Packaging (P&P). I’ve heard a lot of debate across B2B tech on where final ownership and decision-making authority for P&P should live – product management, product marketing, finance, or elsewhere. I’m a strong believer that it doesn’t really matter because to get the pricing right you need every core function involved. The final decision-maker just needs to be someone who has the relevant experience and sufficient time to dedicate to this decision that can literally make or break your business. In my personal experience, the product leader has owned the final signoff on the P&P strategy, but product marketing has been the driver of the analysis and execution. In earlier-stage startups, it’s extremely common (and recommended!) to bring in a consultant specializing in P&P to help. Full-time P&P resources are more common in many later-stage businesses, although it really depends on the complexity of your individual market to determine when bringing this skill in-house makes the most sense. (Shout out to some great pricing strategists that I’ve had the pleasure to work with and learn from Troy Wendt and Ismail Madni!)
PMM/PM Team-Up: Round 3 – Spread The Word
This partnership is a 2-way street. During product strategy and roadmap planning, I encourage PMs to give their PMM partners a seat at the table to provide feedback and share different perspectives. This should be paid back by PMMs when building a GTM strategy for the products. Give your PM partners the ability to ask questions, provide feedback on messaging, make recommendations, and validate alignment on the go-to-market objectives (e.g., new customers, adoption, cross-sell, competitive takeout, etc).
Key activities that PMMs will be leading during this stage include the following. I’m not going into greater detail here since almost every bullet will be getting its own article, so stay tuned!
- Updated product positioning/messaging, including updates to the existing website, pitch decks, datasheets, and brochures
- GTM strategy recommendations for revenue marketing/demand gen teams (e.g., business objectives of launch, target personas, industries, use cases, value propositions)
- Marketing content (e.g., high-value assets for marketing campaigns, customer case studies, creation of promotional/explainer/demo videos)
- Sales and technical enablement (e.g., product overviews, FAQs, updates to competitive battle cards, customer use cases, and outbound scripts for SDR/BDR teams)
- Internal and external launch presentations
- Event presentation content (if the launch will be tied to a hosted event, sponsored event, or webinar)
- Analyst briefings (Check out my article, “Product Marketing and Analyst Relations: A match made in the upper right”)
- Messaging support for any PR or media activities
As mentioned in the launch tiering discussion above, the full extent of GTM activities will be directly correlated with the size and purpose of the launch itself. I highly recommend that all product marketing leaders (or launch management leaders, if roles are distinct) build a comprehensive launch activity checklist – or ‘menu’ tied to the types of activities expected for different-sized launches. The goal isn’t to check every box, but to customize each launch with the most appropriate activities as early as possible. This way, you can engage the right cross-functional stakeholders at the right time so they can best prepare to execute.
I have to say, this was a tough article to write – and especially to keep short. (Spoiler alert after the fact – it’s not short!) There are soooo many areas of critical collaboration between product marketing and product management that I feel I’ve only scratched the surface! But the goal of my newsletter isn’t to write a book, it’s to introduce these ideas and hopefully encourage readers to continue the conversation. So please comment and let me know what important areas of collaboration I missed (I have no doubt there are many!)