Amy Loh

It's important to set KPIs that directly tie to the overall business or organization's goals. My organization has a P&L so we have a revenue target that we must hit with assumptions around growth and retention for each product. I expect every PMM to understand how we're tracking against that growth target which makes up of other KPIs, such as top-of-funnel metrics (e.g. free trials, leads), conversion rate, churn, etc. Besides growth KPIs, it's also critical to understand other metrics, such as feature adoption rates and customer NPS. This will help us understand what features are critical for target customers and ensure we're taking customer feedback to improve the product. 

I've worked with many PMM teams at Square, and the best ones put the customer experience front and center. PMM teams are organized in different ways -- by product, channel, stage in funnel, or customer segment. This can lead to individual PMMs optimizing for their own KPIs, creating a disjointed customer experience. The best PMM teams will think about the seams between products and the entire lifecycle of the customer. I'd encourage PMM teams to map the customer journey. For example, what does a prospect see when they enter from different channels? What ongoing messages do they see when they go through the product experience? Finding gaps in the customer experience will ensure you are telling a cohesive narrative.

One area that I generally push to understand is the ability to tie their work to business impact. I've interviewed many candidates who have led impressive product launches or been part of a big growth story. When they speak about their experience, I try to understand why they decided to go in a specific direction, what did they learn that made them change course, and how the results ladder up to the overall business goals. I want to hear them articulate how a successful launch ultimately contributed to their team's growth targets. 

I'm lucky that we have great partners in Sales who have developed processes for sales training and enablement. The main challenge is once you roll it out - how do you get them to retain the knowledge and utilize the content? * Highlight how your product can help them achieve their targets - Sales teams have aggressive quotas to hit, so when you showcase how your product sales can help them close the gap, they are more likely to adopt. Use examples of key wins that have really helped achieve the team's success. * Make the content easy to adopt - help them craft cadences that incorporate your content and collateral * Use data to increase usage - pull data on the number of views/downloads and tie it to the impact on the sales funnel * Continue the engagement - once you've rolled something out, ensure you have forums where you're regularly connecting with the Sales team to hear what's going well. These are good forums for additional training while gaining a better understanding of your customers. 

It's important to make a plan but plans should change when presented with new information. PMMs on my team are aligned to sprint teams within our organization so that we have a small team of PMM, PM, Engineering, Design, and Data. They have their own rituals and practices that allow them to discuss tradeoffs, reprioritize, and plan their roadmaps. How do they stay agile? * They typically have goals/KPIs that they're aiming to hit together as a team. They look at this data regularly and assess if they need to shift priorities. * They bring new insights to the table - whether it's customer feedback, Sales challenges, or tech challenges that can also help them change the course of the roadmap.

Every market is likely facing different challenges. A more mature market may be tapping into new audiences to drive growth while a newly launched market lacks awareness or feature parity. When creating a global strategy, it's important to recognize the unique challenges of different markets by staying close to in-market experts, such as Customer Success and Sales, and look at all of the GTM challenges to prioritize. Another challenge is developing content/campaigns for scale -- for my team, it means taking whatever is in the US and localizing market by market. That's not a very scaleable approach and my advice is to design a scalable global solution first that can easily be adapted/localized. Finally, it's important to have on-the-ground experts to capture local nuances. My team doesn't have in-market PMMs to drive efforts, so having local customer-facing teams to ensure that the tone and nuances are culturally acceptable is critical. 

While leading a smaller team means you're often still in the weeds, it also means you're closer to the customer and metrics. That's a huge advantage to influencing the strategy! Here are a few suggestions: * Connect with leadership and understand when strategy discussions or milestones are taking place. This could be annual or quarterly planning and carve out time to be an active contributor to those discussions. * Take time to reflect on what you've learned. Develop larger themes and challenges across your product area that you want to surface. Review campaign metrics, adoption trends, and customer feedback that best support these themes. * Carve out time to refresh foundational work regularly (e.g. refreshing competitive analyses or ideal customer profiles). It's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day work, but this foundational work can help influence and shape strategy conversations.