AMA: Mode Director of Product Marketing & Customer Marketing, Christine Sotelo-Dag on Product Marketing 30/60/90 Day Plan

This question shows up a lot for product marketers, in many different ways. Unlike other parts of the busienss that have numbers attached to their roles (quotas, MQLs, etc) often times PMMs share success metrics with their cross-functional counterparts, and attribution is not black and white. That said, there clear ways for PMMs to showcase their value (which might not always be quantatively measureable) AND ways to quantifiably measure success. I'll start with value. A fundamental way to bring value across the business as a PMM is by truly becoming a subject matter expert in your space. Learn your competitors inside and out, learn your product as if you were a power user, learn the market and trends, deeply understand customers -- (this one might be the most important) -- because the more you understand your customers, the more you can represent their voice within the walls of your organization. Their insight combined with what you know about competitors and the market will make you a very valuable asset to product teams that look for that insight as they roadmap, sales teams that need to position the product to different buyers and segments, the marketing org as they decide how to fill the pipeline and what messages resonate, where, and so on. I understand that some orgs want numbers - and clear metrics to define success. And ideally this is in combination with the point above. In every project you drive, define how you will measure success. If it is a product or feature launch, define how you will measure the go to market strategies you put in place, for example, announcement message open and click through rates, content views, qualified leads generated from your announcement messages, or expansion, upsell or adoption metrics tied to your channel strategies. Part of our role as PMMs is product health beyond feature and product launches. So develop strategies for product adoption and usage, and measure how effective those strategies are. Maybe you run and in-product marketing push to drive adoption of specific features - measure how that push drove adoption. Adoption metrics are often shared with your Product Manager counterparts, so work together on that strategy and shared success. Regardless of what initiative you are driving, always ask yourself how you will define success - and if it can't be quantatively - look for ways to bring in qualititative feedback - even if just from your internal stakeholders.

This is a great question - especially because I think this relationship between product and marketing (product marketing) is one that often takes time. Trust needs to be built and that often comes from being able to show value. I think inately part of Product Marketing's role is to become a subject matter expert in your space. This means deeply understanding the market (trends, competitors, hot topics), prospects and ideal customer profiles - their pain points and how your product helps solve them (and what gaps exist), and existing customers - both the power user super fans, and those that haven't yet gotten to deep usage or adoption. All of this knowledge is extremely powerful for product teams. It will help offer a more macro lens to their roadmapping and strategy planning. Oftentimes product teams will do their own research to help define their roadmaps, but it can usually be very narrow aligned to their core focus area and limited to feature gaps. Package your knowledge and insights in a way that offers insight beyond existing customer feedback - to help paint a broader picture. It may take awhile for teams to know exactly how to take action - but it will never be an unvaluable resource, and will undoubtedly add valuable context - and you will position yourself as a valuable partner representing the market. 

This is a great question, and one I thought deeply about prior to starting at Mode. Thankfully, I had a nice long break between Intercom and Mode which I leveraged for lots of down time 😉 but also as a time to reflect on how I wanted to approach those first 90 days. First, I'd recommend reading 'The First 90 days' by Michael Watkins. There was a lot of great information in here that I definitely borrowed from. Here is a birds eye view of how I applied it: First 30 days - Listen! This can often be the hardest part of starting any new role. The urge to jump in and start proving value is very strong but without context and an understanding of the company, teams, problems, customers etc - this can be a detrimental move. So my goal was to spend the first 30 days building as much context as I possibly could. I met with as many people as I could - with the goal of learning about their roles in the company, asking for as much historical context they could provide, and digging into what challenges they were currently faciing - and how they saw product marketing playing a role in tackling those challenges. The goal was not to commit to anything, it was simply to listen. I listened to customer and prospect calls. I read, and read, and read - blogs, competitor sites and blogs, industry repots, substacks, internal docs, etc. I joined right before a big product launch and a rebrand launch, so the urge to jump in was strong - and I did in fact pick up small pieces that I could help with, to start building the cross-functional muscle, but ultimately I measured the success of my first 30 days by how well I was able to start identifying gaps, and what priorities I was able to distill out of those gaps. It is very important to align with your manager at this stage (and the rest) on their expectations - to ensure there is alignment - and pull up together at the end of those first 30/60/90 days. First 60 days - Longer term goals / early wins Building context will continue well into the 60 days, but at around the 30 day mark there is a transition into taking action. What small wins have been identified, that you can start taking action against? Smaller wins usually can be accomplished without large x-functional buy in and without heavy internal resourcing. What larger gaps have been identified and how to start building a plan or brief to tackle those gaps? This is the time that it is also important to start setting up your strategic alliance. Who are you x-functional peers - and what standing meetings should you be joining, and reoccuring 1:1s should you be having? This is critical as you start to build out your plans as you'll likely need buy in from these peers, so set up the right working structure ahead of any plan execution. Bring them into your early thinking and ASK FOR FEEDBACK! First 90 days - Rhthym and results By the 60 day mark you should be moving into a rhthym of work. You've established your aliances, you've implemented team rituals, you've identified gaps and problems to be solved and translated those into a plan for the next 1-2 quarters that outlines: * top priorities * goals (success metrics) * specific milestons to achieving those goals * what outputs are associated with each priority * alignment from manager and cross-functional counterparts This is the time to start promoting yourself and your team as well. Build and share your team charter. Share your priorities, and set up the right structure for sharing out results. ASK FOR FEEDBACK and iterate. There's a lot packed into each of these 30 day segments - but hopefully this provides a high-level overview of how to start a new role focused on optimizing for long-term success by setting up the right foundation first. Go slow to go fast. 🚀

As a first (and oftentimes only) product marketer at a company, prioritization is the mother of all skills. The framework I would apply is a natural extension of the 30/60/90 day plan outlined above. Prioritization can only come once there is a decent amount of work done to understand the current state and needs of the business, and your fellow cross-functional counterparts. That said, there are some tangible and practical ways to approach prioritization. 1. Build out your team (functional) charter as a first step. How do you define your function, the areas you will focus on, the roles and responsiblities that fall within, how you measure success and how you collaborate with your cross-functional peers. Use this as a map to what projects you'll take on, and what projects you'll thoughtfully and respectfully say no to. 2. Have a clear understanding of the priorities and goals of the business overall, and specifically the wider marketing team. Your priorities should align to these areas. If the business has decided to strategically focus on the Enteprirse market, your prioritized deliverables should include how you will position your product to that market. 3. Leave space to build the foundations. If you are the first PMM, it is likely there are not a lot of processes or frameworks in place that set a PMM up to be effecient in the future. Give yourself the time and space to build these out. For example, building a launch framework and GTM templates for announcing new features and products. Defining with product and sales teams how you will work together. etc. If you jump into pumping out deliverables, you may end up positioning yourself and the PMM function as a service hub, rather than a strategic partner. 3. Capacity plan. As the only PMM, it can feel overwhelming at times to tackle all things - at once. Set clear and firm boundaries for yourself so you are not burning the midnight oil, and then plan your weeks, months, and quarters based on your capacity. What low hanging fruit is there - projects that take little time and resources that can deliver an impact - and how many of those can you take on, while still building out the foundations. Scope out how many meatier projects you can take on - and capacity plan with teams you may need to partner with. Things will not always go to plan, dates may slip and scope may creep - but starting with a plan will help provide guardrails to keep you on track to delivering impact. 

My perspective here is whether you are starting at a larger organization with hundreds of employees or a startup with 40 employees - the first 30 days look roughly the same. This is your window to build up as much context as possible, understand the goals, mission and prioritiies of the business, and identify gaps and areas for impact. The advantage of being at a smaller company is this access to information is much more accessible. People are easier to reach, things are probably still very evergreen - which means a lot of blank space for you to think about how you'd like to build things vs negotiating to adapt what others have built. So I'd spend those first 30 days really getting to know those 40 people - envisioning what you'd like marketing and pmm to look like in the long term and deciding what you can do today that will get you to that longer term vision - ie. start building those bi-lateral product/engineering relationships now. Within the first quarter at a scaling B2B SaaS business, I'd imagine you'd want to take a look at how your story is showing up in the market - for your core audience. Do you know who your core audience is? Who is your ideal customer profile, what is their role, industry, company size etc. This is the time that you want to do the work to define this audience, and develop your positioning and messaging so as you scale you know where and how to reach these prospects in a way that converts. Once you have solid positioning and messaging it should be the foundation that your website it built off of, and your sales narratives are crafted from, etc. Outside of core positioning and messaging, I'd take some time in the first quarter to define your GTM process, specifically for how to take new products and features to market. If you are starting to scale, and fast - you'll want a repeatable process in place that all of your cross-functional counterparts are aligned with - so you can spend less time re-creating the wheel each launch. And lastly (although this list could probably go on and on), another advantage of being at a smaller and earlier stage company is access to customers. Carve out time every week to talk to customers, talk to prospects, listen in on calls - and start to build relationship with these early customers. Those relationships can often times lead to co-marketing, where customers are open to sharing your story through testimonials, customer stories, and positive reviews. These endorsements are crucial for early stage businesses. Your first 30 days - 90 days will offer many areas to tackle that will have immediate and often big impact, your key role will be in defining how to prioritize. 

I think the common questions you'd want to ask both of these teams are 1. Tell me about your role and your teams - how do you operate today? (Build context of how these teams work in this organization as it will likely look different from places you've previously worked, even if only slightly) 2. What is working well in your orgs, and what are areas that could use improvement. (Understand what challenges these teams face - and listen through the lens of how your team may fit into the solution. Obviously, not all challenges will be something PMM can help solve). 3. How do you partner with the product marketing team today - or if there isn't a PMM team in place yet, ask how they've partnered with PMMs in the past. What are ways they see PMM and their teams partnering? I'd ask these questions without committing to partner on anything, all of this is context building and painting a picture of the current state of the org. More specifically to each org, I think if I were digging in with sales I'd want to know how the teams are structured - by segment, region, etc. How are sales stages defined, and what are the roles of each sales team across those stages (SDRs vs AEs vs Customer Success, etc), how long is the average sales cycle and where to deals most often get stuck? Where and how can you listen to sales calls? Any question that helps you understand how sales operates, and how PMM can align to more deals closed/won. For engineering or product teams, the things I typically like to understand are how product teams are organized. Is it by product, features, use cases, industry, etc - this will help you understand how to align product marketing in a way to create synergy. I'd ask how the team currently roadmaps - what are all the inputs, how are they weighted, how product and engineering teams envision PMMs inputing to roadmaps. Sometimes product teams don't envision this as PMMs role, it would be good to know if this is the case up front - and ensure that PMMs are bringing value to the product and engineering teams to earn a seat at that table. I'd ask if they can share any documentation that would help build product knowledge - whether its strategy docs, or rationale docs, or just team working docs - to offer a look into how these teams work. Ultimately, in those early days in a role - your main goal is gaining as much context as possible - so ask any question that will help get you there as fast as possible, and don't hold back. If something doesn't make sense, or is foreign to you - just ask. 

This is a hard question to answer because it is pretty dependent on your company's industry, business model, gtm strategy, etc. However, I'll give some examples I've come across in my experience. 1. Website. As a marketer, your website is your storefront - and there are endless ways to continue to improve it to maximize results. Whether your business is built on a self-serve model or you are 100% sales-led - the role of the website is an integral one - spefically in letting prospects and custoemrs know you understand their pain points and have a solution that can help solve them. So - spend some time evaluating your company's website - especially while you have fresh eyes as an outsider, and note ideas for how to optimize. Look at product positioning, audience targeting, clearly articulating value, CTAs, etc. There are likely many quick wins to be found 2. GTM plans. Take a look at how new products and features are currently being brought to market to prospect and existing customers. There are likely quick wins here as well. If there isn't a current GTM template, create one. That is a really great quick win. Make sure your company is taking products to market with the right channels based on what is being released, and to the right audience. Are announcements segmented? (if your company doesnt have clear segments - this should be something on your list of things to help tackle). Are there new and creative ways to get your audiences attention (not everything needs a billboard) -- this can be a clever social media strategy, or in-house videos. When I started at Intercom, the PMM team created 'quick look' videos that were short videos made by an individual PMM, delivered in product. They were not shiny, or overly polished - just a way to connect as humans to customers that didnt require a massive budget or an eloborate project plan. Just a PMM, a script and screen recording software. 3. Sales assets. There are many ways to support a sales team, and hopefully once you've done your listening tour you'll have identified a few areas that are low hanging fruit. I'd say often times an item that shows up on sales wishlists is competitive intel. Not just a feature comparison grid, but how your company can and should win in deals against specific competitors. This is a great first project to take as it often kills a few birds with one stone. on Usually, with some dedicated space and time carved out to do research, this research can be tackled fairly quickly - and as a new person in the company it is a great way to get up to speed on your product and market and build context. You can also start by delivering the content in small digestable pieces. Talking points to SDRs/BDRs, a battlecard for all of sales, a live training, feature deep dives, etc. 

The skills I look for in a PMM are: - Messaging / Positioning: Ability to create compelling messaging that articulates how the products value propositions solve customer pain points. Examples of how messaging and positioning has been leveraged to tell stories that resonate with the core audience. - Project management / Prioritization: Sitting at the cross section of multiple other orgs (Sales, Marketing, Product) there are often many balls in the air - the ability to prioritize, manage stakeholder expectations and drive project deliverables and timelines is a must. - Cross-functional skills: I look for PMMs that have solid examples of working with multiple teams within an organization, and I look for examples for how they have handled hard situations, how they've had to push back on requests, how they've had to claim a seat at the table. - Empathy: I believe as a PMM, one of our key responsibilities is to represent the voice of the customer internally. Therefore we should always be putting ourselves in the customers shoes. We should advocate for what is best for the customer - and their experience with our products. These are just a few. There are many soft skills that are equally as important, and generally apply to most roles that I won't go into detail here - but are weighted just as heavily for me. :) 

My first, and likely only, item would be 'Let's get to know each other.' Of all the skills I've acquired over the years as a PMM, I think the most valuable have been the human / people side of business. I've thought a lot and deeply on how to be a good manager. How to listen to people and understand them as people. I think this really starts with getting to know each other. That doesn't necissarily mean opening up on a personal level, but talking about why we're here, what drives us, how we like to work and communicate, etc. There will be plenty of time to dig into the tactical projects and logistical set up - but I'd carve out that very first meeting as a time to just connect.