Ashir Badami

In my experience, the most important thing to do to support focus is assess organizational alignment and capabilities when you arrive at the decision to build a PMM team. It's not very common for organizations to invest heavily in building whole Product Marketing teams, but when they do, it's to support growth through more effective market expansion or better profitability. The trick is to understand what the real objective is, which means getting to the heart of the corporate strategy. You need to know what the real 'ask' is. If the organization wants to expand market share you may feel the urge to build a team capable of supporting go-to-market (GTM) operations at scale -- things like release marketing, sales enablement, etc -- but if the product-market (or message-market) fit is not there the real work you may need to do is in GTM strategy (segmentation, sizing, positioning). This can have a real impact on the complexion of the team you create. My suggestion is to level set with leadership (marketing, product and sales) to get alignment on what the drivers are and then build a team calibrated to the 12-24 month trajectory. If you can't invest time in the above, resist the urge to just add bodies to support purely tactical projects like taking releases to market and so on. You can only operate at that level for so long in the absence of strong strategic foundations and alignment.