How is the PMM team structured at Okta?

When I was at Okta, PMM was under the Chief Product Officer, so my peer was our head of product management. We had a ‘triad’ model of one PMM, one PM, and one TMM (tech marketing manager) per product for the first 8 years. That worked pretty well as the PM/PMM lead essentially owned the business plan and go-to-market plan for their product. Shared foxhole, so to speak. Tech Marketing was really focused on compete (especially Microsoft compete), technical content and SE enablement.

After we got to about $100M in ARR, we had to shift to more of a solutions marketing approach. This happens naturally and typically when the product portfolio gets to 3-4 products. It becomes confusing for customers if there’s all of this content organized around products vs. problems customers have. So, we started having dual responsibility for a product and solution. You can see the solutions on the Okta site, all centered around our the top 80% of customer problems (prevent data breaches, collaborate with partners, increase M&A agility, etc).

Post IPO, PMM moved under the CMO. Again, natural. Early days, it was more important to be aligned to the rapid evolution of the product. But, over time, the needs of the large field started becoming more and more urgent to align to.