How to Develop a Product Marketing Strategic Mandate
This post is Part 2 in the 5-part series The Power & Impact of Good Product Marketing.
In the introduction to this series I claimed that product marketing is the linchpin to sustainable business growth. I argued that when product marketing is at the heart of your business you can access moments of momentum and reach new levels of growth.
Today we’ll discuss the first step in achieving this velocity: creating an intentional and strategic mandate for your product marketing team.
Why does your team exist? What types of problems will you tackle? Answering these questions upfront will allow you to get stakeholder buy-in and negotiate areas of collaboration and overlap as soon as possible.
Choosing Your Path to Growth
Product marketers are a unique breed. They have a broad skill set and a foundational knowledge of how the product and revenue sides of the business operate. This means they’re primed to take on almost any strategic problem and often results in product marketers being pulled in multiple directions and asked to participate in many projects.
Setting a strategic mandate allows you to take ownership and be intentional about the impact your team will have on the organization.
So, how do you choose your focus and mandate? The answer will be different for every team, but should always start with identifying your company’s biggest challenges.
Are you struggling top of funnel with customer acquisition? Do you need to attract more leads or improve trialer conversion rate?
Or, are you struggling with retaining and expanding customers? Do you need to decrease churn rate, or improve monetization?
Once you’ve identified the biggest challenges, you need a way to prioritize them.
I like to start with these three questions:
- What is most urgent? Is there something that needs to be done immediately?
- What is your team uniquely qualified to do?
- Where can you have the largest impact?
Once you’ve answered these three questions, you’ll be able to define and defend your first area of focus.
How Do You Measure Product Marketing Work?
Measuring the impact of your product marketing mandate may prove challenging at first as there aren’t standard KPIs that all product marketers aim for.
Depending on the mandate, there are 3 buckets of KPIs that you may want to consider: revenue-based, product-based and project-based.
Revenue-based KPIs focus on the impact your team is having on the company’s business results, such as conversion rate, growth rate or new monthly recurring revenue (MRR). These are KPIs that you may share with the Marketing and Sales teams.
Adoption-based KPIs are metrics that you may share with the Product Management team. They focus on overall feature adoption, segmented feature adoption and feature usage.
Project-based KPIs are often the default, but make it challenging to truly prove your team’s value to the company.
A product launch may have KPIs from both the revenue and product buckets, but other initiatives, like new pricing or expanding into a new segment, may only fall under one bucket.
Being clear about both your mandate and how you will measure your work will help all of your stakeholders understand what they can expect from you and what success will look like.
