When do you know you’re ready for your first PMM hire? How do you think about setting that hire up for success?

You know you are ready when you’ve got at least one FT PM and your biz needs someone to stand up / drive any/all of the following:

1. Market Strategy & Customer Insights. Analyzing market data, honing competitive intelligence, and drawing on prospect & customer insights to define PMF (product market fit) and inform product roadmap decisions, including, industry and market trends analysis, competitive research, target segmentation, and prospect and customer insights

2. Positioning, messaging, packaging, pricing. Developing a customer-facing strategy to uniquely differentiate your offer in the marketplace, including persona development, shopper journey and lifecycle insights, packaging and pricing strategy, value props, messaging and positioning, and Social proof like testimonials, claims, and case studies.

3. Go-to-Market Strategy. Providing GTM strategy including creating the GTM strategy, channel strategy, funnel strategy, and creating sales training and enablement

4. Learning and Amplification. Systematize feedback from customers and front-line teams (or to start to collect it for the first time!) to improve and refine go-to-market strategy, including customer insights and data analysis, thoughts on for new products or feature enhancements, and recommendations for new marketing strategies or GTM campaigns.

I don't think it's ever too early for your first PMM hire as they can help identify the product-market fit, positioning, and messaging. To make sure you have set up for success, make sure you have some people staffed (either full time or contract) where they can share work and delegate the strategy. Often times, this means having copywriters/content people, paid ads support, and product managers that are managing the product releases/roadmap.