🟧 Hugo H. Macedo 🟧

There is no typical career path :) As a functional that interfaces and leverages cross-functional work and expertise across Marketing, Product, Sales, CS, and so on, you can come (and go) to all these areas. Having exposure to all of these helps. IMO, Product Marketing should be a senior step in your career after getting experience with other functions. But of course, also depends on the type of org your are in. In a small company a PMM works solo or in very small team and gets exposure to many things this enables them to learn and experience many different things. While in a bigger company, you have some opportunities to specialize if that's what you're looking for. ANyway, you your direction is to go to the manager track and become a leader (Director+) you need the broad exposure - because when you get there you'll be interacting with Marketing, Sales, Product and CS leaders and you need to understand their needs, their mindset and how to best partner with them.

If you haven't reached product market fit, then you don't have much to protect, to risk. That's a great position to experiment with your positioning :) Think of it as if you're searching to see what works - search in the problem and customer space. This means you need to figure out who you are going to solve and what problem you're going to solve. At this point, the question is still to open to give a precise and prescriptive answer.

this is a good reference for a PMM book - quite new https://www.svpg.com/books/loved-how-to-rethink-marketing-for-tech-products/ also read about Product Management - https://www.svpg.com/books/inspired-how-to-create-tech-products-customers-love-2nd-edition/ On positioning: the classic: Positioning from All Ries, Jack Trout the newer: Obviously Awesome - April Dunford

There's many ways to segment the market depending on situation, market, product. But consider 2 risks: * Too complex and hard to use - sometimes this happens because you have a lot of data, and you can use some fancy analysis techniques and "geek out" to find the "perfect" segments. The problem is that no one understands the result, and you have no way to operationalize that in targeting, qualification, or briefings. * Too broad - you define for example just by company size - this can be too generic and doesn't give enough focus, try to add more variables like company industry, region and department. How you segment can represent how you look at the market and give you insight and inspiration. Go beyond the obvious and try to see if it helps position and explain the product. For example, an e-signature tool can be segmented by the department/persona that uses it (Sales, HR, Marketing, Finance, Legal) or by the recipient (Customer, Employee, Supplier). These two POVs will shape how you market and think about the product.

They all need to come down to revenue impact. How much revenue is the campaign bringing or protecting? This is especially true for Product Marketing that should work across the buyer journey - from attracting the right audience, improving conversion, enabling sales to qualify and sell successfuly. Nevertheless, revenue can take some time and be affected by many things, so you can add some leading indicators (that will lead to revenue) * new leads * new opportunities (volume and value) * win-rate: if there's a good match between who we attract and the product, this should be high(er) All of this depends on the actual campaign objective. Needless to say, Product marketing should share the KPIs with other functions that are partnering with - e.g. Demand Gen, Sales, Product

Churn is a consequence, and most often, it is too late. You need to go backward and identify the problems. Segment the problem: * no usage * low usage * support/technical issues * competition Then, you need to choose what you will tackle first based on volume/value and hypotheses on how to fix it. For each, you need to dive deep and understand more of the issue. Who's the persona and/or use-case? any specific customer segment (e.g. enterprise customers) Some hypothesis to start with: * No usage - never passed the onboarding phase and was never adopted, the champion could purchase/subscribe but never to implement. * Low usage - only a tiny fraction of users or use-cases have activity not enough to deliver the value expected (and paid) * Support/Technical issues - how frequent and big is this? Does it relate to the same part of the product? e.g. Integration, SSO * Competition - is there a prevalent competitor? Is it price or features? What are the features/capabilities that are better? Work with the relevant team to understand the problem and evaluate its size and shape. Then, work on potential solutions and use an "effort x impact " matrix to prioritize. E.g., a new feature can solve the problem but can take 6 months to roll out. Sometimes churn can be a mismatch between Product and Go-to-market strategy, i.e. we're selling the product to the wrong segment with the wrong positioning. Examples: * Selling an SMB product to an Enterprise - a sales was made but then roll-out/onboarding hit some implementation "walls" due to lack of features/integrations or proper implementation/rollout management * Selling an SMB product to individuals - individuals use a fraction of the features until they get what they want or realize that it's too expensive, too much for them. This can be checked by analyzing churn by customer segment, in this case.

There is no right answer. It depends on the strategy - if it's more driven by self-service (PLG) or sales. In sales-driven organizations, sales bring revenue and, therefore, have a lot of power. This is even more true if there is a CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) that oversees Sales and Marketing. On many occasions, CROs come from a sales background, which means that sales get a lot of weight. The fact that compensation for sales is short-term may drive the organization to make more short-term decisions, and that's a problem and contrarian to the marketing mindset. The fact is that Marketing rarely calls the shots unless the Founder/CEO is a marketing-driven person.

Focus, focus, focus. PMM can be drawn to far too many projects and areas. That is too many meetings and stakeholders to manage. If it spreads too thin, it will be hard to deliver meaningful impact. How do you choose? Consider 2 variables - you can build a list and classify each with this: * Business priority - how much is aligned with the current business priority (right now, this Q) * Business partner - how good and effective is your partnership with the relevant team (CS, Sales, Marketing, Product) - you need them to be successful, prioritize the ones that know and want to work with you.

We're here to serve business goals - either from a Product perspective and is a product KPI, like Adoption. Or from a Sales perspective and is a sales KPI like Win-rate. We can't work in a vacuum. We're either helping set new initiatives or fixing things that are broken. The KPIs are tied to that. The shared KPIs with Sales, Marketing and Product are what ensure alignment and commitment.

Start by Figuring out the who first - who's your customer, your Ideal Customer, - who's buying, who's using, who's influencing. And you need alignment across the org, that you all obsess about that. You measure that, you target that, you filter out everything that is not that (or at least you don't waste more than 10-20% of your attention). All the rest is noise. all other things depend on that.