Indy Sen

That's a good question. I think it will vary based on when you start your career as a PMM and where. I've seen PMM leaders go on to be CMOs and founders, or successfully transition over to areas like product management and general management. In terms of roles/titles, you typically see a progression of the following type: Product Marketing Manager (PMM) Senior PMM Group PMM Director PMM, Senior Director VP Bigger firms like Google als have entry-level programs like the associate product marketing manager program (APMM) which are simply amazing and help you figure out whether that path is right for you. Bottom line, there's a lot of optionality for a PMM to go on to larger management or entrepreneurial roles because the role is so cross functional to begin with. 

Such a great question. I think the best thing you can do invest in yourself and "sharpen the saw". This is especially critical earlier in your career. A couple of approaches: 1.) Read - My mom has this saying: Books are like software updates for your brain. Yes, not all business books are spell-binding page turners, but you'll quickly see that your brain will free associate and you'll draw on differents nuggets, often at opportune times. I've stumbled on frameworks for example that helped chart the course for a GTM, or quotes that set the entire tone for a keynote. And it's not just business books, but stuff like sociology, psychology and even biographies. Fiction is also great because of the rich storytelling aspects, narrative arcs. If you find an author whose writing you love, read everything she's written because it will make you a better communicator. 2.) Watch - Ted Talks, Superbowl ads, Saturday Night Live, it's all good--really. As a marketer I think it's really important to have your pulse on the zeitgeist and pop culture. This is advice I received from Danielle Morrill, an early Twilio employee, and while it felt self-indulgent and non-intuitive at first, it does help you come up with stuff that feels relatable. You're often just a good meme or pop culture reference away from making an idea stick. Podcasts are great for this too. 3.) Speak - "Every time you speak, you are auditioning for leadership". This is a quote from James Humes, a former presidential speechwriter. The more you can dial into your authentic self and the earlier you get confident expressing your ideas in public settings, the better you will be at your job. People often have this reflexive "I suck at public speaking" fear, but all speaking is public speaking. Steve Jobs used to maniacally rehearse his keynotes. Marc Benioff starts his next big idea keynotes with a kernel that he first peppers into customer meetings or smaller settings and then continuously tweaks until it's Dreamforce ready. So do Toastmasters, or jump at opptys to represent your company at conferences. Speaking is a muscle and one that will make you stronger as a marketer. 4. ) Courses: You can and should definitely take courses as well. Business school is obviously a popular option, and it helped moved the needle in my career as a career-switcher--but it's also expensive, which is why I started with some of the ideas above as they are more accessible and practical. Many employers offer e-learning options like Lynda, or in person classes as well. At Google, I goaled myself on taking at least one or two of these a quarter because to me, it felt like it was part of our compensation package--why wouldn't you do it?

Influencing: You need the ability to inspire and drive cross-functional teams, often without any of the "authority". Cross matrixed orgs FTW, baby. Storytelling: You can turn a plot into a narrative (see answer above). You have a knack for finding that storytelling hook that gets to your why this solution, and why now? Positioning: You can distill a product's features and benefits into something that's aspirational and make the audience feel like this product is uniquely suited to their needs, and can even turn them into a better version of themselves. This is true whether you're marketing an iPhone or an Enterprise Service Bus. Curiousity: Stay hungry, stay foolish. You know you're doing a good job when you learn something new every day. 

Yes, in my experience there are definitely a few org considerations that will shape your fortunes as a PMM, and navigating those will determine whether you're set up for success. 1. The first, as you allude to is the function you report into. I've been in orgs where PMM has been in marketing, product or sales. IMO, PMM should always be part of marketing because, while you're no doubt deeply embedded with the latter two functions, you are by definition a marketer and need to be evaluated as such. The problem with being in product or sales orgs is that your contributions--while appreciated--will not be top of mind when it comes to calibration and performance assessment. And that's just physics--a PM leader will likely dole out comp and stock refreshes to the top PM talent they want to retain. Ditto with sales, which can be an even harder case to make as performance is quota based and you are the "cost center". Note that it's fine and even a good idea to be dotted to product/sales. 2. The second is more company specific, and has to do with the dominant company culture. You've probably heard of companies that are more sales centric, or others where engineering is "king". Now you can do amazing work as a marketer at either one of these, and grow your skillset commensurately, but do pay attention to how "valued" marketing really is as that's what will ultimately affect your long term growth trajectory. Things to watch out for: PMM viewed as a "service bureau" i..e "so we're launching this product in 3 weeks and need a blog post" or if you feel stuck constantly doing reactive and ad hoc work vs fleshing out programs and shaping strategy. As you can tell there's a bunch of situational stuff and pattern matching you should try and stock of as quickly as you can. But if you're at least confident that you're set up for success from a reporting and cultural standpoint, then the rest is up to you. And that's the fun part.

It's really the following three functions: product, sales and the greater marketing team. You will regularly interface with these three, and depending on the company will be deeply embedded with product and sales. The one way I see this changing is that businesses increasingly need to bring B2D aka Business to Developer sensibilities to the fore. Think about how so many companies are becoming "platform companies" and that means that product marketing will also need to supporters stakeholders such as Dev Rel and/or BD who interface with developers and partners respectively. I heard the other day APIs being described as self-service BD for companies, and that really rings true in this day and age. Every company is either sitting on a data asset or has a customer base that others want to plug into. As a PMM, your ability to market your wares and interop frameworks and making internal stakeholders on that side of the house equally as successful as sales and product will be increasingly important. 

Looks like this question got the most upvotes so let me start with it and try and give as much context as I can. At Google we had the following heuristic for marketing which was: 1.) Know the user 2.) Know the magic 3.) Connect the two It informed our marketing overall, but especially our positioning and messaging. You asked about both and I would actually separate the two. For positioning it's always a good idea to start with the product and engineering teams. They are typically the closest to the vision of the product--who it's for/what it does/how does it do it i.e. the "magic". I often use the metaphor that if the product is a movie, PM and Eng will typically cook up the plot, while it's product marketing's job to deliver the narrative. Sales is also a good stakeholder for positioning. They'll help you narrow down the "user" details, especially in enterprise where they spend more time with customers than anyone else in the organization. So it really behooves you to spend as much time with sales as you can. Done right, product marketing is sale's best friend. So at big companies, prod, eng and sales are typically good places to start for positioning while at smaller companies, like startups, you may want to involve the founder and leadership team early as they have most of the datapoints. But I'd keep the stakeholder list pretty tight overall when it comes to positioning otherwise you'll tend to swirl and it's really important to nail positioning first, because messaging is the by product. Per the Google heuristic above, positioning covers the user and the magic. Connecting the two is where messaging comes in, and that's where you should open up the aperture when it comes to stakeholder management IMO. This is where Demand Gen, Field, AR, PR or even support stakeholders comes in. The reason is simple. As the product marketer, people will and should treat you as the SME when it comes to the product positioning but will likely want to help shape what messaging looks like at the last mile, whether that's on the web, email copy, print ads, events and activations, or when talking to the press and analysts. After all, they own those channels, are directly responsible for their performance and know what typically plays well and performs--or not. The worst thing you can do is go against the grain and be precious about a turn of phrase or a cool tagline. At Salesforce, we had a campaign where with partners where we thought we could riff of the expression "being on cloud nine". Well that worked well in NORAM, but didn't make sense in other markets where the expression was meaningless when translated. So when it comes to positoning, be ruthless and direct about who has input as you don't want to swirl on that or compromise. But for messaging, take the inputs, and to paraphrase Bruce Lee "be like water". While you shouldn't let the substance change, you want your message to resonate. 

I think the pandemic has been a reset moment for us all, in more ways than one. For Product Marketing, it's put a renewed onus on equipping your teams with messaging that resonates and also make the case that your product is not a nice to have, but a need to have. We've gone through similar cycles before and you can pattern match. During the '08 recession Salesforce first took a hit like almost every other software company, but becuase the cloud had the unique distinction of helping business better affect their IT spend (Cap Ex to Op Ex) salesforce did better than all of its rivals. Disruption is inevitable. But suffering is optional. You just have to determine what the best way is to convey that your product is made for this moment. 

Great question, and always exciting to be at a juncture where you're considering expanding your GTM to address specific verticals and opportunities. Getting a vertical right is not always easy, but when you have the right structure and offerings, the work across other opportunities is very repeatable. There are several ways to think about this from a marketing approach: 1. Picking the vertical: Spinning up a vertical marketing strategy within marketing is a big bet because you have to orchestrate a lot of bespoke programs and content across demand gen, content marketing and sales enablement, to name a few. So stack ranking and picking the right bets will be essential. The way I've seen us pick verticals, whether it was at Google or Matterport was to keep our ear to the ground with sales and other customer-facing parts of the organization as to where we were seeing repeated requests from a particular industry or functional area. This could be financial services or retail (industry verticals), as much as it could be marketing or sales (functional verticals). Seeing where the chatter is can help you prioritize. If those teams are busy you can also analyze the opportunity data yourself, and look at deals that might be stuck in a particular area for lack of a solid product offering. Ideally, sales leadership should have that information and as a marketer you should make it a point to be across those weekly touch-points. Having the right hygiene in salesforce about this will be key for everyone, but in a pinch, you can also hopefully quickly scan recordings of those sales calls to further validate which areas could be ones of opportunity. That's the best approach in my mind as it's organic and rooted in the reality of the conversations you are currently fielding, but perhaps not crushing. The other way of picking the vertical is to do the market research and opportunityr leadership team and develop sizing with you a strong view of where you could go next. You'll have to sift through a lot of opinions there, and as a product marketer, you'll need to be very aligned with the product team on what the product is ready to tackle to enable sales to have the most authentic conversations. I'll leave you with one anecdote here. Google Sheets didn't have page numbers enabled for printouts for the longest time. Not surprisingly, that was the number one complaint we got from customers in financial services for not adopting the tool, because it meant we didn't understand the needs of that particular vertical. They weren't wrong. For all our talk and focus on moonshots, we shot ourselves in the foot by not clamoring for those table stakes. 2. Focusing on one or two verticals at the most: A common pitfall when adopting a vertical marketing strategy is taking on too many verticals at one time. Sure, you might have hired an industry solutions whiz, or brought some capabilities that should be replicable across several verticals, but you still have zero flight time going deep in understanding what makes those customers tick, how they procure things, who do they trust, etc. You have to get the psychology right, and then, if you're doing full stack marketing against those opportunities you have to obviously get the physics right. That's very very hard to nail all in one go, let alone across multiple verticals. So my recommendation is to start small but go deep. It might take a quarter or two to land that first big vertical customer, but when you do, you'll have a goldmine of insights on how to knock out the others. At Matterport, we started with a lofty goal of "Winning the Verticals" and had all the right people involved in terms of building an encompassing strategy to go after them. We had a robust plan, but were spread to thin. We then shifted to a Win a Vertical strategy, and that then helped set the stage for great, repeatable work. 3. Nailing the offering in a way that's replicable: We talked about focusing on the few vs the many, I'd argue that's also the outlook that product marketing can advocate for with product in terms of what will be the set offerings that are bespoke and essential to acquiring those verticals. It'll be tempting to go after a particular vertical and advocate for a whole set of features that cater to them, but the key ones are more foundational. Are you FedRamp/ISO/HIPAA compliant. Ironically, a lot of industry-based stage gates to penetration are process-driven vs feature-driven. There are checkboxes you'll need to seek out and make sure your offerings can meet before being considered a serious contender. Of course you also need to build the right features. That's where understanding the psychology and workflows of the users you're targeting will matter. Which leads me to my last recommendation 4. Accelerating your execution via SMEs: A total cheat code for accelerating your vertical penetration is to hire or consult with a SME from that industry who either was in sales or in BD there, but may be looking for a job or advisory gig in tech. Sounds crazy, but anyone who has that industry experience will help you understand the psychology and physics of that industry in record time. I learned that from my consulting days where a key-opinion-leader or KOL provided us with all the right inputs on how to frame our analysis. Ideally you want to have someone like that across each vertical. You don't have to hire them, but if you're serious about that vertical, they're worthy every penny.

Think of your PMM team as an interface to the organizations they serve. Your org structure can vary from company to company, but I've often said that messaging, if done right, should be like an API across your organization. Same goes with your PMM organization. The more you can optimize for information flow between team members, the more "performant" your API will be. So when thinking about platform solutions PMMs vs product-focused PMMs I go back to the classic vertical vs horizontal services style org chart. Picture an org chart. Across it are what I'd call your vertical PMMs - the SMES across specific products or audience groups. Directly below them are your horizontal PMMs (think common/shared layers like program management, sales enablement, analyst relations, research and insights). I'd push for Platform and Solutions to be part of that horizontal stack as it almost always ties back to specific products. On the Google Workspace team for example, I supported the APIs and SDKs across each core product like Drive, Gmail, Docs, Slides, Sheets. And while there was a dedicated, product-focused PMM or team of PMMs across each, my team would regularly interface with them so we could cross-pollinate our storytelling, refactor/remix content so as to be across key messaging moments. Crucially we all reported to the same manager at the top level. That enabled us to be across the same operating cadences and business rhythms in real-time, allowing for efficient information exchange and flow.

Positioning is the precursor to messaging. If you don't know who your product is for, what it's good for and how it's different from other products in its space, then it will be very hard to come up with viable messaging. Put another way, positioning is the primitive, typically expressed as an internal statement (see question above re: Geoffrey Moore's framework), whereas messaging is a set of derivative assets, typically copy and value statements that help suit the needs of different channels and media (web, print, social, video, on-site activations, etc)