Madison Leonard

Personally, I hate mini projects for strategic roles and think they should be abolished altogether. The only exception to this rule is internal transferring, esp if you have no prior experience in that type of role. I prefer that prospective candidates put together a presentation on a previous strategy they've built. Presentations are a must-have skill for any product marketer, so this is a great test to see how well they tell the story and if the messaging sticks. Presenting previous experience ensures that you're getting the best from your candidate. They should be experts on that industry, the users, the problem/solution, etc. You should be able to ask them any question, no matter how detailed, and they should be confident in providing a thorough answer. If you were to ask those same detailed questions about a mini project for a product and industry that is likely foreign to them... you'll get either lies or "I don't know". This isn't an efficient use of anyone's time! Some basic questions to that any PLG product marketer should have no problem answering: * What do you think is the difference between PLG product marketing and traditional product marketing? * How do you know if a company is successful at PLG strategy? If you're looking for some green flags, I'd recommend folks with B2C experience and/or experience with other types of marketing rather than in sales.

This is such a hard one! I think it would be getting leadership buy-in. There are so many conflicting priorities in the workday, especially in a startup environment. Each team is contributing to the overall success of the company in major ways. When you have new initiatives you want to implement or a pivot in strategy, it can sometimes be hard to convince other teams or figure out a way to add it to their workstreams. And often I find that even if I do get individual teams to buy-in, leadership is a whole different ball game! Here are my top takeaways to make this process easier: * Establish a cadence with your top 5 folks * Contribute quick wins to impact their deliverables * Plant your idea seed early 

Ooof this is a tough one and honestly it depends on how things were structured at your organization from the beginning. IMO, product marketing should influence/contribute to webinars, but not own webinar execution. For thought-leadership webinars, I've seen product marketing, content, and comms all own this in the past. If you're lucky to have a large marketing team, I usually divide responsibilities for webinars like this: 1. Product marketing owns outline and enablement material 2. Content owns design and copy refinement 3. Ops or Success owns delivery and lead tracking backend 

Customer advisory boards are best when you keep the customers under 10 people and ask them to stay on for 1-2 years. Strategically hand-pick your advisors from the markets you want to break into or dominate. For example, if you want to go more into Enterprise, you shouldn't have 9/10 people from SMB companies on your board. While advisory boards can certainly help with retention, I'd argue they are better suited for roadmap planning and keeping them happy customers. For product retention, I'd pull in PMs and growth PMs to lead the charge on improving user retention and activation. 

TDLR: self-serve product marketing focuses on the individual user persona and their use cases vs traditional product marketing in a sales-led company focuses on the buyer persona and business results. However, the catch is that most PLG organizations have both product-led growth and product-led sales happening simultaneously so you'll need both to have a successful acquisition strategy amongst SMB, Mid Market, and Enterprise alike! If you want more detail, check out this talk I did on the difference between PLG PMM and Sales-led PMM: https://youtu.be/Mbd0pUO1HXs

The frameworks are pretty similar. Talk with your customers, develop a narrative based on the pain points they have, and craft positioning based on your findings. There are some cool tools out there to help with website message testing (like Wynter), in-app messaging (like Pendo), and competitive intelligence tools (like Crayon). Ultimately, the availability of these tools will depend based on the stage of the company you're at and the available budget for software. Even if you don't have access to those tools, you should still put a lot of emphasis on talking with customers. Hear their pains, develop positioning and GTM strategy based on what you hear, and test it with that same persona to ensure you're on track. 

Land and expand is music to my ears! Growth for PLG companies focuses on word-of-mouth and peer-to-peer sharing, both organic and strategic. Example of organic word-of-mouth sharing = mentioning slack in a product marketing discord group. Example of strategic peer-to-peer sharing = slack prompting me to invite users during onboarding, and I do. However, this can be utilized internally as well for a bottoms-up adoption movement! I call these folks "champions" - they are deep lovers of the platform and want others to benefit, too. We can leverage these champions through in-product growth loops (e.g. prompts to invite your coworker) as well as strategic expansion initiatives such as CS-led adoption campaigns or change management support. The truth is, this takes a long time to do effectively so strap in for the long haul! The best metric I can recommend for expansion is called product-qualified-lead. This is essentially a scoring system that is determined using the following information: * Size of the company * Persona/ICP match * Usage triggers Using Slack as an example, let's say that Pam is a product marketer at Salesforce. Pam created a Slack workspace and added her product marketing team. As she continues to use the product, she's finding that her workflow is inhibited by context switching between meetings/email and Slack - this makes it difficult for her to stay on top of product teams as they are nearing a launch in addition to wasting time relaying this information back and forth. Pam decided to add Jim, her product management counterpart, to her Slack Workspace since they are a few weeks out from a product launch. In that time, Pam and Jim experience the value of contextual conversations in Slack. Jim tells the rest of the product team and they join the following week. Pam and Jim match Slack's ICP criteria. And while they only have about 10 folks on Slack right now, using enrichment data we can see that they are part of a massive enterprise organization. Lastly, they are using primary features of Slack that indicate upgrade-readiness. These things in tandem push an automatic notification to Sales and Success teams to begin expansion playbook (also developed in tandem with product marketing teams). TLDR: 1. Identify your ideal customer, company size, and usage triggers to indicate expansion readiness 2. Implement an automated way to pass this information over to Sales/Success teams 3. Launch an expansion playbook to simplify change management, bottoms-up internal selling, etc. 

PLG product marketing is focused on the individual user, whereas sales-led product marketing is focused more on the buyer. However, I will say that most PLG companies mature into utilizing both product led growth and sales led growth together. For PLG, the messaging is more focused on solving the individual user's pain point, ultimately helping them to do their job better/faster. These users are going to be using your product often and are looking for a specific solution. However, sales-led product marketing is focused on thought-leadership positioning about the future state of the business/industry. Usually, buyers are not going to be in the product that often and so they are looking for solutions that save time/money or increase revenue. 

B2C PMM is all about the product itself. You're not having to go through buyers like you do with B2B - so you've got to speak to the product success. Don't make the common mistake I see B2C PMMs make today! I see so many people just focus on output (number of blogs, that a launch happened, copy skills, etc). Talk about the impact of your work - did it help the product grow? Did you increase adoption or retention? Did you find product-market-fit? And since it's a big company, they're going to also want to have trust that you can manage a political atmosphere with lots of different stakeholders. Best of luck! 

Great question - the short answer is that traditionally Product Marketing has been seen as sales-focused rather than product focused. In sales-led organizations, PMM doesn't play a big role (usually) in product experience, road mapping, etc. That's soo far from the case with B2C product marketing. PMM is working closely with Product on user personas (different than buyer personas), onboarding, product growth, and adoption. A lot of PMMs I know come from sales backgrounds, so it would be hard to transition to a B2C type of role where it's more product-centric. It's just a different type of focus!