AMA: Box VP Product Marketing, Alexa Schirtzinger on Stakeholder Management

The thing I don't do is a weekly/monthly team-based newsletter. I find that these generally take a ton of work, aren't read by many people (we're all busy!), and can too easily veer into a kind of self-promotion that can build resentment within other teams. Instead, we generally focus on cross-functional project updates -- status emails for major launches, announcement emails when the big launches go out, and project-based presentations at exec meetings and company or departmental all-hands meetings. These highlight the cross-functional strength of our work while also highlighting the invaluable partnership from other teams across the org.

This is a tough one! I'd probably start with a simple start/stop/continue. So for exmaple: * STOP: One thing you might want to do is try to get the team out of “keep the lights on” mode. When product marketing is relegated to pushing launch after launch out the door and doesn’t have time to step back and think about the big-picture story and strategy, it ends up doing a disservice to the customer and the whole company. Even if you don’t have the buy-in or resources to do more, but you can always do less. Try shifting to a model where PMM takes responsibility for bundling and tiering all of those feature releases and only “launching” a few big things each quarter. This can help customers better understand what’s going on while also rebalancing the power dynamic (so you’re not just responding to features that ship, but inserting some creative judgment on what gets prioritized and launched to the market). * START: In addition to reducing your investment in shipping features, identify one area you (as a team) really want to own and excel at. I frequently tell my team that it’s better to do one thing well than many things sort of well -- especially when you’re trying to get the organization to recognize your value. To identify what you want to prioritize, I’d consider: * the skills on your team: what do you do best? * the things your organization values: where can you have the greatest impact? * the road to success: is it feasible? can you deliver meaningful results in 3-6 months? (fwiw, that’s my sweet spot for big wins -- not exactly quick wins, but not projects that take so long that people start to wonder what you’re doing over there :)) Ultimately, it might also be worth trying to get teams out of the “ownership” mindset. This can depend a lot on organizational culture and can take a really long time, but the more you can get your team and your collaborators to align on the outcomes you want together, and then allocate the work as needed, the less time you’ll have to spend drawing and enforcing boundaries.

First of all: patience. Lots of it. :) As you start to unravel the history of the relationship, you’re likely to find norms that were established so long ago that no one knows why they’re there. And with every new person who comes on board, you have the opportunity to start building new, more positive norms...but of course this can take a long time. In addition, a few other tactics I rely on: * Build support at every level. The individual contributors on a team can be just as powerful as the executives when it comes to setting cultural norms. If you’re coming in as a new leader, it’s really important to meet with (and get meaningful feedback from) people at every level. * Find your allies. Some people are more open to change or more naturally aligned with you than others. Find allies (again: at every level) and lean on them for input, direction, and support when you need it. * Listen without committing. Listening is so important! But it doesn’t mean you have to say yes to every request. Hear out as many people as you can, then synthesize the feedback and come up with a strategic plan that combines what others need from you with what you know needs to be done.

Ah yes, the meeting trap! Unfortunately, my answer is that it depends -- on how mature your PMM team is, what your priorities and key projects are, and how you're structured. That said, a couple of guiding principles: 1. Keep it light. I try to let most meetings be ad-hoc or project-based, with only a few standing meetings. The standing ones are mainly just weekly 1:1s with our Product counterparts (at the team lead & IC level), and then quarterly project-based ones (like QBRs or roadmap reviews). 2. Stay flexible. We generally spin up x-functional status check-ins for major launches, then eliminate the meeting once the launch is over. I also try (not always successfully ;)) to prune any standing meetings once a quarter. 3. Align to priorities. At certain times, like if you're repairing a relationship or establishing closer communication with a particular team, you might need to spend extra time together. Again, I'd take a quarterly lens, so maybe add a standing weekly meeting just for one quarter (vs. indefinitely). 4. Know when to reevaluate. If you're struggling every week to figure out the agenda, or if people consistently don't speak up, these may be signs that the meeting isn't working -- it's duplicative, the audience is too big, the right people aren't included, etc. 

Bad content is so frustrating! I generally use one or all of these tactics when I’m facing headwinds like this: 1. Try to understand the cause. It sounds like what's behind the c-suite pushback is fear of change, and in my experience, CxOs (like the rest of us!) sometimes just need to be reassured that everything will be fine. You can help everyone feel better about trying something new with a little social proof (e.g. at most software companies, the corporate pitch gets a refresh every 3-6 months) and with a solid Plan B (if the new pitch bombs, you can always go back to the old one). 2. Build a coalition. If you can find some good cross-functional allies who agree with you, you can each build support within your respective teams/networks. It sounds like you have some good allies in the sales team (if they know they’re losing deals due to poor pitches, they’re probably motivated to fix that). Look to other teams, too, so you can start winning over the c-suite one by one. 3. Take the pilot approach. You don’t have to roll out a change to everyone in the company immediately; it can feel less scary if you pilot it with a small group (in your case, maybe just one sales territory or account segment), show success, and then gradually scale it out.

A lot of it depends on the types of products you're marketing. Some teams can be easily organized into solution-based pods, so if you have a lot of products in your portfolio, you might have product marketers who focus on individual products reporting up to a solutions marketer, who represents a broader category. At Box, our products are more horizontal, so we have a team of product-focused marketers who work closely with the product and engineering teams, and then a team of solutions marketers who work more closely with the go-to-market teams like sales and customer success. These teams are like two sides of a coin and work really closely together. One other quick point: It's common for product marketing to mirror the product management team structure, but these two teams often have different mandates. For example, a technically complex product that requires a lot of product management and engineering resources might actually be a table-stakes capability or competitive neutralizer rather than a differentiated value driver for customers. I'd encourage product marketing leaders to look beyond PM-to-PMM ratios and think critically about what will really drive value for customers, then staff their teams that way.