Sam Melnick

Managing up is a huge part of being a PMM, especially when aiming for a leadership position. How this is done depends on where you are in your career and what is expected of you. An IC Product Marketer needs to manage up and across, but I'd expect them to seek out specific direction from their manager and other key stakeholders more frequently than a senior manager or Director who should come with more developed plans and recommendations. That said, there are a few common themes that I would recommend regardless of current level: 1. Understand Your Leaders: Get to know your leaders' preferences, communication styles, and priorities. Do they want to be brought in early in a process for input or are they good just reviewing your project plan or goals? 2. Proactive Communication: Regularly update your leaders on your progress, challenges, and strategic direction. Be proactive in seeking their input and feedback, change happens constantly, your leader is your conduit to getting information quickly and making sure your work aligns to top-level goals. 3. Use Your Leaders to Prioritize: Don't look to leaders or stakeholders to tell you exactly what to do, rather use them to prioritize initiatives effectively. Go to them and say "How would you prioritize these X initiatives?" or "Which of these projects should I drop?" 4. Adaptability: Remain flexible and open to feedback from your stakeholders. Product Marketers are in the middle of A LOT of different teams and projects, you have to show that you are willing to adjust your approach and pivot when necessary. Digesting new information and addressing feedback is an important part of managing up. 5. Measure & Tie to Goals: It's easy to get lost in the execution as there is always more to do, but show leaders that you are tracking specific goals that relate to corporate initiatives and report back on progress.

PMM's are prime candidates for leadership positions due to the cross-functional nature of the work. Great PMMs and PMM teams are working with Product, Enablement, Sales, CS, Ops...not to mention all of their marketing peers. Because of this, there are plenty of opportunities to lead through influence or as a project lead. While not all PMMs want to move to official people management (which is perfectly fine!!), for those who are interested, I look for the following skills: 1. Communication and Collaboration: They must be able to lead a project and communicate goals across diverse teams. 2. Macro Thinking: Ability to look at their projects and focus areas and connect them to larger company and market trends. Bonus points for being proactive with these ideas and bringing people together to execute on them. 3. Results Orientation: Track record of delivering measurable results, meeting targets, and driving business growth through their projects and product areas. Specifically driving the full cycle of goal definition, tracking, and reporting. 4. Leadership Presence and Mentorship: Demonstrated ability to work with others, lead projects by providing clear direction, and find ways to mentor and support jr members of the team. And an added piece of advice, if your goal is to become a people manager, tell your manager! The opportunity may not present itself immediately, but get it on their radar.

This is a fun, but challenging question. If there's no Wave or Magic Quadrant (MQ) for your category, long-term and strategic thinking becomes incredibly important. Here are some approaches to consider: * Play the Long Game: Understand that establishing recognition in a category is a journey that typically spans 2-4 years. Be ready to commit to a firm and analyst practice for an extended period, getting placed doesn't happen in a single cycle. * Explore Adjacent Categories: Look for existing reports/categories where you can position your company as a part. Being included, even if it's not as a top-ranking company, can pay dividends if you're called out as exceptional in a specific niche. This can add to your competitive positioning and visibility in the market. * Cultivate Analyst Relationships: Build strong relationships with industry analysts. Provide them with valuable insights, learn from their perspectives, and engage in meaningful discussions. Analysts play a crucial role in shaping market perceptions and can be valuable allies in gaining recognition. They are human as well, they want to work with interesting and smart people! * Start Small, Aim High: Begin by aiming to be included in reports or analyses that may not carry the same weight as a Wave or MQ but still contribute to your visibility and competitive standing. Every inclusion adds credibility and opens doors for future recognition. There really aren't shortcuts here, you need to take a patient approach, but it can pay off in the long run, particularly in the enterprise space!

Let's be clear. CI is a team effort and its very hard to be THE end-all-be-all source for this information. While that can work for a time, a small team cannot be everywhere at all times, so communicating that to the rest of the organization is paramount. There are two tactics I suggest using. 1. Tie your efforts to Revenue (yes this is a common theme with me :) ): You must clearly articulate how competitive intelligence contributes to winning deals and ties directly to company-level revenue numbers. This helps emphasize its importance and impact on business outcomes and gets you buy-in across the organization that they can help make an impact. 2. Flattery and Empathy: Show appreciation and empathy towards customer-facing teams. Acknowledge the challenges they face and how their input and insights are crucial for effective competitive intelligence. Respect their expertise and experience in dealing with customers daily. Also, a little flattery when they handle something well or provide important input goes a long way! But the biggest thing is to ask for help and acknowledge that a successful competitive program takes a village.

Competitive positioning is worthless if you can't explain and train your sales and customer success teams. That's why partnering closely with your enablement team and front-line managers is essential to getting the right information to the team AND for them to retain the information. Here's how I've done it (with significant help from my enablement partners): * Trainings: Provide live and recorded training sessions to ensure everyone understands the competitive landscape. Live sessions allow for real-time Q&A, while recorded sessions (often with quizzes) offer flexibility for reps to learn at their own pace. * Slide Deck: Create specific slide decks for specific competitors. Each should have a "how to use" section at the start, competitive differentiators, and strategic insights. This deck should be easy to update and accessible for quick refreshers before important calls or meetings. You will be updating these quarterly. * Wiki Card: Develop a detailed wiki card with talk tracks, objection handling, and expected FUD. Ensure it's easily accessible through your sales enablement platform so reps can reference it during sales calls. Additionally, work closely with sales or customer success managers to refine the message, so they can effectively train their front-line teams. This collaboration ensures the competitive positioning is consistently communicated and reinforced when you aren't in the room.

Some of my favorite PMMs have spent time in field roles— Sales, Sales Engineering, and in particular Customer Success. Getting first-hand experience working with customers and prospects is invaluable and having empathy for the people serving your customers is also important. Exposure to sales provides invaluable insights into customer needs, pain points, and purchasing behaviors. Roles like sales engineering offer a deep understanding of product functionality and technical aspects. Experience in customer success equips PMMs with a holistic view of the customer journey, from onboarding to retention and where value is delivered. Having a diverse background like this fosters empathy, adaptability, and a customer-centric mindset, qualities that are essential for success in product marketing.

This is a tough topic/question as PMM teams can be structured in INFINITE ways. A lot depends on company size, company goals, your product counterpart and that team's structure, and the needs of the GTM team. Currently, my PMM team matches up with specific PMs in a ~2.5:1 ratio, I try to match PMM > Product, so they are the go to person on that offering. I also have a PMM focused on Launch and Process, they are responsible for helping define the process of bringing products to market and helping program manage any tier 1 or 2 launches. I then have PMMs handle auxiliary projects or offerings (think unique services or differentiators that may not have a clear "product owner"). This might be a full time role or side of the desk project depending on the company priorities at that time Enablement and Market Intelligence are also on my team currently and I've had customer marketing in the past. The common theme is I want everyone on my team involved in the most impactful, challenging, cross-functional projects at the company!

1. Use your expertise and unique knowledge to partner with Product Marketing on a project, any project! When I was a CSM on a new product, I started by working with customers to solve their specific problems. Because I was good at that, sales began bringing me into pre-sales conversations to pitch prospects, I then started creating content for my pre and post-sales engagements. It was easy to take that work and partner with the PMM team to codify and scale my work. That was me moonlighting in PMM and helped prepare me for a full-time PMM gig. 2. Step in and help other departments solve their problems. Product Marketing is pulled in SO many directions. There are very few departments we don't work with and often it is to help solve specific problems. So if you want to get into Product Marketing, get experience working with other teams and help them solve their problems. 3. Find ways to document and share your knowledge. Much of Product Marketing's work is gathering and synthesizing information. Then distilling it into impactful content (PPTs, talk tracks, web pages, enablement sessions, etc) that the field teams can use to drive more revenue. You probably have knowledge or information like this, practice getting it into the right format and sharing it with the teams. And of course, the best thing to do is take informational interviews with as many PMMs as possible. Ask them this question, ask them how you can help them, and ask them for more introductions.

Rule #1 of Competitive Intelligence is to tie it directly to revenue. By doing that you uplevel it from being seen as a research project to something that drives specific impact for the business. Here are three revenue metrics I try to focus on: * Win Rates: Track win rates against your top 2-4 competitors. Keeping the number of competitors limited helps maintain focus and provides clearer insights. * Deal Involvement: Monitor specific deals where CI/MI has been involved. You could track content used through certain sales enablement platforms, or better yet track where you and your team have directly supported competitive deals or saves! * Competitive Plays: (This one is my favorite) Work with Demand Gen, BDRs, and Sales on competitive plays, then track the pipeline and revenue generated from these efforts. By tying CI to revenue in more than just one way you'll quickly make these efforts something the exec team is very aware of!

Staying on top of competitive intel requires a structured approach since a lot happens in any given week and you can get requests from all over the business. Here's how my teams try to manage it: * Prioritize Top Competitors: Focus on the top competitors and their key market activities, like webinars or blog posts, to ensure you're monitoring the most impactful information. You can't be everywhere, so prioritization on what will make the biggest impact is key. * Centralize Requests: Use a central place, such as a dedicated Slack channel or Google form, to triage and manage incoming requests efficiently. You want to keep the flow of information consistent. Nothing good happens when a majority of CI is done in DMs or private conversations. * Competitive Intel Roadmap: Create a competitive intel roadmap and get buy-in from GTM leadership to ensure everyone is on the same page and priorities are clear. This helps you avoid (some) fire drills or worse unmet expectations. * Democratize Answers: Empower others in the company to respond to requests. Often, field teams have valuable insights since they deal with questions about competitors directly every day. The key here is to stay organized, keep your intel up-to-date, and ensure people know where and how to get information.