AMA: Snow Software Executive Vice President Product, Becky Trevino on Scaling Product Marketing

The best way to retain talent is to create an environment where your PMM team is supported, trusted, and valued. You do this by being a strong leader that adds value to the organization and is known for delivering results. People who are known for delivering often get bigger budgets (which means you can pay your people more) and get to expand their teams (which means you can create new opporunties for people in your organization). The best quote I ever read on leadership is from the co-founder of Rackspace, Graham Weston. "What eveyone wants from work is to be a valued member of a winning team on an inspiring mission" So if you're a leader whose team: * Feels valued (and this value can be felt from other teams like Sales and Product who understand the impact of PMM in addition to you) * Feels that their winning (either in a strong growth segment, leaders in your category, or a team that's killing it in your org) * Feels inspired by the mission (either from your organizational or team mission) There is a good chance you can retain good people. That said, even the best managers lose people. At some point, people need to embrace new challenges and we need to be open to the idea that this happens. And that's a good thing. We should be proud when those that work for us grow. That makes us the type of leaders that help people accelerate in their careers. Working for a game-changing manager like this is highly attractive to anyone.

What I would do here is to partner with your manager and key stakeholders to understand the top 3-5 problems the business needs your Product Marketing to solve. Basedo on the responses you receive, ensure you have people in the right roles to solve these concerns. While there are general roles & responsibilities (e.g. Launch Management) that fall to Product Marketing, your aim is to ensure you're team is solving problems for the ubsiness. In your case, if Sales Enablement, Product Launches, and Product Insights are top 3 problems for the organization then you have the right structure in place.

The first thing you need to do is understand the growth stage of your company. There are typically 3 critical growth stages for companies: 1) Scale to $100M ARR 2) Scale to $1B ARR 3) Scale from $1B+ ARR The organizational and cultural needs of Product Marketing differs at each of these different stages of growth. In Stage 1, Product Marketing is needed to partner with C-level teams to build company positioning, messaging, strategic/category narrative, and translate key use cases into critical assets for the marketing and sales teams. In this scenario, you're usually telling a one product story. (Think SaaS Unicorns like Gong and Highspot.) In Stage 2, companies usually need to scale beyond their core product to reach this new growth milestone. In this growth scenario, companies often introduce a new product line targeting a new persona. Here Product Marketing must partner with Marketing to tell the broader story while still remaining connected to the Product and not isolating the original ICP. This is often one of the most difficult stages of growth since the company and the product are no longer synonymous with each other. (Think Gainsight expanding beyond their CSM audience to Product Management with Gainsight PX.) In Stage 3, organizations are managing multiple if not 100s of different products and services. Here there are often so many products and personas that the challenge for CMOs is connecting product back to the brand. In this growth stage, Product Marketing teams need to prioritize which products get PMM support (not all do), how to tie back to broader Solutions Marketing, and effectively managing stakeholders. (Think Salesforce's vast portfolio ranging from its Core CRM product to recent acquisitions like MuleSoft and Slack.)

If you're expanding a PMM team, you're likely growing as a business as well. As you grow as a business, your Product and Engineering teams are likely growing as well. This means that these teams are likely going to be releasing more features. And with more features, comes the need for broader stakeholders (Customer Success, Sales, Partners) to understand what Product is building ahead of when these features get into production. This to me means that a fundamental process for Product Marketing to get right is launch management and how this interwines with release managment. Finding the right process that works for your company and teams so that you have a at least a 1-month understanding of what product will be releasing is critical. With a strong communication process around release/launch (depends on your org if one/both of these fall to PMM) you will provide the key information that the go-to-market teams need from the Product organization.

When I started in Product Marketing there were very few resources - like Sharebird and PMA - where you could learn the fundamentals of Product Marketing. At that time, there was Pragmatic and a couple of blogs here and there. Today, there is a wealth of knowledge available online and even books on Product Marketing. I would have loved to have all of these resources available to me to learn from when I was starting out. I would have immersed myself in them and I would have used this content to help me identify the parts of Product Marketing that really sing to me faster than I did. Product Marketing is a vast field. It's nearly impossible to be great in all areas. It's important to identify your interests and strengths (e.g. data, storytelling, product, marketing) and to use this information to build what makes you special as a PMM. For me, it's storytelling + product evangelism. I'm really strong at both and the combination makes me unique.

For me, the first thing I do when interviewing for a position or starting a new role is to understand what problems my hiring manager is trying to solve by adding me to the team. If I'm new in role, I build my 30/60/90+ day plan off of these problems and build a roadmap/charter on how I plan to solve these. What I've found is that there is often a tie-in between the problems my hiring manager is looking to solve and broader company problems. At the end of the day, my manager is investing in me and my team to help him/her solve a business problem. And when I make traction on solving these problems I BOTH help my manager to meet his/her goals AND I help the organization progress on key business outcomes. The added benefit to this problem-centered approach is that when your team is seen as both helping your direct manager (or his/her boss) and creating desired business outcomes you are viewed as a team worthy of continued and expanded investment. Beyond the 30/60/90 day period, I continue to work through either the OKR process or I create my own 6 month goals. I then ensure leadership is aligned to what I've prioritized and follow the steps above to ensure my teams deliver value.