AMA: Bill.com Director of Product Marketing, Angus Maclaurin on Establishing Product Marketing

I’ve been a one person PMM-team several times in the last decade and encountered the same challenges. More of my management experience comes from my analytics and innovation roles in the past. I'd recommend that you find ways to onboard people or be a mentor or teacher to others. A chunk of these management skills are transferable, but I would consider three points as you grow: What do you need to be a better manager? Many general management (and people) skills can be transferable. Your experience in the past will definitely help and you can continue to hone your skills. We’ve also leveraged personality assessments such as DiSC profiles and Enneagram to help better understand ourselves and how we work with others. In addition, cross-functional work is a great training ground. Often it can be harder to manage cross-functional teams when goals are not the same. Leverage those moments. What skills are specific to Product Marketing? Learn and master Product Marketing frameworks. Your process for launching a product may work in that scenario, but may not be scalable across a whole team of PMMs with different personalities and styles. What tools do you need to create personas? How do you structure product launches? What are all of the key outputs for PMM and how do they work together? If you are managing a team, you need to create more structure across each of those. What is your long-term goal? Finally, ask yourselve where you see yourself in 10 or 20 years. Typically there is not a Chief Product Marketer at a company, so you should plan for your longer-term area of expertise. I’ve seen PMM report to the CMO, CPO, or even the CRO. What part of the organization do you want to grow into? You might even decide that you would prefer to develop cross-functional expertise in another area of marketing instead of pushing towards PMM leadership.

PMMs are often tied to specific products more than lifecycle stages. In general we aim for a 3:1 PMM to PM ratio - meaning the PMM needs to have deep knowledge about each of those products, market needs, and personas. They should be the expert in a product from end to end. It’s not ideal if a PM has to go to one PMM for personas, and another for pricing. I’m a big believer in developing close relationships with PM and partnering closely with them on all parts of the customer lifecycle. That said, there can be exceptions based on talent or company needs. If you have a candidate that is incredible at a specific functional area such as market research, and you can justify a full-headcount to that area, then you can adjust in that scenario. Often this will be the case in larger companies that can afford that level of specialization.

First off, I would say that Product Marketing is in demand in the market and the most critical skill set is a passion for understanding the customer and crafting messaging. If you can show a deep empathy for customers and research how a product actually matches a specific customer need, then you have a strong start for interviews. I would start with talking with PMMs or “shadowing” a PMM at your company. Find out what skill sets they recommend you develop further. Find out what you already have from your current role. One of the benefits of Product Marketing is it’s breadth. PMM does everything from market analysis to messaging to sales enablement. Rarely will anyone be an expert in all aspects of Product Marketing in the beginning. The most important thing is to leverage the skill sets and expertise you have. If someone is transitioning from sales to PMM, I recommend that they start with developing Sales collateral and materials. They can hit the ground running while learning more about personas, market research, and working with product management. The transition is definitely possible, you just need to market the existing skill sets you have and be clear which areas you plan to tackle on the job.

I use every resource I can to gather customer and user feedback, both internally and externally. First and foremost, I always prioritize talking directly to customers. Make time for customer conversations every month at a minimum. In addition, I leverage many of the following sources of feedback: * Outreach to target audience about general needs (not product specific) * Customer support tickets * NPS and in-product surveys * Comments from the sales team * Regular check-ins with the support team * Direct outreach to frustrated customers * Online comments, especially on 3rd party sites Each of these sources provide valuable, often directional insights. Two to three comments on a recent press release may just be noise, when combined with 3 lost sales deals and 8 support tickets in the last week, and a different picture may appear. I will review NPS scores on a monthly basis. It may not be the driver for our 6 month product strategy, but it can highlight some areas we need to monitor or validate moving forward. Often we will need to dive deep into these comments to understand the groups of complaints. In a previous role I manually went into hundreds of return tickets to understand what was happening. Once I understood the pain points, then we could create a survey with the correct categories. The results played a big role in future product strategy, we needed the deep-dive into the raw feedback before we could create that process. This is why it’s important to have several sources of feedback to validate and triangulate against.

My experience in PMM has often been defined more by organizational structure and openness more than a type of product. The three biggest factors I’ve seen that impact product marketing’s role in an organization are the following: Reporting structure: Where does PMM report to? To the CEO, the CMO, or the CPO? Depending on who Product Marketing reports to, the goals will likely be different. When you report to the CMO, you may focus on driving GTM. When reporting to the CPO, you may spend more time focused on market insights and influencing product strategy. Inbound vs Outbound: What is the balance of Product Marketing? One of my most frequent questions in interviews is where on the spectrum does product marketing fit? Does Product Marketing focus only on outbound messaging and GTM plans? Or does product marketing focus on bringing market and customer needs back to product and influence product strategy? Your role should encompass both, but where on that spectrum are you expected to sit? Product openness: Is Product Marketing in the room at the beginning or only after the product has been built? In the ideal state, Product Marketing provides the market / competitive analysis and target customers / insights in the initial PRD and helps define what is being built. In other scenarios, Product Marketing is told to go sell a new feature and has to work backwards to uncover the target market and value proposition.

Product Marketing plays a critical role in launching products, but it is harder to measure. This question can come up frequently in performance reviews and setting OKRs for the coming year. Product Marketing owns several key areas of product launch - from defining customer needs and key features to launch strategy and target channels. Multiple goals may be binary - Did you do customer research? Did you create a launch plan? The challenge comes when you want to tie these activities to specific revenue results and try to separate what team contributed what percentage. The type of product also has an impact on what gets measured. For some it’s about active usage, or upgrades to premium features, while for others it’s about how many units are moved off the shelf. Product Marketing should help define the baseline goals and track improvements against these metrics as you optimize your marketing and outreach. One of the best options is to create shared goals. Frequently you can see conflicts between sales and marketing when the goals are different. Marketing may reach MQL goals, but sales may complain that the quality of leads were not high enough. The more you can align on the same goal, the more the teams work together to reach your overall revenue and profit goals. Ideally you can get to a point where everyone - from product management to product marketing to sales - are measured on the same target. Then each team can focus on how they can optimize their specific part of the process. In my current role, Product Managers, Product Marketing, and Growth Marketing all have common revenue targets. This enables us to all aim towards the same end goal. We can start with the customer journey and how we can contribute to bottom-line growth. Often it works well to create a prioritized list with all potential tactics back. Then we can easily determine if it’s more important to build a new feature or optimize our email messaging.

I’ve come in as the first PMM at several companies. My experience has been different every time, and I’ve learned a few hard lessons on rushing in too quickly. A large chunk of the first 90 days centers around education and getting quick wins. 30 days: Understand Figure out who does what. If you’re the first PMM, then someone else is probably doing some work that PMM would normally do. See how the team is structured, where they need help, and where you may be taking over someone else’s role Talk to customers. A lot. Understand the market and become the expert that can provide value to multiple teams Build bridges. Focus on developing relationships and regular meetings with cross-functional partners. Even lend a helping hand outside of PMM to foster relationships 60 days: Educate Explain what PMM can do. Many of your cross-functional partners may not understand the PMM role. Only half of the PMs I work with understand the PMM role Find quick wins to show the potential of PMM. A few examples can include small messaging work or optimizing target customer 90 days: Implement Outline the key GTM and research projects PMM can lead. Define the PMM processes and frameworks that you will leverage, and start to build to larger wins! Finally, you may also want to read The First 90 Days (comes highly recommended from PMM friends and is on my reading list).

In the ideal state, I consider Product Marketing to have 5 stages starting from market insights. 1. Understand the Market: outline the potential opportunity and existing competition 2. Define Personas and Needs: define the core customer, their needs, and their current solution 3. Develop Product and Features: influence key features needed for both table-stakes and differentiation in the market 4. Create Messaging and GTM: create the GTM plan, the value prop and messaging, and key channels for launch 5. Launch and Optimize: measure and test, creating a clear feedback loop Product Marketing’s role will vary depending on the company - I’m a big believer in being involved early and helping shape the product. If you can successfully do that, the GTM becomes easier to plan. You don’t need to figure out which market will buy Feature X because you defined that upfront. You know the key needs so writing the value proposition becomes easier. It takes time and relationship building - this is what I strive for in any Product Marketing role.