Product Marketing vs Product Management: Building An Effective Partnership

Alex I am Alex, one of the organizers of the San Francisco Product Marketing Meetup. Thanks for coming here. I want to go ahead and start off by thanking Zendesk for hosting our event. So thank you, Catherine, and thank you, Zendesk. Real quick, the topic of this event is Product Marketing versus Product Management, Building an Effective Partnership. Thank you to our sponsors 23 and Sharebird. We're going to go ahead and do a Q&A panel here. And we have some questions up front that the moderator will ask. And then after that, the audience will have time to ask questions. And so with that said, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Shreya. Here you go. Awesome. Thanks, Alex. Hi, guys. I'm Shreya. I'll be your moderator for tonight. Just a little bit more about me. I am a product manager at Credit Karma. Been there for about a year. And prior to that, I was in product marketing at LinkedIn for about five years. So product marketing is very near and dear to my heart. And I'm really excited about today's topic. So as Alex said, we will be starting off with some quick intros, then asking some of the questions that you guys posed ahead of time. So thank you to all those that submitted questions. And then we'll turn it over to you. So let's get started. So to start off, could you guys each introduce yourselves? Where you work? And what product marketing means at each of your companies? And your favorite thing not on your LinkedIn profile? Okay. Hi, my name is Catherine Kelly. I work here at Zendesk. I have been here for about, just about three years. Product marketing at Zendesk, what it means at Zendesk is definitely focused on messaging and positioning. We work really closely with our product managers, which we'll talk a lot about today. And we're going to be talking about how we position the product to our different segments. And what was, oh, and what is not on my LinkedIn profile is probably how much time I spend camping. My husband and I are really into getting outdoors. So we spend a lot of our time and money and weekends getting outside. So yeah. Hi, my name is Sheena Zhang. I work at Marketo. So I'm a product manager at Zendesk. And I'm really It's actually changed a lot. I've been there for four years. So when I first came on, I was one of the first three product marketers. And the charter was really to go build the enterprise business. So I joke and say, literally, our customers were up and down the 101. We had like two enterprise accounts. So my job was to literally figure out how we go build that team, attack that market, et cetera. Now, over the years, as we've grown as a company and have gotten acquired, the model has really changed to product marketing and segment marketing. So I'm going to talk a little bit about segment marketing. So segment marketing is sort of the GM side of the house. What I mean by that is as the enterprise product marketing leader, you really think through the business, through marketing, sales, partners, services, really aligned to hitting a revenue target per quarter. And then product marketing is more the traditional product marketing and thinking through product releases, features, functions, et cetera. So happy to talk a little bit about that. And one thing you probably would not know about me from looking at my LinkedIn, I'm actually from, Louisiana, Baton Rouge, raised, lived there for like 18 years. And you can tell when I'm drunk that I'm from Louisiana. Hi, I'm Andrew Tron, also known as Drew. I work for Facebook. And what product marketing means at Facebook, marketing is actually pretty new to Facebook, probably four or five years old. So can you imagine the company actually didn't have marketing people before that? We just kind of shipped things. So as you can imagine, things have changed since then. There's a lot more risk involved. So product marketing at Facebook is primarily three work streams. One is inbound, which is competitive insights, context, product briefings, that kind of thing to help decide what we're going to be building and for who. A second is go to market and launch marketing, which is kind of, I feel like a lot of PMM's bread and butter. What are launch communications? How do we talk about it? What do we call it? That kind of stuff. And then the last thing is outbound, which is all the campaigns and engagement and down funnel work that we do in very close partnership with product to drive metrics. And the thing that you wouldn't know from my LinkedIn, my fiance's over there. Her name is Kat. Awesome. Congratulations. Cool. So thank you guys for the intros. Let's dive right into the questions. So most popular question, what are tips for maintaining open lines of communication amongst product and marketing priorities? So I think what I take away from that is we're all super busy. We have very cross-functional roles. So in the chaos of your jobs, how do you manage to maintain that close partnership and especially the communication with your product partners? So for us, we actually have product management around the world. So we have product development teams here in the US, but also in Dublin and Copenhagen, Singapore, Australia. You kind of get the gist. So it's really hard for us to do a lot of the kind of physical proximity or stand ups or those types of things. So I think some things that have worked for us are really aligning our product marketers with our product managers. So they kind of know who their partners are and they're in touch with them over Slack or over email and kind of have those regular touch points. So I think that's really worked for us. Yeah, we have a similar model at Marketo. The only thing I would add is we actually found a lot of success in going to a biweekly fulfillment meeting. So that's every two weeks with actually our head of product for that particular business, I would say. And then the product marketing folks making sure we're all doing a checkpoint aligning towards the launch or whatever the next milestone is. And then we'll do a smaller meeting the other week in a biweekly fashion without the leadership team. Just more of a check in, red, green, yellow, a scorecard in terms of if it's the next feature release, if it's the next launch release, etc. with the product team. Yeah, so we also try to have the partnership with PM to make sure they know exactly who their PM coverage is. But because of our ratio of the team, we don't have that. Because there's so many PMs and products and not as many PMMs, we had to play zone. So in order to prioritize, we actually work with PM leadership to make sure that they put every major test and launch on this thing called a launch calendar. So that's the source of truth for the entire company. If it's not on there, you're not launching it. And if you launch it without it, it's going to be a pretty serious problem for you. So basically, we use kind of the stick approach. Like you can work with us up front or you can try to skip it and do it. And you pay the price. So basically, by having everything on a calendar, we can have a work back to make sure that we've checked all the boxes on the way to launch to make sure everybody's comfortable with it and all the pieces are in place. And part of filling that form out is actually requiring that you put down a PMM or figure out who they are. So for those of you who are at big companies, I'm happy to share some notes. Just to add to that, two tactical things that we found success with in terms of communications with the PM group is I feel like 50% of working with PM is just communication and alignment. So if you go to the third floor at Marketo, I'm not exaggerating, you see these like 8 by 10 printouts of four personas. For us, it's like a VP of marketing, a director level, a practitioner, and then somebody in IT. And so even something as simple as nomenclature, like, okay, great, we're building this brand-new feature. Are we building this for Alex, the practitioner, or Joanne, the CMO, right? Like I know it sounds silly, but when you're running with a big, full team, it's good to even have a team. You can get aligned on understanding who are we building it for, why do they care, what pain point does that solve? You guys get it. You've been doing this a long time. Is it 10x better, et cetera? And then going back to your point about calendar, another thing is if you go to the fourth floor at Marketo where the marketing team is, we literally have this 55-inch screen. And shameless plug for Marketo, there's a product there called Marketing Calendar. You can use whatever calendar you want. But literally it has all of our product releases, feature releases, major announcements, PR, et cetera. And if you're not on that 50-inch screen, you're not launching. So a similar approach, and we found it to work well. Awesome. Stick, noted. So a couple of you guys actually mentioned alignment. Speaking of alignment, another popular question that came up is role definition and role clarity. So has that ever come up in your roles, like PM versus PMM? And if so, how do you define that? Have you found any frameworks or tools to be helpful there? I'm working the mic. I think something that's very helpful is to define who owns what deliverable. So for us, the PM owns the product brief, which has the outline for what exactly we're building for who. And everybody else contributes to that. For PMM, we own things like the run of show, the go-to-market plan, the messaging hierarchy, and all of those types of documents and things that we reference for the product. So I think it's helpful to have very specific deliverables that is assigned to each person and each function. It gets fuzzy when people kind of co-own things, and we try to not have that as much as possible. So I've worked in product marketing now at a multinational. So I used to work at Microsoft and at Marketo, like I've mentioned. It's evolved quite a bit, even with startups. Going back to roles and responsibilities, I feel like that's the main thing. Number one is literally having a definition sheet. Like what is an MVP? What does that mean for this company? What is a major feature release? What is a product release? What is a marketing campaign? I think just simple, and it sounds silly, going back to nomenclature, but having all of that documented somewhere as a single source of truth has been helpful for us as we grow and evolve and as people leave and new people come in the organization, just to help with onboarding. One other thing is, so I kind of alluded to this earlier, but in segment marketing at Marketo, we actually are aligned slash paid out on pipeline and revenue, right? So we have a very strong incentive to drive the go-to-market. But we also drive that across. So kind of having a split there is really helpful. And then also the aligning on the goals piece. We definitely have moved, you know, in the three years that I've been here to a place where our product leaders actually own a number for their product as well. And so there is a little bit of alignment there because when we look at launching a product, we're not just looking at are we getting adoption? Are we getting engagement? Are we getting interest? It's, you know, we're really trying to see are we actually selling more of this product? Can we sell more seats? Is it actually influencing the bottom line? And so I think that creates a lot of alignment between product and product marketing. Aligning on common metrics ahead of time. Exactly. Awesome. How do you help product management understand the value of product marketing beyond just the launch? So I remember getting this a lot as a product marketer as well. Hey, how can I get PR? How can I get a blog post? How can you send a large email? So a lot of it is focused on the go-to-market activities. Have you guys found that to be a challenge? And if so, what advice would you have for folks here? You mean all we don't do is make like pretty brochures and banners? That's what I do all day. I don't know about you guys. Yeah. Going back to education, I mean, I'm going to say it again. I find it funny and Sheree, I know you're now in product so I can, you can earmuff. But I find that like a lot of people in product don't know what happens when product ships. Like when they're done code complete. They don't understand. I work in a B2B company obviously. It takes six months for us to even train sales people to be able to talk about it. It takes another six months for sales people to then go sell it to their customer. It takes another six months for their customer to go implement it and then get going. So my point is it's a long sales cycle. It's not just, oh, beautiful, we launched it. Now let's go sell $10 million worth of it. So going back to education, I spend a lot of my time actually with product and educating them with that process I just told you about. And then going back to, you guys have all read because you're great product marketers, the stat, right? It costs five times more. It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain one. Okay. Then how do you create cross-sell, up-sell opportunities in a B2B market? So to answer your question, beyond showing them all the documentation around launch and all the beautiful brochures and things we're going to do and the go-to-market strategy, but actually educating the time and the different teams that actually get influenced in driving that product to market. Yeah. To build on that, I also started when it was only three product marketers here. So there was a little bit of that education that had to happen. And I think part of it was also just showing it. It was kind of the proof was in the pudding a little bit. How can I show up to a product summit that maybe I wasn't necessarily invited to, but I showed up and I came with here's a perspective on who our customers are and how we might bring this product to market down the line. And then I think over time as we did change to align our products to be in the same goals that we have in terms of bookings and et cetera. I think that that really changed the conversation because before they ever build the product, before they're going to launch the product, they want to know what the marketing plan is going to be because they want to know is this going to be successful. And so there is a real then I think pull mechanism where they want us to come to the planning session and tell them and help them understand that, yes, we're going to be able to market this at the end of the day and this isn't going to be a wasted effort. So I think that those two things together kind of first thinking about what we're going to do. And then then the second thing is what value is it that you think you can bring and showing up to the product meeting with that and educating them on what it is that you're going to do to make it successful. And then if you can align on those goals, you know, they'll start to see that and start to ask you for it. So I think that'll that'll work together. Yeah, I think this question really speaks to credibility building credibility with the product teams because it's about being invited into the process, like from the beginning to the end. I think the experiences that I've had really start with the go to market. And launch is because that's what we what people think of for PMM. So prove it there first. Be a great partner at the launch, because at that point you're probably not defining the product anymore. So you're just trying to help it be as successful as possible. Get involved with engagement and user insights to see what's happening after something launches. Create that feedback loop and build credibility there. I think once you have that, you're invited to the earlier stages. Assuming you've like proven good points and given good data and help them move metrics. You're going to be invited to the earlier and earlier in the process. Even to the point where they're asking you, what should we be building in some cases? So I would start in that order. Yeah. One other just tactical thing that I've learned is volunteer to help with the product roadmap deck because every single product manager loves to talk about the new features, functions, releases that are upcoming. Sales wants nothing. CSM want at least in a B2B org want nothing more than a roadmap deck. So you are uniquely positioned to be able to drive that conversation and earn credibility outside of a launch schedule. To actually number one, define go to market strategy. Number two, define vision, messaging, positioning, all the things you're all great at. But number three, serve to Andrew's point or Drew's point as that partner in helping to communicate the vision beyond just a list of features and functions. Awesome. Actually, you guys touched a little bit on B2B versus B2C. Just curious to get a quick show of hands. How many folks in the room are B2B marketers? Awesome. And how many are B2C? Looks like a somewhat even split, maybe a little bit more on the B2B side. How about size of team? How many folks are the sole product marketer at their companies? Under 10? Under team of 10? Okay. Over 10? Okay. So mostly in kind of the 1 to 10 range. How have you guys found that to be different depending on size of company or B2B versus B2C? Does the role of product marketing change? Definitely. Definitely. Yes. Yes. Definitely yes. I think we've both been in companies that have grown from three to way more than three. But I've only ever really worked on the B2B side, so I'll keep it to that. But I think in B2B, you just have a higher kind of bar or standard for what you're delivering because you're working with customers who pay you. And so, you know, the standard for what they're looking for, the communication that you have to achieve with your existing customers, you know, that's just, that's a pretty high bar. And you have to have that relationship with your customers. And as a product marketer, you have to represent that within the product org. I think also just in terms of B2B, there's a lot of different models. You can be actually reporting through marketing. You can report through product. That really changes the product marketing role and what you're focusing on. And I think, you know, when you're one person, you tend to be more focused, I think, on the product. You're focused, I think, on, like you were saying, like, can I get a roadmap deck out there that's going to show my value immediately? That's something that I can tangibly do. And I think as you grow to a larger and larger team, you can structure around more strategic initiatives. You can get a little bit out of that brochure making, website making. Hopefully you get a little bit out of that as you grow as a team and as you start to show that strategic value. So I think that's the biggest shift I see in the different sizes. Yeah, I can start. I'll start large and go small. So, which is a little bit opposite of what you did. So at Microsoft, product marketing holds the budget. So you get to pull the levers, as I mentioned, across marketing and sales and partners and services to do what you need to do to drive your P&L to hit revenue goal. So in many ways, you're the most loved person. And in many ways, the pressure is on. Because literally I was, like, checking sales dashboards every month, every quarter, saying, okay, I was in the Azure business. Like, are we going to hit our? Hit our revenue quarter? So I would say it's less on the creative. It's less on the messaging and positioning. But it's more truly operational, go to market. Like, how do you run a business? Now, going back to, you know, when I first started at Marketo and now how it's scaled, ruthless prioritization. Because, number one, if your company has never had product marketing before, even in your space, everybody's like, oh, well, that's a product marketing thing, right? Everything from messaging to sales enablement to brochures to websites to pricing. And packaging to roadmap. Like, right? Everything is just product marketing will do that. And if you're one to ten people, you are, like, bless you, you are barely staying alive. Or you did a much better job of it when I did. So for me, it was all about ruthless prioritization at a smaller company of learning when to say no. And that's in order to do that, you have to know what your North Star is. And so from the day I entered Marketo, my North Star was always, is this helping to grow the enterprise business? Is it going to help us get a new logo? Is this going to help us to drive ARR? Is it going to help us reduce sales time to closure? Is it going to help us kick Oracle's butt? Or Salesforce's butt? Right? Like, if it wasn't doing one of those things, then the answer is no. I just do not have that time right now. Because only then, going back to the earlier question about building credibility, every PM wants to know that their product or their feature is just crushing it in the market. And if you're helping them do that, you're naturally earning credibility. So I would say it's a much different role at a larger to smaller company. But that prioritization is something that, it's hard, but it's something that I find is a must-do if you're going to be successful at a smaller company. I've only worked at big companies. So in a former life, I worked on product marketing for AdWords, Google AdWords. And so I felt like the biggest difference between B2B and B2C is that in B2B, you know your customers by name. Or you have a Rolodex that you can go talk to people, and they'll tell you what exactly they want. What would cause them to spend more money? Or on ads or buy a product, what exactly would you need to do? How much money does it need to save for their company? So a lot of times for ads, that's like new formats, better optimization tools, and that kind of stuff. On consumer, the problems that you're dealing with are very different. Sometimes the problems are boredom. So how do you fix boredom? There's like many, many, many different choices. You can turn on TV. You can download an app. You can message your friend. You can go outside and do something there. So we're really focused on that. We're really dealing with a lot of time spent. And so something that's been helpful for us is obviously doing a ton of surveys and market research and seeing how people already use things and spend their time. But in terms of getting more concrete towards product strategy, a lot of companies and a lot of times even internally, we run into the problem of defining problems in terms of our company and our goals. Like how do we make people do, like leave more comments or use more events or whatever it may be? So we define problems and roadmaps in terms of what will move our metrics. And instead, something that we've been trying to do recently is define it in terms of people problems. What is the people problem that is associated with that metric? Is it because people don't understand what's going on? They don't know how to use something? They need examples of how something works? They're afraid to share or comment because of blah, blah, blah? Like there's so many different types of people problems that you can define associated with your metric. And I think that's actually one of the ways that for the consumer marketers out there and also for B2B to help your PMs rethink how they define their strategy. Because if it's just increase metric X, there's ways to do it that aren't so great for your customer. And there's ways to do it that's keeping their interest in mind. And so are you going to hack your way there or are you going to help your customers and your users have a better experience? And in the long term, you should do the latter. Because if you take advantage of users, you're going to have a better experience. And if you confuse users or you confuse them or you make them do stuff that they didn't really want to do, your sentiment's going to drop over time. People will get tired of you and they'll just leave. So think long term instead of short term. And I would say like define people problems rather than company problems. Awesome. That's a great segue actually to another really popular question. How do you get product to focus more on customer or member problems and solving them and less on shipping features that customers don't need? A little sub note made is sometimes product managers want to ship 20 to 30 products. And maybe it's better to focus on only three to five. Maybe there's a tension between something that's good for the user short term versus long term. How do you deal with that? Yeah, so Drew, I think, did a good job of capitalizing the problem. I call it the shovel and hole problem, which is we, even as marketers, probably do a great job of talking about our company, our product, our value prop. Like me, me, me, me, me. It's like selfie marketing at the end of the day. But we don't necessarily do a good job of articulating the hole. We're looking to solve for our user, even in B2B. It doesn't, you know, B2C. This is agnostic. So I think our job is to help product understand the hole, the problem of which. And I mean, I alluded to this earlier, but literally like simple, like lock on four personas, three personas, no more than five that your business sells to. Get everyone across product, marketing, and sales talking about those personas and those names and have everyone deeply understand who they are, their pain points, what they care about. What their day looks like, what other tools they use. You guys know this, classic product marketing. And that helps to drive a lot of that behavior. Going back to your, I know we're making a big thing about B2B and B2C. But the one thing I'll say is you guys are doing this a long time. There's a concept of like B2H or B2P now, right? Business to human, business to people. What I mean by that, like the relationship that we now have with companies like Amazon, where I can just, you know, click one click and something shows up on my door in two days. Or Starbucks. Like a few swipes and I have personalized coffee waiting for me. People carry that expectation into B2B software as well. It's not just good enough to be like, well, it's okay. We're just competing with like SAP, right? So we just need to create something that's better than that. No, people have strong expectations for that customer experience even if it's in Marketo or something that they use for their work. And so getting that design thinking or whatever you guys want to call that, going back to the whole, is important. And I think that's part of the value. Part of the value that we uniquely provide as product marketing in the organization because, you know, obviously product is just focused on shipping the feature, making it usable and stuff. But we have that unique advantage of understanding what is the hole that it's solving and how is it comparing to the other experiences outside of this industry that our persona interacts with daily. That was beautiful. So I might take it. Going for an Oscar tonight. Yeah. No. I think maybe I would take it from more of a tactical level then because I agree with everything that you guys just said. And I think at Zendesk we're, I'm pretty lucky because even in, you know, our tenure history, our whole ethos is about relationships and the relationships that you have with your customers and kind of exactly what you were just talking about that, you know, everything in our world now is about that. So that's really a core part of our fabric. So we've never really had the problem. I've never had the problem of a product manager at Zendesk not thinking about the customer enough. So I think that's a lucky, lucky thing. I think where we spend most of our time is actually defining who is the customer because we actually serve customers from, you know, micro SMB. It might be like one or two guys who just started their business and they're using Zendesk with a credit card all the way up through, you know, your Ubers, right? And so kind of looking at that whole spectrum of different customer sizes, when we say we're solving the problem for the customer, it often comes down to like, well, what are we doing? It often comes down to like, well, what problem for what customer? And sometimes you can get into this. You mentioned it in B2B in your kind of past life that you have your Rolodex. Like you have your customers that you know and you always kind of pick them out. And I think we get into that habit as well. And so the bigger challenge that we have is just not going back to the same ten customers and solving for them and not thinking about the fact that we have this huge velocity business of smaller customers that we need to serve as well. And so there's a couple things that we've done to that effect. Some of it just comes down to the project definition and saying like when we are building this feature, who is it for? And that goes back to your persona comment as well. Like are we building this for those bigger organizations or are we building it for the smaller organizations kind of starting there? And then we also do a ton of work on how we diversify the feedback that we're getting. So it's not the Rolodex. It's not the calling the same ten people. So one way that we do that is we work with our success team. We make sure that they have a good feedback mechanism. We call it voice of the customer. I'm sure many of you guys have programs like that. But we make sure that we have this kind of prioritized list where we can look at this is the feedback that was asked for. These are the customers that line up to that feedback. And we're kind of keeping that fresh and coming in from our support and advocacy teams all the time. Another thing that we do is a win-loss program, which I'm sure many of you also do. But one thing that we just added to that that was incredibly successful, and I'm going to play it out. And I'm going to plug Zendesk a little bit here, is that we started taking all of the transcripts from our win-loss interviews and turning them into tickets that get assigned to product managers. And so I saw it on a Slack channel. I got into the private product Slack channel, which is also a tactic that you can do. Somehow sneak your way in there. But I'm in that Slack channel. Don't tell any of the product managers here that I'm in there. But I saw them go, oh, we're getting all these tickets all of a sudden. Where are they coming from? But I start reading them. And they're like, oh, my god, this is gold. And that's what got their attention. So now they're seeing these things that we've been doing for quarters. And we've been doing report outs of it and trying to get that back in there. But just having that kind of constant ping of like, here's another deal we lost. Here's another deal we lost. And they're reading through that feedback I think has been really effective. So those are just some of the ways that we're trying to kind of break out of this silo of each product manager's favorite 10 customers kind of really driving the roadmap. Yeah. Awesome. Last question. And I would love to open it up. I love this one. So which role is more strategic and has more power in the tech industry, the PM or the PMM? Who has the final call on product decisions? I think we need to pass wine around in order to have an open discussion about that. At the end of the day, I still feel like the product manager is the CEO of the product. I'll say that. Right? I think PMM, you have a strong responsibility to influence it, to drive revenue. If you think about the PM as owning vision, strategy, design, and execution, I think of PMM as owning articulating vision, articulating strategy, driving a go-to-market motion, and amplifying, throwing gasoline on that engine for lack of a better term. So I don't know who has more power. But I would say product is CEO of the company. PMM owns the product. PMM owns, has a very strong influence on it, and then owns the go-to-market side completely. Be careful here. Yeah, I agree with what you said. I'd say, like, in the models that I've seen work best, PMM should be owning their products. They are directly responsible for the outcomes for whatever metrics they sign up for. I think, at best, PMM should be co-owning that and sharing in it and really feeling responsible for it as well. In terms of who's more strategic, I think it really depends because I feel like you can be a PM that builds against a brief and against insights extremely well. And that's a really great PM. Or they can be someone who really synthesizes a lot of insights and chases it down themselves and defines it off of their vision for what a product could be. And that could be a good PM as well. So I don't think that's really a cut-and-dry question, like who's more strategic overall. I think there's examples of both. Okay. I'm going to sidestep the question a little bit because at Zendesk we actually follow a GM model. So we have a GM for each product line. And so ultimately the decision for the product line and for what we're doing lies with the GM. And they look at, you know, the overall business. Kind of what you were talking about with Microsoft. You know, it's like they look at, you know, the whole budget and what they're doing and what they're building and why and how they're going to hit that number at the end of the year or the end of the quarter. And then product marketing and product management are really partners in trying to get there. Like what needs to be built to get there and how do we position it and how are we going to be successful. So I think I'll be the one to say, like, I think the question has a little bit of fallacy in it already because, like, we should both be incredibly strategic thinking about different things. And if we can do that, then we'll be incredibly effective. And I think if we try to get into a match of, like, who's going to be the ultimate decider. I just don't know if that's going to be as effective. So I'm going to sidestep it and say, like, I don't, I'm not going to answer that. Totally fair. Awesome. Now what questions do you guys have? Let's open it up. I think Alex and team are coming around with some mics. Okay. Who's got a question? Hi. My name is Lauren and I work at Weebly. And my question is, do you guys have growth teams in your companies and what does the relationship between PMM and growth? Yes, we do have growth teams. So actually we just made some changes to this. So we actually now have the growth team. We have growth teams in product as well as a growth team in marketing. And I think that's been a really interesting shift because we've really started to look at it and, like, using the same kind of growth mentality around, like, testing very small little bits in our product around, you know, the trial experience or trying to A-B test, you know, if we have this feature turned on or off at trial. Or if we put, like, a tip here or something there. Can we actually change the conversion rate? And I think that kind of goes back to that conversation about the alignment of goals and that if the product team is ultimately responsible for bookings as well as the marketing team, you know, we can look at things like, you know, the different emails and nurture campaigns that we send and the different messages that we're putting out into the market. And we're testing those things. And now we also have this partner that's, like, testing that within the product and the way the product is designed and the way the product is implemented and optimized and how the trial goes. So that's, I think, been really interesting. We're kind of in the early phases of that. We just kind of rolled it out where each product line has their own. So I think that's really excited about what we can do with that. And I think there's a big drive from those growth teams to work with product marketing because they're looking for, you know, what are the things that we should try and how can we incorporate that with the other things that you're doing. So, yeah. So we have a huge growth team. The growth team precedes the marketing team. So it's really built into the DNA of the company. We run thousands and thousands of tests at any given time. I would say I kind of think of growth marketing, and I don't mean this in any negative way. They can, like, squeeze every last drop out of that orange. It's basically, like, what are all the ways that you can push people down the funnel, really get them to take the actions and drive the metrics that you want. And I find that we, some product teams don't have product marketers. I think you can always run. I think you can always run growth marketing or growth strategies against any given product because there's so many things to tweak. I think the times that we've been able to work best together are those situations where there's issues of user understanding, education, examples, settings, and what you name each thing. So there's a lot of language that I feel like is the most obvious place that we play a role because we carry that understanding and context about what users are trying to do. We're trying to figure out the context that they're coming in with. What choices do they make? How do you refer to similar concepts elsewhere? And being able to, and to an earlier question of, like, how do you make sure that, you know, we're aligned with product on goals? It's, a lot of it really, how do you prove that credibility in terms of metrics? You turn your insights into experiments. Like how do you run things with different language and different positioning and different presentations in a way that actually shows up statistically significant? Like, that's a lot. I feel like in order to have any credibility with product and growth at a company that's operating that way, you need to be able to prove it in the numbers. So that's what I would say. So a quick question. I think that throughout the evening we've spoken a lot about hard skills and very practical technical approaches for building an effective partnership between product marketing and product management. There's a lot of rhetoric out there about the importance of influence and soft skills and emotional intelligence. Like we're all just bombarded with all of this discussion and discourse about how we should just be as humans to humans. I'm wondering if you can share some insights with the audience as, you know, three people, four people who have excelled in your careers. What are some of those critical soft skills that you've exercised to build that influence and that relationship and build trust in that relationship? I would say I've done this well and I've done this poorly. I would say when you're joining a new team, especially, that's the best time to actually build trust. And don't go in swinging because I think sometimes as PMMs we can be pretty opinionated about what's good, what's bad, what should change, what could go wrong. I feel like we're kind of wired that way. But I think like building those relationships and just understanding what's on people's minds regardless of whether they're a PM or some other function. I think especially, you know, building good relationships with other functions is really important. We only talk about two here. But I think if you're just looking at a lot of different inputs and considering the questions that are on people's minds and what problems they're facing, you're going to have an uphill battle. So I would say like go in, you know, aiming to have a good relationship first and sharing in these goals rather than like trying to prove a point or trying to ship something. I found that that's pretty helpful. Yeah, I juggled a little bit because I was at Microsoft during the Bomber days. I'm sure it's very different now. But the way you moved up in your career was you got scored on like two things. You got these vectors and one of them was impact and influence, cross-functional collaboration, which made me laugh because how do you measure that, right? But I actually, one tactical thing I do when I join a new org is I actually go on a listening tour. People love to talk about themselves. You just ask questions and buy them lunch or coffee. And I literally go to different departments like sales ops, customer success, obviously product, product marketing, even engineering. And I'm just like, hey, I'm 30 days new. I'm just doing a listening tour. I'm trying to better understand like how things are run, what's working well, what's not working well. And more importantly, what is your understanding of product marketing and what do you expect from the role? And then I actually like to create some sort of like a three -slide report out to my manager and then obviously to the team of, okay, like this is what I heard from our listening tour. And then here's like my plan and here's what I think it can evolve to. And here's where I think, you know, we're already doing great. And here are the opportunities for growth. So I feel like when you formalize it into something like that, people can get to it. Yeah, so I agree with everything that you guys just said as well. I think what I'd add to that is, you know, product marketing is incredibly cross-functional, not just with product. And I think one thing that I always try to stick with or try to do is when I'm creating these projects and, you know, to be successful, so many people have to be bought in on it. And I think when you get people to a place where I'm telling people what to do or saying like my way is the right way, you know, and I'm the, you know, this is what we're going to do and you think we should do this and that's wrong but we're going to do this. If you can get everyone on the project to buy into the project and then realize that their success is tied to the success of that project, you can kind of get everybody on the same page pretty quickly. And so like when I think about product managers, right, like they have a launch or they have a feature that they're trying to do. to try to tell them that they're wrong or tell them that they should listen to product marketing and product marketing is smarter or product marketing is better or any of those types of things. I'm there to say, look, I want that product to be successful too. And so if we can get on that same page, here are my ideas and here's why I think it and here's the work that I put into it to build that credibility like you'd mentioned earlier, I think then you start to build this relationship and they start to trust you and you build that over time. Because I just think when you get into those questions of who's right and who gets to make the call, you've already lost something and you're never going to get that back. Because if you come at it from like, well, we both want to be right, we both want to win and this will make both of us look good if we can get it done, then you can work together for years and it can go really, really well. So I think if I think about a soft skill, that's probably the one that I rely on the most. I was kind of wondering, you're at these big organizations with lots of people doing things. I don't have a lot of experience in that situation, but in your day-to-day, when you're doing what you're doing, do you often find that there's something you could do, but you decide that someone else should do it? And what would be a good example of that? Does that happen often for you where you could be doing something, doing this, but you've decided, okay, you know what, I need someone else to do this because I've got these things going on. What would you be giving to other people that you could do yourself? Great question. I feel like I need to be careful because my team is in this room. I'm just like, these are all the things I assign to my team. Do you mean in a team sense or do you mean to other teams? Are you saying if you had a team that you were running or if you're saying, or I'd give this to PR? I guess I'm thinking of something that comes up often that you may argue with and realize, you know, it's actually just a protection for our team. I guess I work in a much smaller organization. I know I get so many things that I'm often thinking about. I don't do this just because I'm not. But in a much bigger organization, people find stuff that they're not. You're still making those decisions that I'm not making. So, yeah. So I would bring that back to, actually, maybe I should just give it to you because there's something that you said about prioritization around, like, you know, it has to do with, you know, you have your goals crystal clear. Like, I am trying to either, you know, sell this product, like, increase seat size or increase deal size. So, like, you have to articulate that. Like, so if you can articulate for your manager, whoever that is, if that's a product marketer or if it's, you know, the CMO or whoever it is, you're articulating, like, my big goals for this quarter or this half year or this, you know, full year is increasing deal size, increasing seat count and going up against competitor X, then it becomes very easy, right? Because you start to bucket those things. So when somebody comes to you and says, like, well, we're going to do this event and, you know, we'd like for you to create this brochure, you're like, well, is that going to increase our deal size, increase, you know, our seat count or increase, you know, our ability to compete against this competitor? And you're like, well, that event has to do with some other sector. It's not what I'm looking at. So no, right? Then you could push that back on, you know, is there someone, I guess, maybe in communications or, I mean, I don't know the size of your company, right? But here, you know, we do have, like, all of our shared services. So we have, you know, teams who write emails and we have creative and we have copywriting and we have all those teams. And so there are people who know how to do that. And so we actually invest a lot of our time in things like messaging docs, which, you know, once you've written it and my team is here, so they're probably going to laugh, but, like, they're hard to write at first because, you know, lots of input and people really, you know, get kind of spun up on it. But once you have that agreed upon thing, you know, you can hand that to the content team or, you know, copywriter and say, like, hey, this is what's needed. Here's the messaging and go write that. And then you can come back to those goals every time and say, it's not aligned to this, so it's not on my plate. That's kind of how I would do it if it's about putting it on other teams. Yeah, I think it's about finding your points of leverage. So messaging docs is a great example of that. So two tactical examples of that, right? So when you're doing a product launch, spend the time and do the messaging doc. It's painful, right? Have the 10-word version of your product, the 50-word version and the 100-word version where people can literally copy and paste. When I say people, I'm talking about people in marketing. So they can literally copy and paste and plug that into an email. Your marketing ops team can, you know, take that and run campaigns with it. Your sales ops team can take that and put that into sales enablement decks or new hire training. CSMs can obviously take that and update their existing customers. So that's one big point of leverage, marketing and positioning docs and just any sort of like template, which I know gives a lot of people the heebie-jeebies, but like trust me, it's a point of leverage. A second point of leverage that I find just in terms is like recording trainings and things like that. I know it sounds tactical, but for example, when I first started Marketo, like we were hiring new people like every day. And so, we would run sales boot camps weekly and that's just a week, like so much time to go and like meet people and then they want to have coffee with you one-on-one, which I'm happy to do. But my point is like, you're not, that's not a point of leverage. So can you record yourself and then drive a virtual certification process where you're having people then repeat back the messaging, your chalk talk, your 30 second pitch, whatever your messaging is, and then grade them against a set of benchmarks in a way that's virtual. As for us, like we have AEs around the world, right? So I'm not flying people around to go and do that. and then another example, I'm getting pretty tactical. Sorry, this is doing the weeds, like the product roadmap. Like every year, I literally try to start with what are the big five themes we're building this year? Okay, analytics, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I go and hand that off to product and say, great, now you're going to run with this deck for the rest of the year because you have the themes and like if there's major changes in the themes, we can definitely discuss that. But you have the major themes, you can just input your features throughout the year and you can articulate a pitch. So, um, obviously that may not work for your organization, but I think the key takeaway is figure out what your points of leverage are so that you can give people things that they can literally copy and paste into their messaging and their day-to-day activities. Great tips. Probably use some of those. so I, I would say, um, kind of related to those, I want to comment more on approach. Um, I think something that's helpful is a lot of times as PMMs, we do have shared, shared deliverables, things like messaging docs, um, decks, that kind of stuff. I think it's helpful sometimes when we have those shared um, deliverables to figure out who's going to take the first stab. I think for us, like, we actually have very, very simple decks. We don't use templates. It's just the regular one where it's just white with black text on it. So we don't actually spend any time designing decks, so that'd be a great thing to, uh, bring to your organizations as well. Um, but what you can do is, yeah, I actually don't want templates. Um, I prefer black text on white slides. Um, with charts. Um, so, so, I think something that helps is, figure out who can take the first stab and be very honest about your timelines. Because I think, um, a lot of times we're really busy, um, kind of shifting things around. Everyone's got their own bandwidth and some people are less busy on some days than others. Just be really honest about it and figure out what the milestones are. When do we need this out? Who needs to take a look at it? And it doesn't always have to follow the same process where you own everything. I think, like, part of it is just, like, kind of get over it. Like, if you want to move fast, you can't always be, like, having the pen on everything. And you have to have more trust and empowerment for the people that you work with. Um, you could be the final owner of it, but at the same time, like, find those partners, see what people are good at, um, and take advantage of that. Hi, guys. I am Jacqueline, a product manager of a Brazilian SaaS company called College RD Station. Uh, it's my first day in San Francisco and this is my first meetup in America, so, um, welcome. And we talk a lot about product launches, but I would like to understand when it comes to removing a feature or communicating, uh, uh, technical dabs or, like, outage, uh, it is something product marketing managers are involved in and how do you communicate it and if you have some tips about it? Sure. Uh, so the anti-launch, um, I would say deprecations, those are fun. Uh, it's just the, just do everything in reverse. Um, I think a lot of times you will have people who rely on your service or, or are the people who are like the 5,000 or five people who use a specific feature that you've decided you don't want to maintain anymore. And I think it's depending on, sounds like a big company thing, um, you should just, like, actually reach out to some of them to understand, like, why are they using it? What are the alternatives? What actions can they take? How do we make sure that we can soft-land them as much as possible? Because sometimes you can shift them towards another related feature that does basically the same thing or even, you know, it sounds crazy, but give them alternatives off your platform if you aren't providing that use case anymore. Um, tell people why, give them other options, and give them time to transition, I think are some of the things that I would keep in mind. Yeah, I would add on to that. Um, I'm thinking of, like, two use cases, where that's happened to me. Uh, one is when we slip on dates, and the second is, uh, reducing pricing impact, or, shifting pricing and packaging. So, in other words, telling someone, hi, next year you're gonna pay 40% more, um, and, and easing that process and grandfathering them then. Um, yeah, in terms of slipping on features, we do, like, recently this happened at Marketo, we actually just sent out an email communication and said, hey, like, own it, and this is what's gonna, and this is when it's gonna happen, um, and tell them, why, and usually we find the people who have been with us want us to win and understand and are willing to, to come along for the ride. Um, or I, in my other experiences, I've just launched something public beta. That way, the company, the customers are much more forgiving. Um, and then, yeah, and then the other good news about that is you now have a funnel of people you can reach out to, to get feedback, so when you're ready for GA, you're, you're taking that feedback, so that's a way to shimmy out of that one. Uh, for pricing and packaging, that's rough. I always try to have, I call it no customer left behind, some sort of a strategy in terms of, like, your tiered spend because there's some sort of 80-20 rule, at least in B2B software where 80% of your customers are driving a certain use case that drive the, the most revenue, so how do I make sure I grandfather them into a ramped plan so it's not just an overnight 40% increase? Um, for those of you who are really nerdy, we did this for SQL Server. We went from POCs to cores. Really nerdy. but long story short, it was gonna cost, like, the Fortune 1000 a lot more money and so we went on a ramped plan over time, um, and just communication gave them escalation because the worst thing, especially in today's age, is you don't want someone tweeting, like, you know, just going bad PR on your company. Um, and then, yeah, so I think having a plan with a tiered system and then who's responsible for communication to, to who, um, those are two examples that I've, that I've used. So I'll just go at the more tactical level again because I agree with both of you guys, uh, kind of at the strategy level. I think, um, uh, there was a joke kind of at the beginning of, like, just do the launch plan but backwards but when we actually, um, end of life or sunset a feature, we actually really do kind of a reverse funnel so we start with, like, how many customers are actually using this feature and when do we want to turn it off and then you kind of back into, like, how can I get customers off this feature so that, you know, and you set a goal, like, by the time we get to the time of turning it off, I want only 10% of these customers still using it. So in the course of the next, like, uh, depends on our timeline, three months, six months, or whatever, how can I move these customers from what they're currently doing to an alternative and, you know, kind of mentioned, Drew mentioned, um, you know, understanding why were they using it in the first place, what are the alternatives, are there alternatives, something that Zendesk provides or is it something that a partner has to provide now or something like that but if you kind of walk them backwards and we actually partner with our, and I don't know how big a company is but, um, partner with, like, our successor advocacy teams so people who are actually working with our customers and actually try to help them, um, move off, whether that's we're doing a webinar and saying, like, hey, you've been doing it this way, you should now do it this way, um, and just trying to do that communication through email, through in-product messaging, um, trying to make sure that they definitely see the message, they definitely know it's changing, they definitely know what the alternatives are and then we watch that funnel go backwards and we hope that we get it down to our goal, right? And then, um, you know, there's always, at the end, there's always a couple of people who are gonna, you know, they just still haven't moved and you're turning it off and, you know, you gotta, you gotta deal with that, but, um, yeah, hopefully that helps. Uh, so I have the final question for the event and then, obviously, it'll be time for people to talk to the panelists. Um, this is a question for all four of you. What is one, this is a Peter Thiel question, what's one thing you believe about product, the product marketing, product management relationship that most people would disagree with you on? For all four, for all four of you guys. Andrew first. Does anybody have an answer first? I need a second. Anybody. I think the takeaway for me, or the thing I would believe that other people may think is a myth, is that it's possible to have a very good relationship with your PM. Like, the fact that we have so many people in this room trying to understand, like, how do you do this and if it's possible, if it exists, like a healthy relationship with your PM. I'm here to tell you that it exists. I've had a few of them. I've, hopefully, some long-term healthy relationships as well. I think the biggest thing is a lot of stuff that we talked about before and it's possible. It's an achievable goal and, like, when it works well, it could be a very fulfilling experience. I've alluded to this, but I'll say it. I think product marketing owns more of the customer journey and I know there's this whole thing about, like, designing and to create delightful experiences. Product marketing owns that because you are solely, you sit at an organization, at a place in the organization where you're thinking through from the first minute they're even aware of your brand and know your company exists to when they become a customer to when they onboard to when they, hopefully, become an advocate and et cetera, et cetera. So, I actually would argue that product management does not own designing delightful experiences. I think product marketing owns delighting customers every single step of the journey and the journey does not start when they log in the product. The journey starts when they first are aware that your space or your category or your brand or whatever even begins and we have a unique responsibility to do that across every step. Okay, so, I don't know if this is something that nobody else would agree with because I definitely heard it, I heard it from a conference that we went to once but it stuck with me and somebody said, he said that product marketers and product managers are actually cut from the exact same cloth and actually think along the exact same lines and that really stuck with me because I think, you know, first of all, I see a lot of people, sorry, I probably stole yours but I've seen a lot of people who switch back and forth between being product marketers and being product managers but I also think it goes back to that, like, who's the more strategic person? It's like, you can kind of let that go and actually just recognize that, like, we're actually very much the same. We think very much the same. We have the same goals and if you actually just let them have your back and be like, you're facing that way looking towards the engineers and towards what needs to be done that way and I'm looking this way and I'm looking towards the customers and what needs to be in the customer journey and if you can just learn to trust each other that way and have each other's back, then you can have that relationship that you talked about. So I think that was a really eye-opening, like, thing that I heard and really stuck with me and I try to kind of, like, promote that thought that, like, we actually are just very similar. Yeah, totally agree with everything that's been said. The only thing I would add on to that is that one core advantage that product marketing actually has is being able to move a lot faster. So I remember one of the things that I spent a lot of time doing as a product marketer is actually piloting out certain product concepts via email or webinars or landing pages first to start getting insights, start getting feedback on how we should actually build it in the product. And in many ways, content, webinars, landing pages, emails, et cetera, are all extensions of the product. So as Sheena said, the impression starts much earlier than when you actually land into an authenticated product experience. So I definitely think goals are aligned and I think that product marketing actually has some...