Guide to Product Marketing for startups
A primer on Product Marketing, including best practices and insider perspectives from my time at Stripe, Twitter and Uber
Brand marketers get all the love. They get Super Bowl budgets and magazine features, bookshelves lined with acrylic statues from fancy awards shows, red-carpet parties at Cannes Lions, and viral TikToks. Product managers get countless books and newsletters, “thought leadership” Twitter threads, and the adoration of MBA students worldwide. Product marketers, on the other hand, tend to be less externally visible. But even though they operate behind the scenes, their impact can be felt throughout the entire organization, and across their external customer base around the globe.
This post will cover:
- What product marketing is
- The three pillars that make up product marketing
- How to hire product marketers
What is Product Marketing?
Product marketing is one of the three main categories of marketing: product, brand, and growth. Product marketing managers (PMMs) are responsible for launching new products and services, and they also play a critical role in product strategy, growth, and adoption, and require deep customer understanding in order to best shape the company’s positioning and messaging.
While much has been written about brand and growth marketing, as well as the adjacent role of product management, there is relatively little written about the role of product marketing. Because of this, I’ve fielded a lot of questions about product marketing from founders, investors, and growth-stage company builders. I thought I’d jot down some of my thinking about the role, inspired by my time at rapidly-scaling companies such as Twitter, Uber, and Stripe.
I spent much of the first decade of my career in B2B product marketing roles. I’ve been the first product marketer for new regions and products; scaled product marketing organizations; and defined how this cross-functional role should collaborate with peer organizations including product management, engineering, sales, user research, and brand/growth marketing.
Product Marketing is still a relatively misunderstood role, and the responsibilities can vastly differ from organization to organization, depending on the type of customer, the go-to-market process, and the strength and size of other related functions. That said, I have found some commonalities. Here are the basics:
The three pillars of Product Marketing: strategy, launch, and adoption
When I joined Stripe, I was the second member of the marketing organization and the second PMM. Like many organizations, Stripe hired product marketers before other marketing roles. Once we had scaled to half a dozen PMMs, we held an offsite to discuss our plans for the next year and align on the vision for Product Marketing. I led an exercise called “The Three Pillars of Product Marketing” (to see my chicken-scratch whiteboard notes, scroll to the end). I outlined the three main categories of responsibilities and broke them down by “primary” (where PMM typically led or co-led) and “secondary” (where we supported other functional areas).
- Product development and strategy
In order for organizations to get the biggest benefit from their PMMs, they should make sure the PMMs are involved in the product lifecycle from beginning to end. Product development and strategy starts before the engineering, product, and design teams even begin building a product, and certainly before the sales team begins selling it. The first part of this pillar includes conducting user interviews, market research and competitive analysis that can help surface product gaps, as well as product qualities to emphasize in the eventual launch materials.
Some of my favorite memories at Stripe and Twitter were the “user roadshows” we conducted ahead of a product roadmapping process. At Twitter, I often did these solo, and at Stripe I usually partnered with an engineering leader or product leader. We set up qualitative interviews with ~10–15 existing and potential users that fit certain criteria (e.g. “Series B SaaS companies”) to gather feedback on needs related to issues the customers faced every day. We summarized our key takeaways and presented them to the engineering and product teams as key inputs for the product roadmapping process.
By including your PMM on this part of product strategy, you can lay the foundation for a more successful launch when the time comes. One of the most common mistakes I see at other organizations (even very large organizations like Google!) is that product marketing is “tossed the ball” once a product is fully baked and then tasked with creating launch materials and taking it to market. Without rich, first-hand context on user needs, pain points, and market gaps, it’s much harder for product marketing to run a successful launch.
The secondary responsibilities of a PMM in this first pillar include quant research (often in conjunction with the analytics and research teams, if they exist), product roadmap prioritization, and market sizing (typically through collaboration with product management, and sometimes engineering or strategy teams).
2. Product launch
This second pillar, product launch, is what PMMs are most known for. When resources are tight and PMMs are stretched thin across too many different product areas, this is typically where their responsibilities start and end, because it can be a tremendous amount of work. That said, if you ask a PMM what their favorite part of their job is, my guess is they’d say “launching products.” Personally, it’s what I miss the most. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as leading a six-month project, coordinating across multiple teams (my max was seventeen teams for Stripe Connect), and bringing Milk Bar cakes and cookies to the “War Room” at sunrise on launch day!
Product launch responsibilities can vary considerably and are typically tied to the magnitude of the launch.
At Stripe, we developed a tiering system to help us catalog how big a launch should be, and what the associated launch materials would be.
A “Tier 1” launch was the largest, and was limited to 1–2 per product area per year. This often included a brand new landing page, a new sales deck, a new demo, support training and FAQs for the support teams, a blog post, PR publications, in-depth customer case studies, an org-wide sales training, and a presentation or announcement at “Stripe Sessions,” our user conference.
“Tier 2” launches were more frequent in nature, and included updates to an existing product landing page, updated sales collateral (maybe a slide or two), a few brief user testimonial quotes, a blog post, an addition to an existing sales training, and maybe an email to certain users.
“Tier 3” launches were the smallest and most frequent, and included internal/external emails, maybe an API changelog entry, but not much else.
The PMM took the lead on naming the new product (leading these Stanford d school-style brainstorming sessions was always fun), drafting all internal and external messaging pertaining to the launch, all website and sales collateral copy, and any new sales materials that needed to be created. We would also partner with the product team to conduct sales training sessions and manage Q&A for sales and support teams.
At Stripe, we also spoke with each beta user, gathering feedback on the early impressions of the product, with the goal of identifying which customers might be best for user testimonial quotes or more in-depth case studies (one of my favorites I created with Lyft here).
Shared responsibilities in the product launch pillar included general beta management along with product; website design in partnership with brand design; product Q&A doc creation with sales, support, and product; and pricing strategy with product and finance.
3. Adoption and engagement
The third pillar of Product Marketing completes the cycle of strategy → launch → adoption.
This process begins pre-launch in collaboration with the sales and product teams to set goals for the launch and metrics for success. From there, the product marketing team often leads sales training sessions that help the sales teams learn how to pitch the new products.
At both Twitter and Stripe, we often sat in on early sales pitches to help answer questions about the products and provide support for the sales teams.
In my final year at Twitter, I created a new international product/product marketing role where I was the primary liaison between the teams on the ground in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, India, and Australia, and our product and engineering teams based in San Francisco. I held monthly sales training sessions to answer ongoing questions related to our newer products and help the sales teams hit our product adoption goals.
At Stripe, we tested out various tools to increase product adoption and engagement, including “product newsletters” to new and existing customers; taking regular audits of sales collateral and messaging and identifying opportunities for updates; creating new case studies; working with the sales team on repositories for customer testimonial quotes; events; conferences; speaking opportunities; and more.
We also collaborated with the account management team on sales enablement, Quarterly Business Review (QBR) support, and ongoing customer feedback. For some of our more mature products, we partnered with the communications team to create analyst reports with firms including IDC, Gartner, and Forrester, and made sure they knew about exciting new products and users to highlight in media conversations.
How to hire a Product Marketer
Identifying ideal candidates and creating interview loops for product marketers depends on a few variables, including:
- Customer type (eg consumer, SMB, enterprise, developer)
- Size of product marketing team
- Size of overall marketing team
- Size of “peer functions” (ie product management, design, sales)
- Go-to-market style (self-serve, inside sales, direct sales, combination thereof etc)
What you’ll want to look for depends on whether this PMM is joining as the first PMM (or first marketer), whether or not they’ll be expected to move into a management role, and the strength/size of the PMM peer teams, which often dictates how much their responsibilities might bleed over into those other areas.
I frequently speak with founders about how to adjust the profile of your ideal candidate based on the above criteria. While the interview loop and process will also differ based on your unique situation, since PMM is always a highly-cross functional role, I recommend including stakeholders from the most critical peer teams who will be working with the person, in addition to other PMMs/marketers (if they exist).
Getting work samples through a take-home project is a really valuable tool in a PMM interview process — especially for PMMs coming from large companies where they may have had considerable support from other peer functions, agencies, etc, you’ll want to test out what this person can actually do on their own. At Stripe, we varied take-home projects by functional area, but a few of my favorite assignments were: “Write two emails pitching Stripe Billing: one to a developer, and one to a finance stakeholder” and “Create a sample launch plan and basic collateral for the upcoming launch of Connect Payouts.”
What do I do if I don’t have a Product Marketer?
For any startup founders reading this and thinking: “Sure, all of these activities sound great, but we’re too small to hire a dedicated PMM,” note that some of the activities I outlined in the pillar above might be overkill for a seed-stage startup, and you almost certainly don’t need a product marketing manager yet! That said, the responsibilities of product strategy, product launch, and adoption/engagement are functions that every business, no matter how small, should be performing in some capacity. When you do hire a dedicated PMM, you can pass on some of those responsibilities, but it’s common for many different functional areas to collaborate on those three pillars.
Product Marketing in a nutshell
So there you have it! Product marketing boils down to product strategy, product launch, and product adoption. A common thread in all of this is a deep understanding of who the customer is, and what they need. Product marketing is an extremely cross-functional role that helps relay customer needs from the go-to-market teams and the customers themselves to the product development teams, and helps translate and explain product functionality to the go-to-market teams and the external customers.
I’m continually surprised by how helpful these skill sets are for early stage company building, and spend quite a bit of time with my founders on the three pillars of product marketing. Hope you find this useful. I’d love to hear your feedback!
Thanks to Kathleen Estreich for the feedback on this post, and my peers at Twitter and Stripe for the inspiration!
