Liza Cichowski’s Post

9 Reasons to Hire a Product Marketer Early: (And avoid costly mistakes) Most SaaS companies wait until post-series A once they've started a regular cadence of shipping new features and updates. If you wait to hire a product marketer until you start launching more features/products, you’ll already be way behind. Issues you experience during launches can be symptoms of deeper problems that must be addressed first. Here’s why you should hire a product marketer in the early stage: 1. Build a strong product story from the start ↳ They lay the foundation for your core product story. ↳ Not just for new enhancements. 2. Avoid inconsistent product messaging ↳ Ensure everyone is on the same page. ↳ Consistent messaging drives better results. 3. Fill gaps in sales team enablement ↳ Equip your sales team with the right tools. ↳ Boost their confidence and performance. 4. Improve communication and collaboration between teams ↳ Bridge the gap between sales, product, and marketing. ↳ Better communication leads to better outcomes. 5. Understand the market deeply ↳ Bring the voice of the customer to every team in the org. ↳ You need customer insights yesterday in the early days. 6. Shorten the lag time ↳ There can be a lag between hiring and impact. ↳ Start early to see results sooner. 7. Navigate a competitive talent market ↳ Product marketing is a hot talent market. ↳ Hiring takes longer than you think. 8. Prevent launch issues ↳ Early involvement avoids launch hiccups. ↳ Smooth launches lead to better customer experiences. 9. Secure long-term success ↳ Early investment in product marketing pays off. ↳ It sets the stage for sustained growth. Product marketing is the function that finds traction and repeatability in your GTM and then cross-pollinates it across every team in the organization. Would you rather have that sooner or later? #gotomarketstrategy #productmarketing #SaaS

I could not agree with this analysis more. PMMs are basically mini CMOs. You must own the world of your particular product if at a larger company with multiple products, or if at a smaller company you are the Swiss army knife - but your top priority is to 1. know the customer better than anyone else and feed that information into all directions the job takes you. and 2. know the product to a depth where you can match the two together and translate for anyone - dev, customers, c-levels, product, strategy, what is needed and what the value is in their 'speak'. Best job ever but not an easy one.

The struggle of the Product Marketing Manager (PMM) role in our industry is very real right now. In preparing to launch PMM as our latest role on MarketerHire we created a council (as we always do) of top marketers in that role, and the CMOs who hire, them to advise on experience, skill, matching and vetting data structures. Here's some of the key stuff I took away: - PMM might rival Growth Marketer as the most confusing, wide-ranging, make-it-whatever-you-want role in the marketing industry. It's terrifying. - Product Marketing Managers are apparently being asked to do anything from content marketing to testing/setting pricing. - Some companies hire PMMs hoping they will also function as a technical product manager, sales manager, or multichannel marketing IC. This does not go well. - There is usually a heavy market research component to the role that PMMs find companies want the benefit of but rarely have the patience to wait for. Relevant vertical and product experience is more important than other marketing roles to alleviate this. We make it a point to have a clear framework for what a role does before we launch it (otherwise how can we match it?). Product Marketing Manager was definitely one of the most challenging I've ever worked on, but I think we got there. What are some of the things you find challenging in hiring or being a PMM?

I sat in on a few sessions at the Product Marketing Alliance here in Seattle this week. I enjoyed the discussions about AI (lots of them), positioning, storytelling, GTM. While I took away some useful topical insights, I also came away with a personal insight. I realized that throughout my career, I’ve done much of the work called “product marketing” without consistently calling it that. - Spearheading customer interviews to discover pain points  - Uncovering the customer’s “truth”   - Blending data + intuition to make decisions  - Coming up with a hypothesis and proposing solutions to test/address problems in the customer journey  - Working with the product team before the product is fully built, informing the downstream roadmap  - GTM planning - Conducting competitive analysis  - Championing the user/buyer - Facilitating naming  And I love this stuff (except for the naming if I’m being honest). Why is Product Marketing a more common job description in B2B tech or just big tech vs B2C, e-commerce, CPG and DTC? Thanks to Dani Kellogg 🧪, Caitlin Snaring, Stuart Pitts, Jamie Gier, Sanjay Kidambi and many others for stirring up insightful conversions. 

In the end it’s all semantics. The product marketing manager job title is one thing, the written job description another, and the unwritten expectations still another. Hiring managers, decide what YOUR company needs and don’t just copy a job description from a renowned company or a competitor. Put your needs in your job description. ° Do you need someone who has created over 20 types of product content? Write it down. ° Do you need someone who has transitioned the marketing of a product from an on-premise to a SaaS solution? Write it down. (A few of you see where this is going.) ° Do you need someone with 29 years of experience in the identity/biometric industry? Write it down. Once you set your expectations (assuming they are realistic), the right product marketing manager candidates will find you. #productmarketing #productmarketingmanager #biometricproductmarketingexpert https://lnkd.in/g3QYjyZy

What issues can arise from a lack of collaboration between product managers and product marketers? How can organizations improve the partnership and collaboration between product managers and product marketers? Read the article to find out: #IdentifyingFromAfar #marketing #hiring #recruiting

The role of #ProductMarketingManager has only been widely adopted within the last six years—as a result, the depth of skills available in the market is often shallow, making it difficult to find a candidate who can develop a GTM strategy rooted in value. To help ensure #hiring success, streamline your #PMM #hiringprocess with these 3 steps:  1️⃣ Determine the Best Reporting Structure 2️⃣ Determine the Degree of Market-Facing Skills Required 3️⃣ Decide Between Domain Expertise and Functional Expertise #ProductMarketing #TechHiring #ProductMarketingRecruitment

No two product marketing roles are ever the same. Just look at these job descriptions: 🔍 "In this role, you will work with others in marketing to establish compelling product positioning & messaging." 🎯 "Responsible for the cross-functional success of large projects and product launches—with a strong bias toward operational and organizational excellence." 💼 "You’ll own the marketing strategy and product marketing campaigns for all business lines." 📈 "…will be responsible for growing our customer base and understanding their needs." So as a knife product marketer, expected to adapt to.. literally everything... what skills should you develop to grow your impact and your career? Below are the top three priorities I think every product marketer should focus on. (You can find the full post on my blog - link in the comments) 1️⃣ Understanding the customer: You need to develop the strongest skills and undeniable prowess at reading the room. 2️⃣ Collaborative feedback loops: Unless you can establish effective, two-way relationships within your organization, the deepest customer insights won’t translate into successful outcomes. 3️⃣ Consistent customer-facing go-to-market execution: Your GTM hinges on your ability to combine the first two priorities with a strong external marketing strategy. What would you add? #ProductMarketing

”We have someone doing product marketing but I don’t think they know how to do that” Too many companies understaff product marketing as the business scales. But it feels like even more make the mistake of hiring under-qualified people for product marketing positions. Because they know some industry expert. Or because they have someone that worked on the customer success team and really knows the product. But knowing the industry or product only makes you half qualified to do product marketing. The other half of being good at product marketing is knowing how to do product marketing 🙃 How to create a positioning strategy. How to get the whole business focused on an ICP. How to build programs to get customers to adopt more features of your platform. How to message those features to various cohorts of your customer base. How to help the sales team close more deals with better training. Those are the areas where product marketing can have a big impact on the business, but you really need someone who's done them. I’m not trying to hate on anyone who’s just starting out in product marketing. But I've heard too many company leaders say they need product marketing help but the person with the product marketing title right now “is great at writing product releases" but just not capable of doing the thing the business really needs and they don’t want to hire someone else. I’m sorry, but the solution is hire a professional, experienced product marketer to help you level up. If you're limited on headcount, I'd hire the person experienced in product marketing over the industry expert or the former CSM. Yes, a pro is more expensive. But a good one will be worth it.

Every successful marketing head shares a secret. And that is… 👉 The balance of short-term & long-term wins. Today, marketers face too many UNREALISTIC expectations around resource & execution. They’re not given the time, patience, and budget required. If the company is to succeed, everyone must be playing the long-game with the goal to keep getting better, to keep innovating, and to keep playing. But most won’t be around to see it. And neither will anyone else in the company. Unless, of course, there are short-term wins on the table. Truth is, the best way to change long-term behaviour is with short-term feedback. The BAD short-term involves using deception to make a quick sale, spamming as many people as you can, using aggressive promises, having a price war, or using linkbait. We don’t want any of that. The GOOD short-term is optimising existing activity, shutting down the things that don’t work, optimising the sales and marketing processes, allocating fair budget to social paid social, running retention campaigns. We want all of that and more. And putting those short-term wins on the table buys you the trust, time, and resources to do the work that *really* matters, which is…. The long-term: – Hiring the right team to execute. – The consistent research. – The partnerships. – The stakeholder marketing. – The demand campaigns. – The network effects. – Validating your segmentation & targeting & positioning. On and on we go. All the stuff you can’t do in month 1. Brick-by-brick. Building trust with customers but ALSO internally. With sales, with product, with leadership. So, that you (and the company) can keep playing. That’s the only path forward today. #saas #marketing PS. We’ve been obsessing over the short CMO/HoM tenure for decades. What we don’t talk about (enough) is all the capital, effort, and talent wasted as a result of short-term thinking.