Christopher Greco

The easiest way to influence heterogeneous goals is to show how action A for goal A would provide a positive impact on action B and goal B. In the end, everyone has the same goal: increase company revenue / margins / stakeholder value. But depending on how these goals are set, you might have a long way to go before succeeding. So what would a PMM do? * Identify your target goal * identify the target audience and persona * define their jobs-to-be-done * tailor your positioning and messaging to fit the needs of your target audience * SUCCESS Influencing other departments is a key skill within a Product Marketer's portfolio, and we're lucky our bread and butter positions us in a way that makes it doable for us. TL;DR: understand what your counterpart might get out of your request for their own benefit, and use it "against" them.

Use a GenAI solution to go back and forth as if it were an interviewer, and have it critique your answers. 1. Practicing alone can be good if you can be objective, which we can rarely be. Still, recording yourself practicing is a good way to improve the way you give voice to your answers. 2. With that being said, you need someone to ask you some questions. Prime a generative AI solution (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc.) to act like a product marketing director working in your field and ask it to ask you questions you'd probably experience in a real interview. 3. Say that you want to answer questions using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Review), and ask for thoughtful feedback on what worked and what didn't. 4. If you'd like, retake the answer incorporating said feedback and repeat. This method tries to mimic having a real-life interviewer / mentor to practice with. When that's not available, we can now use AI to get as close to it as possible. Tip 1: use speech-to-text to answer as if you were talking to a person. This way your tone of voice would be suitable for a conversation. Tip 2: record yourself while giving these answers. You'll notice subtle mistakes that you can iron out. Still, don't overthink it!

Work backward: define your goal -> understand where your users are more likely to be and convert -> understand which channels provide the best ROI. The first step is always to understand what should be achieved by a particular launch. Is it new signups? Feature adoption? Upselling? Based on this segmentation, use your data to understand what the best-performing channels could be based on historical information. Add to the equation competitive intel: is there anything you could steal and test with this launch? Add to the equation your own hypothesis: do you have an idea that could raise the bar? Focus on what worked before for similar segments (both yours and from your competition), and dedicate a portion of your budget / time to test new channels and ideas. Working based on historical data only works when you keep experimenting to update it and enrich it.

Not everything needs a full-scale Tier 1 or Tier 2 launch, but that shouldn't stop you from communicating effectively important changes for Tier 3, just make sure you're not overshadowing or reducing the impact of what's more important. The framework is the usual: * understand who'd be impacted the most * understand how big of an impact it would make * understand how this release fits within your other launches / comms. Could it be paired with another one for example to avoid overcommunication? Could it wait until a downtime in the feature roadmap? * Cherry pick what to say, when, and where. Having too much overload will make both your internal (especially sales) and external stakeholders. TL;DR: it's important to communicate important things, but at times it's more important to get other things across first.

Gradually increase trust toward your function's strategical capabilities from the different function leaders. It's never easy to gain the trust of other people. Take any opportunities you have and slowly build upon them. It's not an overnight success and it will take a lot of effort, but you might have a good feature idea from a market insight. That might give you some leverage over the product team, and if you play your cards well they'll see the value you can provide them as voice of the market. Same with sales teams: start (politely and subtly) suggesting ways they could get better results. "Prospect X has a usecase B. Why don't we try doing Z?". In short: work your way up and put in the strategical work. Before you realize it, other teams will rely more and more on your function.