AMA: Google Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform, Madeline Ng on Stakeholder Management

At my current company, these roles are different and lean on the different skills that you mention! That said, at smaller organizations, or even smaller marketing organizations, you may not have the luxury of having different individuals occupy each role. If you are in a spot where you aren't able to add dedicated headcount to partner with product or creative separately, I'd suggest having a conversation about priorities with your leadership and using that to guide not only the talent you bring on, but the allocation of time on activities for those individuals. While it may feel like too much to execute on both capabilities simultaneously, it's also exciting and a benefit of being at a small company!

Your best play is to show up with an insight backed by data. I think many product marketers over-index on the product and not the market and you have an opportunity to bring market insight into the organization. Being new is actually an advantage because you won't be skewed by the history of the company. You'll know what insights will be most impactful to your organization but a few ideas: 1. Market trends - what is happening in the market overall? How is your company proactively making sure they'll be competitive in the future? 2. Market players - who is your top competitor? What have they been up to and why does that matter to your company? 3. Audience trends - who are the people you are selling to, or the people who use your products? Are they doing things differently now? What does that mean for your company? All of these will differentiate you to your new team members and be really useful to the organization.

The short answer is that there are more, and the desires each stakeholder has become more specific! Essentially, as companies grow they have the opportunity to bring in more specialized talent. This could be teams in finance that are focused on products, specialized support organizations, strategy teams, program teams, or any number of others. The benefit is that you often have more hands on deck to ensure the success of a product. The downside is often coordination cost, and when it comes to product marketing that cost can be high. You can stay on top of things by being proactive in understanding your organization. Also, you should advocate for the expansion of your product marketing team if you find the demands are becoming too great for your existing team.

Start by understanding your stakeholders. What are their overall goals? What are their concerns regarding your proposal? And who in your organization influences the decision makers? Once you know what you need, I would determine if there is a way to have more data to support your idea. It may not be definitive, but even directional data is powerful in making arguments. For example, if you are advocating a new messaging approach, are there ways you can test it with lower risk? If you are trying a new marketing channel, are there industry benchmarks you can turn to to explain why it matters to your audience? And finally I would ask yourself what kind of "yes" you require. Would a conditional "yes" suffice? Try and figure out what you need to move forward incrementally and have that in the back of your mind when you're making your argument.

Here's what I have done in the past, but your mileage may vary based on your company. Quarterly: Meet with leadership in your go-to-market teams, product teams, and marketing teams. Understand goals, dependencies, and expectations and make sure you set up instrumentation for tracking success. Monthly: Meet with go-to-market peers to make sure execution is on track, whether you're launching or landing a product. Review metrics. Understand risks, shifts in strategy, shifts in market. Use this as an opportunity to get the data required to do any readouts to leadership. Weekly or more: Meet with peers who are helping you get things done. These could be demand generation teammates figuring out a campaign, product managers to finalize launch materials, sales to review messaging feedback, etc. I'd also recommend meeting any agencies weekly if you are running a tight timeline because it keeps things on track. These meetings rarely happen to beautifully in real life, but hopefully this shares a bit of a framework! 

The best way to identify the stakeholders is to identify the success metric for the launch, and then figure out who is directly responsible for hitting that metric. Typically your product manager is a stakeholder, but often you'll have a customer success/sales organization involved and also engineering. Stakeholders are also up and down the leadership chain so be sure to include the leaders of those who are directly responsible. Stakeholder changes are inevitable so I tend to learn on documentation to help smooth over the transitions when they happen. Do you have your messaging and positioning documents ready? Your marketing strategy? If so, anyone new coming into the launch will immediately be able to understand your plan and you won't need to spend lots of time ramping them up.

This is an interesting one where I'd want to understand more. Is the innovation slowdown temporary? What is the cause or strategy behind it? What are the expectations on your organization in light of this? In many ways I see this as an opportunity for your team to step up as experts in the market and audience. What are the problems that your customer is facing that hasn't been solved yet, but could be with creativity using what you already have in market? I'd suggest pairing closely with your product managers, sales, customer success or other external customer-facing teams to understand what stories you could amplify.

First off, great job on finding a problem and bringing people together to fix it! I'd suggest having a little bit more curiosity and empathy around why the CSuite members are hesitant. I'm guessing there might be more going around the IPO and that there isn't actually a desire to be "consistently bad." In situations where I feel like things are non-sensical I try to pause and listen harder to see what isn't being said. In terms of selling the new pitch decks, I'd suggest positioning it as a "pilot" or "experimentation." It immediately drops the pressure around wholesale adoption of a new method, lets you move forward, and gives you the data you need to prove your hypothesis. If the pitch decks work fantastically, even if you only have anecdotal evidence, you may end up convincing everyone to adopt the new ones! Never underestimate the power of a few sales team members, or your Head of Sales, advocating for change.