AMA: SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Solutions Marketing, Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann on Product Marketing Skills

Messaging is a skill that takes time and effort to improve. And not everyone intuitively "gets it" when it comes to crafting great messaging. Here are 8 ways I'd recommend PMMs improve their messaging skills: 1. Talk to your customers: Get their lingo down. Talk to them in the same way they talk about themselves & their needs. The more you talk to customers, the more you'll be able to echo them in your messaging. 2. Consult the competition: competitive websites can be a great place to understand how other companies in your industry position themselves & convey that positioning in concise, customer-facing messaging. 3. Get advice from your peers: Is there someone on your team that's really strong in messaging? Pair up & start learning. Ask them to join you in a working session or messaging brainstorm. 4. Receive coaching from your manager: Sometimes it's great to just dig in & learn from someone who's done it for longer. 5. Create time-saving templates: If you find something that works & helps to service all of the teams internally that use your messaging, rinse and repeat! I know Sharebird has several messaging templates you can download & try. 6. Take trusted courses: Find a messaging certification or course from a well-known association like PMA, CXL or Pragmatic Institute. 7. Test & learn: We're lucky at SurveyMonkey because we have message testing tools built into our own product, but there are several ways to do this: surveys, user research, and in-market A/B testing. 8. Practice, practice, practice! With anything else, messaging takes practice to become good at it. So treat every launch, campaign, or program as an opportunity to refine your messaging skills.

I really like the term you used here: "data-informed". At SurveyMonkey, we strive to use the best data we have available to inform our decisions. But you don't always have data, so that's where a PMM's intuition comes into play. I'll also challenge you that it's not always hard "data" that you need to inform a decision. Sometimes it's sources like: * Conversations - with those on the frontlines like sales & success managers, or with customers themselves * Qualitative interviews / ethnographies * Industry reports * Competitive websites Sometimes you need to place a bet on a direction, lean into it, and then test performance. You can make a plan to have data to inform how you evolve once you're in market.

We recently stood up our CI function at SurveyMonkey a couple years ago. Before then, competitive intel responsibilities were previously scattered and shared across the product marketing team. CI as a dedicated role is still growing, so you may find it challenging to find someone with a CI background. Our current CI lead had an education & product marketing background, and is FABULOUS in the role :) When hiring someone to stand up CI, these were the must-haves we looked for: * Research experience (of any kind). This person will need to do a LOT of research: secondary research, website searching, interviews, surveys, etc. * Strategic positioning: This person will need to be able to distill the top reasons why someone would choose your product over your competitors'. * Clear communication. This person will need to communicate clearly & concisely with sales, product, executives, etc. * Project management: There is a lot to take on when you're establishing a function. The person in this role will need to know how to effectively prioritize & manage their work, some of which is cross-functional in nature. * Vendor management: This person may need to work with competitive platforms, vendors for competitive research, etc. Initial programs this person ran: * Competitive positioning & messaging * Competitive battle cards for sales + competitive enablement * Competitive landing pages for organic search * Win/Loss analysis * Competitive product research to support feature prioritization & development * Competitive monitoring & alerts on top competitive moves

On your path from Sr. PMM to Director of Product Marketing, you may have a couple roles in between: * Lead PMM (sometimes called Principle PMM) which is typically the highest PMM level for individual contributors * Manager & Sr. Manager of Product Marketing, which would be your first people managing roles in the Product Marketing org Here are the major competencies you'll want to develop on your path to Director level (summarized from the PMM career ladder we have at SurveyMonkey): 1) Leadership DNA: * Influence: At a director level, you'd be expected to drive organizational alignment and influence cross-functional stakeholders at the SVP or higher level. It wouldn't be uncommon for you to present your strategy or approach to the executive team. * People management & coaching: You'd be responsible to hiring, developing, and growing talent on your team, including owning org design. You likely have multiple direct reports (even direct reports who are managers themselves) to whom you provide coaching and clear guidance. You'd be responsible for meeting hiring targets and employee engagement goals in addition to business impact. * Conflict resolution: Directors can independently and proactively address critical business issues, with scale in mind. Directors would be able to meet with peers in similar leadership positions to align on a resolution. A good example would be agreeing on roles & responsibilities across teams. 2) Vision & Strategy: * Domain knowledge: As a director, you'd be expected to independently execute market assessment for a broad product area or for the evaluation of a new product. You'd need to clearly define your PMM team's roadmap and influence organizational alignment, including interfacing with PM leaders to define high-level product strategy and roadmaps * Product & market strategy: At this point, you'll need to demonstrate mastery of Product Marketing by leading a team of product marketers and partners to develop sound product and GTM strategies that support your company goals. This includes understanding market white spaces, TAM, and actively suggesting how to address said white spaces (e.g. buy/build/partner strategy). You'd likely be going beyond just defining the strategy, but defining the process by which the strategy is created - examples being processes and frameworks for GTM launches or product EOL (end of life). * Thought leadership: Directors demonstrate broad knowledge and expertise in their product domain, as well as Product Marketing best practices and PMM leadership; they are seen as a go-to for interviews, blog content, and webinars 3) Functional Expertise / Execution: * Goal orientation & project management: As a director of product marketing, you would be co-accountable for key metrics including product adoption, pipeline/revenue targets, and win rates. You'll be expected to manage large teams + large & complex projects involving cross functional teams * Content & deliverables: At this point, your presentations should be executive-ready. Both internal strategic presentations & external speaking opportunities at industry events. * Analytics: As a director, you should be able to conduct and supervise efficient, accurate and meaningful hypotheses driven analyses to address highly complex areas. Examples could be doing cross-BU funnel analysis of how you're performing with specific persona targets. My recommendation for measuring your progress against these core competencies would be to have open & direct conversations with your manager. If you don't have a documented career ladder or job framework, work with your leaders (usually with your HR business partner) to create one. It's great to have that as a reference as you prove your readiness.

My top tip for being successful in Product Marketing is getting close to the customer. Ways to get close to the customer: * Do your own customer interviews * Get your hands on as much customer research as possible (product research, user research, win/loss, NPS surveys, brand health research, segmentation, etc.) * Shadow customer-facing teams like Sales, Success, and Support * Get access to tools like Gong for analytics on customer conversations * Attend events & conferences, and simply talk to people * Run customer surveys (for feedback on product, messaging, etc) * Read industry reports, join industry newsletters, attend industry webinars with customer speakers How getting close to the customer will help you be a better PMM: * You'll know what they need to be successful in their jobs * You'll better understand your customers' pain points * You'll better understand how/why customers use your product (and competing products) * This translates to great messaging, thought leadership, product content, etc.

When I think about scaling content creation (this could be sales decks, collateral, long-form content, etc), my best tactical suggestion is to create a self-service template. Here's an example: Several years ago, we had a process at SurveyMonkey for creating sales one-pagers that involved PMM writing copy, Content Strategy proof-reading, then Design creating a PDF. The PDFs were difficult to edit/personalize, so we kept having to go back to Design for versions. Then we created a project where Design instead created a self-service one-pager template. The result was a one-pager "component library" in Google Slides (what we use for presentations). We had several versions of headers, single/double/triple columns of text & imagery placements, logo bars, customer quotes, etc. All on-brand. This was a game changer for us, because we could mix & match those components to create a one-pager & then personalize it by industry, etc. - even down to the account level. PMM then had autonomy to create sales content without dependency on any other teams. It meant we could create more content in WAY less time!