Product marketing is on the rise. According to the most recent data shared by MKT1, PMM is currently the most popular role within marketing hiring.
This means many companies are hiring product marketers for the first time, and many of these successful PMMs will go on to build the first PMM team. If this is you, that’s amazing! But how do you ensure your success, and how do you build your team?
This is part four of my newsletter series, How to Build Your Product Marketing Strategy, and we’ll be diving into just that.
Part 1: The 3-step product marketing strategy framework
Part 3: Operationalize product marketing through growth tactics
Part 4: How to thrive as a founding PMM and build your first team ← today’s newsletter 🎉
Also, this newsletter was edited by the one-and-only Martina Launchengco. 😍 Learn more about our collaboration towards the end.
Section 1: How to be a successful founding PMM
Before we discuss building a team, let’s discuss how to be a successful founding or first-time PMM. First, you want to ensure you are in the right role and environment to succeed. I recently wrote this post on 3 recommended profiles and anti-profiles for founding PMMs. This is not meant to be prescriptive but a general guideline to help you ensure you are set up for success.
Once you are in the right environment to succeed, here are 4 tips that are essential for you to drive early (and sustained) success:
1. Pick the key strategic initiatives first. The biggest failure mode of the founding PMM is you get spread peanut butter thin against a backlog of everyone’s “we want this from you” needs. Don’t serve all masters. Pick one area of strategic importance and pilot how the function should work for that initiative. Then you have an example of what success looks like rather than getting buried under a pile of to-dos that don’t let the function act with the strategic purpose. To identify the highest priorities, I recommend:
Get deep into the company's business model (e.g., how it makes money), its key goals/metrics, and audit the GTM motion across key funnel parts. Examples of initiatives you might uncover could be a need to revise pricing and packaging or get better messaging tested by sales.
Align with founders and key leaders. Understand how they view the biggest challenges and blind spots. Most importantly, ask, "How do you want the company to be perceived 12-18 months from now?" Remember, PMM's unique purview is to keep the long-term and short-term POVs together so the short-term better serves the long-term position the company should hold.
Come up with a gap analysis/opportunity assessment of the biggest needs, categorizing them according to different growth levers (to read more on growth levers, check out this article). Then, prioritize your opportunities and communicate them with a framework. The Action Priority Matrix from product management can be helpful here.
2. Say what you won’t do. This is as important as what you do take on. Being strategic means there has to be a “no” or “not now” bucket, as again, there is an endless list of things you could do. Draw a firm boundary. This is precisely where the Action Priority matrix can also help you. You can always make pragmatic exceptions if you need to, but without the hard boundary, the pile on your virtual desk will get too high to be successful when you’re a team of one.
3. Evangelize the role of product marketing. As you are the sole PMM, take time to educate others on how product marketing will function at YOUR company. No two companies draw all the lines around it exactly the same way, because the range of what’s important and the market situation shifts over time, how it can add value across business metrics, and how you expect it to work with your partner teams (product, sales, marketing) to deliver results.
Creating a PMM team charter with stakeholder input can be really useful, as can regular feedback loops with stakeholders. A PMM charter should include information on the scope and goals of the product marketing function, the strategy, how it works with other departments, key projects, and focus areas.
4. Introduce processes and plan for scaling the function over time. As you start getting wins under your belt, and have better understanding of the role (could be anywhere from 3-12 months), you can start thinking about building out standard processes (e.g. a standardized launch process). In the model where you launched this as a pilot, you can define the standard for launch process by example, then roll it out to other areas.
Section 2: How to build your product marketing team
As your company grows, and as you build more value, you will need to grow your team. How do you set them up for success? While no two teams will look exactly alike, this is a framework I built and evolved to help you guide you on building your first PMM team.
I use the 4Ps framework (not the one you are thinking!): Purpose, People, Process and Performance to do this (from the seminal book “The Wisdom of Teams").
Purpose
This is about setting up a clear understanding of why the team exists and what it aims to achieve. It means having a clear mission and vision for the team and clearly articulating the team’s objectives, goals, and highest priorities. This should be a more refined version of the founding PMM charter you have created, aligned with the most important company objectives.
People
With clarity on the team strategy from step 1, the next step is to identify the hiring strategy. Based on the team's specific needs, break down the areas where you need help and then determine what kind of help you need and the profiles of each hire you need.
Here are 5 tips you need to keep in mind when hiring:
1. Build the smallest team first. One of the common mistakes I see first-time hiring managers make is over-hiring. I recommend mapping out the responsibilities of each role for at least 12 months (it’s really hard to see past that, presuming these are less mature companies–since, after all, this is their first time building a PMM function). If you can do that confidently, then it’s likely a full-time hire is justified. Let us not contribute to the terrible culture of hiring and firing (and mass layoffs due to poor planning).
2. Consider part-time and third-party hires ALONG with full-time hires. Given limited resourcing and point #1 above, it’s important to consider all types of hire. Inspired by Peter Mahoney’s framework shared on Exit 5, here is my version of it to help you choose which type of hire is needed.
3. Hire based on gaps and strengths. Instead of focusing purely on the skills and excellence of each individual, also consider how the skills will complement your own gaps/weaknesses. E.g. if you are amazing at sales enablement but are weaker on positioning, you may consider hiring someone whose primary strength is positioning. This also means hiring someone who aligns intrinsically with the culture of the team and company.
4. Hire T- or π- shaped generalist PMMs first. Early hires should be more full-stack PMMs with special expertise (like analyst relations or partner marketing) in one or two core areas. This provides you with flexibility to meet changing demands, while also allowing each team member to own a specific area in more-depth. The specializations could also be domain expertise, especially in highly niche or technical industries (e.g., cybersecurity).
5. Don’t hire in a silo. One highly overlooked yet common mistake is hiring in a silo. It’s important to review your hiring plan and requirements with adjacent teams, such as product and sales leaders to ensure the hire will align with their needs. So much of the work of PMMs is to enable OTHER teams to succeed, so getting cross functional buy-in is so important.
Below is a table that shows possible roles and division of labor for the first PMM team. Note that no two teams look the same, so please adapt to your own needs. This is also I area I frequently advise my coaching clients on.
In this example, there are two full-time hires, each mapping to 3 PMs across several product pods. Each is also responsible for special projects within their expertise. This does not mean they are the ONLY people who get to do that particular work, but they are the go-to person and main owner of it. This team is also hiring an agency to perform critical pricing analysis–a skill missing from the team.
Make sure you also assign projects that allow intra-team collaboration, so they don’t each work in a silo. For instance, all members could contribute to a positioning project for the entire product.
I have also seen leaders hire a dedicated sales enablement manager early on. While sales enablement is extremely important, in the early days, enablement responsibilities should be handled solely by each core PMM, which will allow them to truly understand customer needs and build relationships with sales. Only consider a dedicated enablement role past the tens of millions in ARR mark.
When you start to feel the need for dedicated partner marketing, customer marketing, solutions marketing etc., that means your GTM motion is evolving. Your organizational structure should reflect this as well.
In the next (bonus) part of this series, my collaborator and 30-year PMM veteran Martina Launchengco will focus on how you layer in this vertical/market/solution/partner expertise–its purpose and where it can live–depending on the shape, scale, and market challenges you're trying to solve. Follow her on LinkedIn to receive the next part when it drops!
Process
Going back to our Ps, the next one is process. Process should be developed based on the foundation you build as a founding PMM through the pilots you have ran/will run, or co-developed with your team based on the actual context within the company.
I strongly caution against building processes using cookie-cutter frameworks without having piloted them within the company. Death by rigid process without testing is exactly the opposite of what is needed at this stage. Examples include feature launch, positioning, messaging, sales enablement, and research processes.
What's most important to make this work is to get feedback from the adjacent teams along the way. Are we working as well as we could? What could be better?
Performance
Finally, define success for the team and for each individual. Success should include both quantitative metrics and qualitative metrics (such as feedback from stakeholders). Create individual development plans for each team member and coach them to succeed and monitor their growth and performance.
Don't shy away from feedback that could be hard to hear i.e. “ I think this messaging isn't clear enough.” As the founding PMM leader, you're setting the example and the standards by which all future work will be measured. Don't be afraid to set the bar high and coach your team to meet it.
With that, you should be well on your way to building a high-performing first PMM team...
...but you also don’t have to do it alone.
Whenever you need, here are two programs I offer that can help:
With these signature coaching programs, you can confidently step into your new role or become the leader you’re meant to be.
That's all for today. See you next time!