AMA: Zapier Former Head of Product Marketing, Gregg Miller on Stakeholder Management

GTM kickoff meeting: It is absolutely essential to get all the right stakeholders in the same room to get on the same page around what we're doing, why, by when, and with which owners. I like to have my team run these meetings roughly three months before a given launch and use them as an opportunity to share out a preliminary GTM strategy they've developed in partnership with the product manager. The goal of the meeting is to provide a concrete rough draft detailing strategy and assets and timeline and owners for everyone in the room to pressure test and improve upon. It should be a collaborative discussion that brings out the best thinking of everyone there and then develop the right set of next steps. Launch tiering philosophy: Not all product releases are created equal -- or more aptly, will have similar value for customers/the business. You will quickly tire out your external audiences and your internal teams if you are always shouting full volume about everything that ships. Having an agreed upon system for classifying upcoming releases as small/medium/large is a fantastic way to align on level of effort and importance for a given release and ensure all teams are investing the right amount of effort. Asana or similar tool: There's a lot of moving pieces in a launch. Trying to keep it all coordinated in a basic Google Sheet or word doc is just too brittle. I find that tools like Asana really shine when it comes to product launches as they combine timeline visualization, task ownership, commenting and communication, etc. all in one place and in a way that is much easier to manage/stay on top of. Retrospectives: Too often teams focus on the launch itself and shipping the thing and don't have an intellectually honest conversation after the fact to ask "did it work, and if not, how are we going to either improve results or avoid similar mistakes in the future?" These can be hard conversations to have as folks have invested a ton of energy into building and launching the product, but without them a company risks defining execution as success rather than defining the desired business outcome as success.

It sounds like the first issue that needs to be resolved at your company is the amount of resourcing on the PMM team. If you're barely staying on top of product launches, you have no capacity for the major projects and responsibilities that you see going to other teams -- leadership every time will care more about the work getting done than where the work gets done (and if that "where" has the right philosophical justification of ownership). Your options are to either scope down the volume of product launches by bundling features together or defining marketing launches as only being appropriate for "large/tier 1" releases, or to make the case for more people on the team. You'll also need to be able to make the case that the PMM team has the required skills to take ownership of the major projects in question if you were to get the extra bandwidth via either of the previous options -- if you think PMM should own buyer segmentation but your team doesn't have any experience doing that while another team like Product or BizOps has it in spades, leadership may not be excited to give you that project. If these paths end up being total dead ends, though, it may be that your organization or key senior leaders just don't value or understand the product marketing discipline. If that's the case, you may want to consider exploring opportunities at other companies. PMMs are in high demand!

Oh man, this is a tricky one! It's important to start by first identifying the source of tension. Is it due to leaders of those teams (or the leaders of those leaders) not seeing eye to eye and their conflict flowing downstream? Is it due to your predecessor being a jerk? Is it due to one team not following through on their commitments which in turn hurts the other team? I'd recommend then asking "what's my scope for influencing the relationship?" If you're a relatively junior IC PMM, you have a high scope for influencing your own relationship with a sales leader or PM counterpart, but you might not have much scope to influence the overall relationship between Product and Marketing if the core issue is the CMO and CPO are constantly in conflict. Once you've got those two things dialed, you can start to assess "what's the most meaningful step I can take, and who can I work with to implement the change?" If you're going to be a change agent seeking to help resolve a team-to-team dysfunctional relationship, you cannot do it on your own. You need the buy-in and support of your manager as well as a highly influential individual on the counterpart team as well at a bare minimum. How can you make them prioritize the problem, and how can you enlist their support in your goal at resolving for it? The latter could look like giving a public and visible endorsement of the work you're doing, providing resources for you to lead the change (data, time, whatever it may be), finding you allies for resolving the conflict, etc. I hope this helps, but it's tricky to give a general answer without the specifics of a given conflict as the number of variables at play is just so large.

I think the best approach for PMM is to employ a mix of programmatic and opportunity specific approaches to aligning stakeholders around customer priorities. Programmatic approaches are best for clarifying improvement opportunities for the existing buyer and customer journeys. Tools like win/loss analysis, monitoring key sales pipeline metrics (closed won ratio, time to close, etc.) and investigating where any metric is underperforming, and customer advisory boards are all great ways to keep a finger on the pulse of business performance and where to focus for improvements. Opportunity specific approaches are often more powerful. Skilled product marketers often can tell you on the spot their personal answer to “what are the top 3 things holding us back from accelerated business growth?” The answers they have will be things like “we’re focused on the wrong target customer,” “we aren’t sufficiently differentiated vs. the competition,” “we haven’t been satisfying a top customer pain point,” etc. To align stakeholders around those customer priorities, you need to develop a specific approach to building the business case that marries resources you have at hand (e.g. budget, time), the type of insights that are most compelling to key stakeholders (e.g. customer interviews vs. testimonials from top sales reps vs. quant analysis etc.), and an understanding of what inertia exists vs. your recommendation. This type of work is much harder to do than the programmatic version, but often is also the key to PMM becoming a truly strategic and essential team within a company.

Our team is structured by audience type and discipline. We have one part of the team focused on our end users and prospects, another part of the team is focused on our partners, and a third on market research and market strategy. That said, I strongly believe it's important for PMM teams at hypergrowth companies to be nimble in terms of their structure and be willing to redefine roles and responsibilities as company strategy and the needs of the business shift over time.

Communication: You simply must be a good communicator to be a stellar product marketer. So much of our discipline requires strong communication in order to provide clarity (both externally and internally) and develop and exercise influence. Strong communication to me spans written skills, presentation creation skills, public speaking skills, and executive presence. Adaptability: The potential list of things you might work on as a product marketer is so incredibly long and diverse! Someone who is excited by the chance to parachute into new situations and create new deliverables they've never encountered before is going to have a much steeper growth trajectory than someone who is less comfortable with change and ambiguity. Self direction: A manager cannot be in all places at once. Having a direct report who can take a high degree of ownership of all aspects of their job -- correctly surfacing and acting on organizational/data signals to shape their work, defining rough drafts of their quarterly and annual roadmaps, developing preliminary problem-solving approaches, successfully managing cross-functional relationships independently, etc. -- enables the manager and PMM to engage on a more strategic and high impact level. This is extra important in product marketing given the breadth of the discipline and how many things you could be working on at any given time.