Product marketing can be a difficult role to fill. Knowing what their role within an org will be, what skills they should have, and what they will do, and how they will be measured are critical. This post will walk you through where to start.
Product marketing (PMM) may be one of the most complex roles to hire for, especially since it’s also very widely misunderstood. This post will cover the following:
Read on below!
What are the responsibilities of a product marketer?
A lot of what a PMM will do depends on what stage your business is in. For earlier stage businesses, PMM may focus on foundational work for the business. There’s likely only “one” product – which is the entire business as a single platform. Otherwise, they will manage the go-to-market (GTM) strategy for your product or products. Often times you will assign a PMM to a sole product if it’s large enough to run a big process.
This person will be the linchpin between Marketing, Product Management (PM), and Sales. Their time will be split between building foundations for the products (typically known as “pre-launch” if it’s not live yet) and shepherding the products’ success once it is post launch. A PMM’s role often goes beyond just product in many cases – especially in earlier stage start-ups when the “entire business” is a product. The type of work they will do is split into three categories:
Foundational work includes:
If you’re in an early stage business and need foundational work done (such as personas and early messaging), a PMM often steps into this role. Below I’ll explain more on the best marketing hires for early stage businesses. Foundational work may include:
- Partner with finance, product, and sales on commercialization strategies (such as revenue impact and pricing)
- Partner with product management & engineering to influence the product roadmap (Note: this must happen continuously)
- Support in building company messaging, and incorporating messaging into marketing materials (website, collateral, sales pitch, etc)
- Building and maintaining personas (often supported by the marketing leader and a demand gen marketer)
- Building segmentation strategy
- Supporting the personas with researching and building buyer’s journeys
- Building and maintaining a use case library and begin to think about future case studies and where & how to get them
- Building and supporting a sales enablement program (generally early stage businesses do not have a sales enablement team at this point)
- Partnering with sales to develop a pitch deck
- Developing competitive research and battle cards
- Developing objection handling tools
- Own product education internally & externally
Product pre-launch work includes:
Most PMMs will operate between the following two stages – product pre- and post-launch, with most of the work heavily in pre-launch (as it’s the planning stage). They will:
- Partner amongst product, sales, and marketing to build a GTM strategy for product launches
- Manage GTM strategy to keep the plan on track (can be in partner with PM)
- Build foundational positioning, value prop, messaging
- Implement customer research
- Partner with sales to determine revenue impact and how to measure success (then work with the marketing team to ensure it’s incorporated into forecasting)
- Build related collateral needed – partner with product (and technical writers) to ensure documentation is clear and concise; partner with sales to determine what is needed to sell, and is incorporated seamlessly
- Partner with demand gen to build campaigns (or activations) to support driving sales, up-sell/cross-sell, or adoption.
- Build sales and client success (CS) enablement materials
- Provides initial training to functions and wider organization on product (generally in tandem with PM)
Product post-launch work includes:
Product post-launch work tends to be focused on driving value out of the product. A PMM will have to be data driven and very much on top of monitoring demand (and working closely with a demand gen team) to ensure their vision is executed.
- Implement demand gen campaigns to drive sales, up-sell/cross-sell, or adoption
- Create thought leadership supporting the launched product/features
- Build case studies
- Partner with sales to do win/loss analysis for sales
- Partner with CS to interview clients on success metrics
- Measure & monitor product success (and report back on it)
Who should you hire as a product marketer?
There’s many flavors of product marketers – you can hire those who lean much more on the marketing side or those that lean more on the product side (and are more technical). The best product marketers will enjoy both types of work even if they lean one way or another.
Early stage businesses can be very product-driven, so a strong PMM may be useful early on to help look at product roadmap etc, but you may want to consider bringing on a generalist who has had product marketing experience. When you are small and perhaps your business is small and not so complex, product marketing may be a mere concept. A generalist can pave the way for you to eventually hire on a dedicated product marketer.
The graph below may help you visualize where or when you should be hiring a PMM.
Bonus! Here’s a sample job description you can leverage to create your own.
Where does product marketing sit?
This is an age old question – does product marketer sit in product management (PM) or marketing? As a marketer, I am, of course, biased and believe that PMM should sit with marketing, but truthfully, it depends on what stage the business is in.
For early stage businesses that are still working out product-market fit, a PMM may need to sit under the product team. Often times all of that foundational work – personas, product roadmaps, competitive research, needs to be done with the eye of a product manager who is living and breathing the building of the product. You can often think of a product manager as a “CEO” of a product, while the PMM is the “CMO” of a product. In this instance, the demand piece of marketing may be less important as getting the product “right” for launch.
For later stage businesses, especially when product is mature, or there are multiple products and PMM becomes its own function, it should sit within marketing. This is because marketing will be working much more closely with PMM to drive growth (or adoption), and a PMM will be working much more closely with sales.
The key thing to note with having product marketing is that it’s critical to any organization (even service-forward ones). Even if you don’t hire a dedicated PMM, you should hire someone with knowledge and background in how to support the successful growth of a product.
Header Photo by Alvaro Reyes on Unsplash