Getting ramped up and ready to create meaningful impact in a new role can be both thrilling and nerve-wracking. That’s especially true for a new product marketing leader where you’ll generally deal with more key stakeholders than other marketing roles. Your role will mean working closely with the product team, sales team, customer success team, the marketing team, and often the customer support team. This is even more true if you’re originating the role at your company because your coworkers may have very specific expectations for product marketing from previous companies.
When I’m working as a product marketing consultant, I don’t have the luxury of a 90-day ramp up. I need to be effectively driving growth as quickly and efficiently as possible from day one. That’s meant building a framework that helps me go deep on a company’s needs quickly. Here’s what I recommend for new product marketing leaders, whether you’re joining a new company, or you’ve been promoted into a leadership role.
Start With Goal Setting for Your New Product Marketing Leadership Role
Before you even begin your new job, refine your thoughts about what you’d like to accomplish in your first 30, 60, and 90 days. Throughout the interview process, you’ve gleaned information on the organization, its goals, its track record and how it functions. How can you drive impact in your early days? Have you heard rumors of data problems? Concerns about too many marketing materials? Not enough case studies?
Make sure you’re getting input from your supervisor and the organization’s leadership (usually their expectations will be documented somewhere — if you haven’t already, ask for access to that). Think about the problems you’ve observed, the opportunities you’ve noticed, and the gaps between this company and its leading competitors.
Choose a framework for effective product marketing goals
Every product marketing leader has their own approach to goal setting, and you’ll want to use the framework that works best for you. Generally, I like to start both on a zoomed in level — deep in the weeds, what would be do-able in 30 days that would change something significant — and also zoomed out thinking along the lines of “what do I want to have accomplished five years from now” and then working backwards to break that down into achievable milestones. Usually, my ultimate plan is a hybrid of these two views.
When it comes to sharing these goals with others, I like to structure the early goals using SWOT. It can be helpful to get clear on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and the ways that intersects with product marketing goals going forward. Get feedback on the goals you set from your leadership peers so you can ensure they’re well aligned with cross-organization expectations.
Schedule One-on-Ones With Everyone
Schedule time to meet all of your new coworkers, particularly on the teams that will most impact your role. In most organizations, you’ll want to start with the leaders of each team and check with them about meeting their reports, but if at all possible, make time to meet everyone on the teams you’ll be working with most closely. During these one-on-ones, come prepared to learn:
- What challenges their team is facing, how those challenges are currently being defined, and what attempts to resolve those challenges have looked like.
- Which opportunities they’re most excited by — new product features, market shifts, customer changes — and what they believe is needed in order to maximize success with those opportunities.
- If they’ve worked with a product marketing team before, it can be helpful to hear about their expectations and what’s worked well for them in the past. If they haven’t worked with a product marketing team in the past, see if you can uncover their concerns and desires about the relationship.
- And make sure to learn about them as individuals — what are they passionate about outside of work?
Also come to these one on-ones prepared to share:
- Your background as a product marketing leader. If you’re an introvert like me, you may want to practice this a bit. Sometimes my brain floods me with too many ideas at once when I’m meeting new people, especially when I’m enthusiastic about the work I’m doing, so having some ideas already jotted down can keep me more focused.
- Any specific questions you have so far. I like to arrive at each of these meetings with one key question that I’m curious about that I think this particular person may have key insights on. If your new coworkers have extensive LinkedIn pages, you can often learn what they’re most expert at there, but otherwise, I keep detailed notes when someone mentions a coworker, especially if they say something like, “Mary’s the go to expert on all things ABC.”
- Any observations you’re ready to share. Make sure to couch these as early impressions because some of them will be wrong :), but I find bouncing ideas off people in these early meetings is a great way to test out my initial hypothesis and refine the best ideas and insights that have bubbled up from my research to that point.
- A specific, small ask. Meeting your new coworkers can be a great time to ask for a favor if there’s something you already know would be helpful. Make sure this initial favor is small and well-defined. For instance, asking a customer success lead, “Can you introduce me to a customer who really loves feature XYZ?” can be easy to fulfill and having that introduction can mean you have someone to meet with when you need voice of customer insights.
Deepen Relationships Both Internally and Externally
More than any other single thing you can do in your new role as a product marketing leader, investing in relationships will have the biggest impact. Meet the company’s key partners and customers, take the time to really get to know your coworkers and peers.
If it’s not already on your calendar, set up regular time to meet with the marketing team, product team, sales team and customer success teams. You may be able to join their pre-existing huddles once a week. You’ll also want regular one-on-one meetings with your supervisor, any direct reports and the leaders of each of the key teams you’re working with.
As a new product marketing leader, be prepared to front load your schedule with meetings
Starting in a new role often means having more meetings than you might later on. These regular opportunities to interact with others at your organization are key to cementing your new relationships. Especially if you’re a remote product marketing leader, don’t underestimate the importance of scheduled face-to-face time with your new coworkers.
If you’re someone who loves to get things done like I do, sometimes it can feel like meetings prevent that. But even beyond meeting growth goals and hitting KPI targets, getting to know your new coworkers and prioritizing these new relationships is foundational work as a leader. What’s more, these meetings will often help you map the most effective path.
A range of perspectives can shorten the learning curve
More than once, I’ve been having a conversation with a sales person or onboarding expert and discovered that that research white paper a SME suggested might not be as useful as a quick infographic with a few relevant statistics or an online calculator with a lead gen mechanism. Because of these conversations, I’ve been able to deliver much more impactful product marketing collateral which means having the impact I’ve been hired to have.
When it comes to these relationships, also don’t underestimate the usefulness of social media connections. In work, LinkedIn can be particularly helpful. For those contacts who regularly publish content, commenting and sharing what they’ve published can go a long way towards improving these relationships, especially in early days.
Now’s the time to hone your people skills
If business relationships don’t come naturally to you, I recommend the classic Dig Your Well Before Your Thirsty. It’s rather old fashioned, but what I like about that is that it feels more do-able for busy marketing leaders than some of the newer guides which often take a “be everywhere, know everyone, know everything” approach which leads to superficial connections at best.
Remember, this is just about being curious about new people and offering to support them. It really can be that simple. Sometimes people see professional networking as something that requires a charismatic personality, but the truth is your genuine interest in people is more than enough to meaningfully connect.
When it comes to those external relationships, join networking groups in your industry and reach out to leaders in your field. Often, those leaders will be excellent connectors and as you get to know them, they may introduce you to others in your space. These external relationships will help you be more effective in your work and can introduce you to resources and opportunities that will help you create even more compelling results in your new role. What’s more, as you start to build your team, these contacts will be valuable for recruiting more effectively.
Though many marketers are introverts who are more skilled at the “one to many” conversation, the importance of individual relationships to the success of your product marketing motion really can’t be overestimated. If you haven’t spent much time networking both internally and externally in the past, use this new role to make more of an investment in your relationships.
Document Everything You’re Learning as a New Product Marketing Leader
As you go through your early process at a new company, make sure you’re making notes on everything you’re learning. Organizing these notes is fundamental to being able to make use of them later, so I’ll share some of my favorite tools. Also, consider sharing these notes as you go to give your work more transparency. I wouldn’t just send a link to everyone at the organization, but, I do like to share the notes from a one-on-one with the person I met with, and I tend to do snapshot summaries of the learnings that seem most important to share with my own supervisor.
- For meeting notes, Fellow is a fantastic option. Notes are searchable and shareable, plus you can use the platform to send a pre-meeting agenda. It integrates well with Zoom and other video conferencing platforms so that you can have your agenda accessible during the meeting.
- Fireflies.ai can transcribe the meeting, summarize it, and generate action plans. This can be a real time saver. (Personally, I find taking notes helps with my retention, so I don’t tend to learn on AI in this way.)
- For building your own documentation library as a product marketing leader, I like Coda which offers automations, integrations and AI tools to create a more flexible approach to internal content. I like the way you can easily create a dashboard where you can pull together tools that give you a high level view that can be cross-indexed with in depth resources.
- For voice of customer interviews, a tool like Gong can be game changing — it makes it easy to identify specific topics (like competitor names, or common frustrations you customers were looking to solve before buying your product/service), to share audio content, and to glean deeper insights on your customers.
Seek & Use Feedback Regularly
Right from the start, build a feedback mechanism so that you can evaluate how you’re doing. Some of this should be informal — a weekly one-on-one with your supervisor offers you the opportunity to check in and re-align as necessary. Try not to take this feedback personally (whether it’s positive or negative). Your growth in a new leadership role will not be without growing pains and your supervisor can help you better fit in to the organization for future growth.
As product marketing leaders, we’re accustomed to seeking out and using feedback about our company, but it can still be tricky to seek it about ourselves. You likely don’t want to resort to something so formal as a survey, and our coworkers can be uncomfortable delivering constructive criticism. That’s why you’ll need to strongly leverage personal reflection, continual learning, and insights from your supervisor. You may have a peer or mentor at the organization who will also be comfortable being frank with you and this can be a tremendous asset for growth.
In a remote working environment, in particular, there’s generally less office gossip which can make it easier to be more productive, but also can make it more difficult to assess if there are things your coworkers need from you that you’re not currently doing. On the plus side, though, I’ve found my remote coworkers tend to be more focused on getting their own work done which means being reliable, trustworthy and a hard worker who’s good at your job will go a long way towards helping you be successful.
Setting expectations is key to building credibility
The other area around feedback you’ll want to keep a handle on is setting expectations. When you’re the first product marketing leader an organization has had, expectations may be sky high for what product marketing can do. I’ve worked in organizations, for instance, where customer retention was through the floor and people saw that as an “easy” problem for marketing to tackle. (Spoiler: though retention can sometimes be mitigated with strong marketing, retention isn’t an issue of “just email our customers more and they’ll stay longer.”)
As you’re building relationships with your coworkers, you’ll start to build the capital to be able to gently push back on those expectations when they’re outsized and re-calibrate so that your coworkers aren’t disappointed.
Begin Reporting on KPIs and Product Marketing Leader Wins
As you start to get more established in your new role, you’ll want to ensure you can report out regularly on the work that the product marketing function is accomplishing. Setting up and sharing dashboards, presenting projects and their successes, and sharing what you’re testing and iterating will all go a long way towards helping others understand the work you’re doing.
A product marketing leader has the opportunity to work cross-functionally with so many key stakeholders and that can lead to extraordinary growth both for you personally and for the team. Sometimes in a new role, we can get so focused on creating and driving results that we forget to publicize those results. Don’t expect your coworkers to just know what you’re doing and delivering and the impact that work is having. Rather, make sure to share your results with your supervisor and with other teams.
Remember to publicize new resources internally, not just externally
Sharing results and new resources internally might take the form of a regular recap of new resources available, an official presentation at the all company meeting, or even an informal Loom recording. If you’re hosting a webinar, invite the company to share the event on their own LinkedIn profiles. If you’re highlighting new product features, post a celebratory Slack message calling out the hard work of product and engineering.
Perhaps ironically, most marketers struggle with self promotion so if you do as well, just be aware that it can be really helpful to share the work your team is doing. Also keep in mind company culture as you decide what to share and how to share it.
The wonderful thing about sharing these wins with the entire company is that it will give them the opportunity to amplify these new materials. Every time I’ve written a case study, my product team has been enthusiastic about sharing it with their contacts to demonstrate the work they’ve had a hand in. (It goes without saying that marketers and sales people love to share case studies, but sometimes we forget powerful case studies highlight the work of everyone at a company and our coworkers are often eager to share content that features their work.) So do make sure to highlight the good work you and your team are doing.
Your First Ninety Days as a Product Marketing Leader and Beyond
Succeeding in your first ninety days is just the beginning, but by tackling your first quarter in a strategic, structured way will get you on the right foundation to thrive in your new role. Continuing to set smart goals, build relationships with your coworker and deliver on expectations will keep you challenged and engaged with your work.
In your first ninety days, you’ll be learning non-stop, building relationships, setting expectations, and creating frameworks and foundations. By building a foundation of data, testing, and effective strategies you’ll be charting the course for a product-led go-to-market motion (or hybrid motion) that will truly transform your company’s path. What’s more, you’ll be responsible for building a product marketing engine that will bring in more customers, keep them more engaged for longer, and helping sales win more business.
Product marketing leadership can be frustrating, but worthwhile
Product marketing leadership is not without its frustrations — there may sometimes be too many stakeholders to satisfy everyone, it’s still a new/emerging field which means roadmaps aren’t as time-tested, and it can sometimes feel like you need to reinvent the wheel to host yet another group demo or webinar that brings in new audience. But all of this just adds to the bone-deep satisfaction of success in this field, as you see your hard work pay off in rising market share, increased conversion rates and a growing raving fan customer base.
As you set out to make your mark in the field, you’ll want resources you can trust. Make sure to subscribe to the Lean Product Marketing podcast for continued career growth support.
