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Today’s content covers part three in a four-part series on How to Build Your Product Marketing Strategy:
Part 3: Operationalize product marketing through growth tactics ← today’s newsletter 😍
Part 4: Scaling the strategy to action by building a team
With that…let’s dive in!
How To Build Your PMM Strategy Part 3: Operationalizing Product Marketing Through Growth Tactics
Growth is all the buzz. Companies want to grow again, and they want to do it smartly. Lenny’s latest hiring data shows that growth-titled roles are growing faster than all other roles.
While the data is mostly from product roles, the same applies to marketing. I recently helped a startup hire its first marketer. The profile we determined? A combination of product marketing and growth marketing skills—the golden combo.
Why is this the golden combo? If you think about it, the best marketer needs to know strategy AND how to execute tactics. But the challenge I see with PMMs is they can be too much in the silo of their world. The result? They can’t tie what they do to their results and have a harder time proving value.
Key point: To be a great PMM (whether you want to be a CMO or not), you must understand growth tactics and how they relate to strategic planning.
So, let’s dive in to help you understand growth tactics and planning.
Step 1: Understanding Growth Tactics
Growth expert Elena Verna describes growth as “your ability to predictably, sustainably, and competitively answer the question of how you acquire, retain, and monetize customers.”
So, to drive growth, we need to consider these three levers:
Acquisition lever: The company acquires customers through awareness (top of the funnel), interest (middle of the funnel), and activation/purchase (bottom of the funnel).
Retention lever: The company retains and expands existing customer revenue through feature expansions, reliability, and services.
Monetization lever: The company charges customers to optimize for revenue and profit.
While these concepts are PLG-focused, they apply more broadly to every type of business. Most businesses, no matter what kind, use a combination of tactics across these three levers across sales, marketing, and product.
Understanding the most common tactics is extremely important for PMMs to inform their own strategy and determine which efforts require collaboration with different teams.
I built the tactics table below to use as a guide. Note that this is not exhaustive and some tactics will fall into multiple buckets across teams.
A word on monetization—many PMMs have not worked on monetization, as it can be owned by other teams like product management or sales, depending on the business model. However, because monetization relies on a thorough understanding of personas and customer research, PMMs should have experience with it.
In my private client community, I did training on monetization and pricing 101 and how to get involved in pricing as a PMM.
Source: Yi Lin Pei, Courageous Careers
Section 2: Operationalizing the tactics to drive marketing
Now that you understand the common growth tactics by growth lever and business model, it’s time to use it as an input/consideration when you create a marketing plan.
According to the book LOVED by Martina Launchengco, product marketing work gets embedded in larger marketing plans that cover all marketing activities. So, it’s essential to ensure the GTM strategy and PMM foundation research work are covered in the larger marketing plan.
No matter who PMM reports into, ensuring marketing plans encompass details of GTM will help bring it to life through the GTM engine, and connect marketing with product.
If you are trying to figure out how to do this, this is the process I used to go through every quarter to ensure our team’s plans are embedded in the marketing plan.
Step A: Determine the key growth lever to meet the business goal
It’s usually very hard to focus on multiple growth levers simultaneously and achieve the best results. Instead, I recommend prioritizing the most important lever and funnel stage first.
For instance, if your company’s key goal is to reach $20M in revenue by driving pipeline and increasing conversion rates, then it’s important to focus on the Acquisition lever.
Then, evaluate which stage of the acquisition journey has the biggest drop-off and therefore the most significant room for improvement.
For instance, if your company consistently hits their top-of-funnel goals and captures a lot of leads, but they are not converting well into accepted opportunities, it makes sense to focus your efforts on this middle part of the funnel to drive better lead → opportunity conversion.
Step B: Use the PMM framework to map out product marketing strategy and tactics
Before jumping directly to growth tactics, it’s important to run through the key gap/challenge from Step A through the PMM framework in Part 1. This ensures the foundational issues are addressed.
Using the same example above, let’s say you are now trying to understand why leads are not converting to opportunities. You found two key reasons:
The lead quality is low. In this case, it’s important to define the audience, better define the ICP, and set better qualification criteria to select the leads.
The lead quality is good. In this case, leads are not properly nurtured and segmented so the messaging sent to leads is generic. You need to segment the ICP and create more appealing segment-specific messaging.
Step C: Choose the growth tactic to double down as a bit bet.
With a solid strategy in place, it’s time to pick a growth tactic that fits the company’s business model. If the company has a history of being marketing-led and boasts a strong lifecycle marketing team with a good email marketing track record, a key growth tactic could be to create a segmented email nurture sequence.
Even if product marketing doesn’t directly own this tactic, you’re in a great position to suggest co-owning it with lifecycle marketing. You can offer valuable insights on your ideal customer profile, segmentation, and messaging to help them develop effective email sequences.
Step D: Complete the rest of the marketing plan with additional tactics.
Once that tactic has been determined, you can use a similar process to complete the rest of the marketing plan and show the final result in a funnel, which could look like the graph below.
Source: Yi Lin Pei, Courageous Careers
Congrats! You’ve now used PMM fundamentals and growth tactics to build a strong PMM team plan that feeds into the overall marketing activities.
You've pinpointed the highest-impact strategies for growth based on your market insights, customer understanding, and growth levers.
Implementing this approach every quarter will shift you from a passive role to a more proactive and strategic PMM, whether you're an individual contributor or a team lead.
Let me know what you think!
You don’t have to do it alone.
If these ideas sound exciting but a bit overwhelming, you’re not alone—I’m here to help! With my signature coaching programs, you can confidently step into your new role or become the leader you’re meant to be. Together, we’ll tackle any tactical or strategic topic that will help you achieve the best results for your team and hit your career goals.
“Through working with Yi Lin, I was able to identify my priority and craft an action plan that I was able to immediately put into action and deliver impact. Yi Lin also had the right resources and answers to all of my questions and customized our coaching to fit the specific challenges I faced at each juncture - from product activation, launches, to goal setting and more. I highly recommend Yi Lin's coaching if you are looking to level up!”
How Susan Landed A Senior PMM Job in Just Five Weeks
I’m thrilled to share Susan's inspiring journey from layoff to landing a senior PMM role at Semble! As a client of my Job Search Membership Program, Susan transformed her job search techniques and her career:
She went above and beyond to "show vs. tell" in her assignment
She honed her communication skills and other pinpointed areas of improvement identified in her interview process
And she stayed positive.
Her strategic efforts and my program’s support helped her overcome final-round rejections and land a dream role. Susan's story highlights the power of resilience and the right guidance. Learn more about how you can achieve similar success here (click on the membership program option).