The Case for Product Marketing Managers in Seed-Stage Startups
Widely recognized as the definitive guide to product management in tech, the first problem I needed Marty Cagan’s Inspired to solve for me was the ambiguity of my role — residing in Marketing Ville (population one) — within a citadel of developers and engineers smart enough to build truly useful stuff on the blockchain.
“Very often key leadership in sales and marketing is confused and embarrassed by what the product team is trying to get customers to buy and use. The root of the issue is that while the ‘p’ MVP stands for product, and MVP should never be an actual product. Not where ‘product’ is defined as something that your developers can release with confidence, that your customers can run their business on, and that you can sell and support.”
— Marty Cagan
Three hours into Inspired on Audible, it hit me: to drive the kind of marketing activity that hikes up sales and encourages retention, I’d need to evolve my job description as Head of Marketing to Head of Product Marketing, and here’s why:
Product Management vs. Product Marketing Management — two sides of the same coin?
Right up front, let’s acknowledge that making clear distinctions between these two roles can be tricky.
Since we’re a fairly early-seed-stage startup, Custos Tech’s Product Managers currently sit at executive/founder level.
This structure lends velocity to our product road-mapping process in ways that are extremely valuable: our technically-minded Product Managers are the literal definition of ultimate accountability for the business units they oversee (since they also own the business); and, in setting vision for our products, nobody can compete with the industry context and experience they possess.
However: this also means that our Product Managers are performing three to five varied and crucial business functions on any given day of the week, including everything from business development to product road mapping.
“I’ve seen countless roadmaps over the years,” says Cagan, “and the vast majority of them are essentially prioritized lists of features and projects. Marketing needs this feature for a new campaign, etc… the trouble is, there are two inconvenient truths about product:
1. At least half the ideas on your roadmap are not going to deliver what you hope. Sometimes customers just aren’t as excited about this idea as you are, so they choose not to use it. Sometimes they try it out, but the feature is too complicated, so users choose not to use it.
2. Even with the ideas that do prove to have potential, it takes several iterations to get this idea to the point where it delivers the necessary business value.
In strong teams, product, marketing, and engineering work side-by-side.”
Upping my Product Marketing Management game
According to Facebook’s former PMM, Helen Min, the four key competencies of an effective Product Marketing Manager are as follows:
- Strong partnership with technical counterparts: PMMs should always be in lock-step with Product Managers (often Engineering and Product Design Leads too), as a breakdown in trust can be fatal to a product launch. Technical leaders should be able to trust their PMM will surface critical information from customers and/or sales to them directly (and filter noise).
- Ability to craft strategic messaging. The best PMMs can stand-in for PMs on product demos because they strive to know the product just as well. This knowledge coupled with the ability to develop a clear and compelling core value proposition provides the rest of the marketing, communications, and PR teams with a strong foundation to build additional messaging.
- Effective internal communication skills. To use a sports analogy, I often refer to the PMM as “the quarterback of a product launch” because they are leading the play, and their teammates on the field are looking to them for direction. This requires PMMs to be extremely organized and effectively communicate updates to their (often matrix-ed and distributed) team whether through email, presentations, chat, in-person conversation. Communicating clearly, confidently, and regularly is critical to successfully “quarterback” the launch moment.
- Ownership of outcomes. While the PMM is clearly important and central to a product launch, the role can also be tricky because the execution of a lot of external-facing pieces is distributed. The very best PMMs are able to see past this and simply own all outcomes. They should be the first to ask: how can I help, what information or support do we need now, (and later) what could they have done differently? Great PMMs are ones that have earned trust and respect from both technical and non-technical cross-functional partners, and what makes those people want to work with a PMM, again and again, is ownership of outcomes.
The reason this PMM role description excites me so much?
It demands a 180-degree turnaround in the way I’ve been working up until now.
It takes a village to custodian the backlog
I happened upon software engineer Juan Urrego’s musings via OfferZen’s incredibly smart community-driven content project, <source>, and I hope he’ll appreciate my fangirling for his assertion that:
Everyone in the team has a voice and needs to be included in the prioritisation method, you can’t leave the backlog being managed by a singular [person]… that’s why we have a team that can bring ideas and self-empowerment to the table. If we follow the Agile Manifesto Principles, the fourth principle says: “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” So if that’s true… why should I leave the complete prioritisation to a unique point of view?
At Custos, we’d rather stick pins in our eyes than add another meeting to the calendar.
Which is why we’ve thus far taken an MVP approach to the processes of product road-mapping and backlog prioritization, in which Marketing and Sales have minimal oversight.
My drive to expand the scope of my role from Head of Marketing to that of a Product Marketing Manager stems from the desire to change that.
And, while, adding the word ‘product’ to my title might seem like a small step, it signals a larger paradigm shift that’ll afford me:
- closer and more authoritative oversight of our current product roadmap(s),
- more insight into the product features that should be coming through in marketing messages,
- ritualized contributions to the process of backlog prioritization, and
- the opportunity to establish an operationalized process for feature releases that involves proofreading, testing and UI feedback before deployment.
How do Product and Marketing work together to build better software in your startup?
The product-focused evolution of non-technical job roles at Custos — including our rockstar Ops-Product Manager, Annie Spies, has helped us work towards obtaining holistic answers to the following questions, before product and feature prototyping:
- Will the user buy this or choose to use it?
- Can the user figure out how to use it?
- Can our engineers build this?
- Will our stakeholders support this?
How many of your team members are pushing a product marketing and management agenda on the daily? If many, I’d love to hear about how it’s helped your makers build better products.
Similarly, if you prefer to keep functions like marketing and product management separate, I’d like to learn why.
Let me know in the comments!
Thank you for reading this! If you feel this content was worth your click, please make my day and hodl down on that 👏 button for a few seconds to help others find it 🤞
Cheers,
Tash 👧🏽
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