Since payments are not like SaaS, where you are selling a subscription, how does your product marketing team define success?

When I was at Stripe, we had a robust self-serve channel in addition to sold deals. Startups that start by processing very small amounts of volume can grow up to be quite big. Our long-term bet hinged on this cohort-based approach, so we prioritized both channels ~equally.

Pageviews and impressions can be useful proxies to understand the impact a launch had on awareness, but the north star is usage and engagement. As a PMM group, we tried our best to align our metrics with the product and engineering groups, which means we’re looking at metrics that are further downfunnel than most other marketing teams. 

While our core product was payments infrastructure, we eventually also had software products like Stripe Radar or Stripe Sigma. Since the use cases they address and the user personas vary across the products, we defined usage and engagement on a per-product basis. We set usage and revenue targets annually, and tracked progress at monthly and quarterly business reviews for each product area. Some leading indicators include sign ups and MQLs + SQOs.