AMA: Facebook Head of Product Marketing, VR Fitness, Media and Work, Susan J. Park on Global / Remote Product Marketing

I have started to ask "What is the biggest trade-off decision you had to make?" Most people go straight to themselves and a trade-off that they've had to make about a job or career path, not a company decision. One interviewee floored me when he talked about hard decisions on needing to lay-off members of his team, but then described how he worked through his network to get every person on that team a job at another company. Not only did he show he could make tough calls, but he was trying to be a good person too in a rough situation. 

Challenges: If you are away from your product and engineering team and conversations/changes on the product happen in hallways not in meetings. If this is happening to you, try and advocate that to change, but if it doesn’t, perhaps find a new role or specialty. If you don’t, your role may be changed to a project manager versus a product marketing manager and that’s not ideal. Advantages: You can drive the impartial customer voice without being swayed by the everyday interaction with the product and eng team. You can collect customer feedback much more quickly (I'm assuming you're in a market/timezone with the customers). For example, for complicated product alpha we staffed an PMM in the most competitive market to drive real-time intelligence and client feedback. There was no way we could have iterated as fast without this.

Build confidence and context with your team. The book “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyers relates a person’s communication styles and how to gain their trust. It’s a great read for working with other cultures, and explains business norms, especially around feedback delivery, very well. Also it will help you read people and see how you can build context and trust earlier. It's key for you to be trusted so you can deliver strong results. Schedule informal "coffees" with folks so that you get time to build banter. It's important that people see you as a 3-D person, not a head on a screen. Ask for a culture where the team mission is greater than individual success. All teammates will be incentivized to stay connected with the team and drive progress on their global initiative. For example, every person on my team has a global objective that ladders into our main mission for the 6 month goals that every region must execute a plan around. It helps drive personal impact and communication back and forth. If you feel like you're on an island, you will be on an island. Try to find ways for your work to integrate in with the teams. Eliminate hallway decisions. Nothing will frustrate you more than decisions being made outside of the core team meetings or in silos that you can't attend. Make sure the decisions in the meetings stick if you can. Meeting 3-Rs - Record meetings, Re-cap with notes and actions, Re-iterate major takeaways in other communications (team meetings, etc). Also, many folks on your team may have different language fluencies, having multiple mediums available will allow them to learn on their means. Then re-iterate. Once trust is built (and if you're on another timezone) ask them to meet you in your timezone. The team should switch off, even if it’s for one person. (We do it bi-weekly. Every month I either wake up at 5a or stay up until 8p for a team meeting.) It will bring empathy to the team, and allow every person to have their opinions show up when they’re at prime brain activity.

Examine the materials and get honest feedback. If the smaller region needs more than your bigger regions then something may be off. Maybe things need to be changed, but a smaller region should not be more work than a bigger one. You will need to make trade-off decisions on what you build for a local market based on their success, and incentivize them to think that way. Find a great local agency, or agencies that help in the region. Take the time to vet them and help you build content. Some can even be in person consultants to the region if you need it. Build a network of local champions. Any product that resonates relies on the local community whether it be troubleshooting boards, feedback via social media. If your product is B2B, you definitely need something more formal. Find a very active salesperson who may be interested in product marketing or customer service representative that is sharp to help pitch in. This is the beauty of start-ups and smaller companies, you can find people who will want to pitch in and help land information better. You can even pitch it as an “extra project” for performance review perks. That person can be a defacto link and help scale and customize the work from global, and the region will feel more supported. If the local champion is successful, then you already have your business case as well as your first hire in that market. Leverage any employee at the company with knowledge of the market. Hopefully, you will have people staffed in that market and you can lean on for information, but if not put out a slack/post/email and take down note of employees who have worked in other markets and if they have language fluency. Use those people for copy gut checks if possible. Don’t ask them to do the translations - hire a contractor or something for that - but they can read it and let you know if any language is awkward or if the terms are off.

Timezones: If you have to make a 1a call work, do it. But then give yourself a break or a reward. You have to make allowances outside of your personal time to make projects work around the globe, but pay yourself back in some cases so you don’t burn out. Ex) Prior to COVID-19 I worked from home most Fridays (especially after long trips or off-time meetings) to ensure I could get some personal admin done. Or if I stayed up at 8p the night before, I tried to treat myself to a yoga class or something personal during the work hours to drive balance. Actually tonight I have a 9:30p meeting - so I'm definitely going to have a nice, long lunch tomorrow. :-) Getting teams to use the documentation: The biggest thing that will help you sleep and drive work without you needing to be there is rooted in documentation. Communication documents and getting people to USE them is key. You have to build a muscle to restrain yourself from answering every ping/comms, and direct people to the documentation. Teach them and you will be thankful for more time. Language barriers and cultural nuances: Driving personal context and trust is key. Driving trust is hard, but worth the pay-off when your team can move quickly and stakeholders give honest feedback. (Managing Humans is also a fantastic book if you're learning how to work with tech teams). Unbalanced market feedback: Going global leads to “Superpower Syndrome” where the biggest markets or the company HQ location (probably based in a strong market) drives most of the product decisions. Staffing accordingly and using data-driven exercises versus gut feelings will drive a balanced point of view.

Sharebird and the Product Marketing Alliance are fantastic networks. It’s wonderful to see communities sprout around this fun and challenging career path that can lead to a variety of successful positions. Use your network and ask questions as much as possible.

Expected: * Working with multiple timezones * Language barriers/poor translations * Cultural issues * Getting individuals to focus on the team dynamics so we can work as a global unit * Countries/regional teams coming up with their own narratives and strategies. Unexpected * Distributing the work so each person on your team can shine with a strong project to drive visibility, especially if they're not inherent good ways of working in the region. * Memes are incredibly quick to spring up and hard to squash. A meme will spread faster from one region to another than a global truth, so ensure your team is in the conversation so memes can be uncovered and recitified quickly. * Loneliness for individuals who are remote. I try to get adopted by teams around me or set up more purposeful socialization so I don't get too far removed from the culture of the office and the people I work with. Work loneliness can be a thing, and I try to combat it as much as possible.

I love this question. Instead of trying to convince them, I would listen to their concerns and try to alter the product to make it relevant, especially if the market has a strong track record of being right. If you can’t make the feature requirements in time to do so, cut the market from the launch. There’s no need to enter a market (translation resourcing, training etc) if you don't have stakeholder buy-in. You will have more time to focus on other markets with more opportunity. Also, nothing will make a market want a product more than seeing it be successful somewhere else.

Align your culture, the rest will follow. Drink up that company Kool-Aid. :-) Then after, ensure the guidelines are practices are evangelized and understood. No one likes to arbitrarily follow rules. Take the time to ensure that the tone, voice, branding is distributed thoughtfully and understood by the regional teams. At Spotify, we had clear and strong brand guidelines. We couldn't move out of step of them, and had clear reasons why. It was a brand to be proud of and was treasured. Relay that through your culture and stick to it, and the pride will resonate and become second nature. 

If you have global projects or have syndicated a regional product to the global level, I would think that experience is relevant. If you are a regional product marketing manager and do not have a project like that to speak of then work on getting one. This will help with your own visibility and help the company projects succeed. If you want this experience and you’re already in product marketing you can network in the company to try and make that happen for yourself. Then in the interview/vetting process you can speak to these projects and show that you do have global experience, despite not having the job title. Otherwise, if you can show you influenced the product team from a regional perspective it would be HUGE. I have seen regional product marketing teams focusing on influencing their own markets versus rolling up the feedback and driving change at the global product level. The latter is more impressive to me, and shows me you could be a product leader.