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Ready to build a product marketing team?
Leadership recognizes the value of your work and wants you to expand the function. There may be upcoming product releases, a big company event, or a new sales team that needs more resources. You've been given a budget and are ready to hire your product marketing dream team.
As we know, the role of product marketing can be varied, so you’ll also want to determine which skills to hire for and when you'll need them. Here's your guide to understanding the characteristics to look for in the interview process and how to set up your team for success. It includes considerations for structuring your team and mistakes to avoid.
What is a high-performing team?
According to Gartner, “A high-performance workplace results from continually balancing investment in people, process, physical environment and technology, to measurably enhance the ability of workers to learn, discover, innovate, team and lead, and to achieve efficiency and financial benefit”.
When it comes to product marketing, that means producing high-quality messaging or assets that significantly contribute to the organization's success, whether it’s through revenue generation, product adoption, or even creating a renowned company brand. Additionally, high-performing product marketing team members are empowered to try new things and challenge the norms while consistently delivering superior work. When the function is set up to be strategic rather than just tactical, innovation could be in creating new go-to-market strategies, highlighting competitive differentiators to win deals or even uncovering blue-ocean product opportunities.
Hiring high-performing product marketers
Essential characteristics of exceptional product marketers
Product marketing sits at the intersection of sales, product, customer success and marketing. As a result, team members need the ability to pull and share information from each team to synthesize it into messaging and content. The most indispensable qualities of a product marketer are:
Communication: Product marketers work with people across the business to find and share information. They'll need listening skills to learn from customers, salespeople and executive leadership what's most meaningful. Then, they'll need to be expert writers and presenters to create messaging and materials and educate the company on how and when to use them.
Curiosity: Much of the role involves researching and synthesizing information. So, natural curiosity and analytical thinking are critical capabilities. They must continually ask questions about the market, dig into what competitors are doing and think about how those factors impact the business because things are constantly changing.
Content creation: There’s a misconception that marketing's job is to make things look good. While we do okay updating slides, product marketing is more about words than graphic design. Experience creating one-pagers, decks, blogs and eBooks will be valuable.
Technical acumen: The best product marketers can simplify complex technical concepts and translate them into messaging anyone can understand. Where possible, they should be comfortable using and testing the product to learn how to demo it effectively.
Other factors to consider:
- Level: This will depend on budget and how strategic the work is.
- Industry expertise: Do you require expert industry knowledge, or can you find someone who can pick it up quickly?
- Experience: Do you need someone stronger in sales enablement or writing technical product documentation? Look for spikes in a particular product marketing area that match your needs.
- Personality types: Diversity creates a more productive work environment, so look for different personalities to create a balanced team.
What to ask in the interview process
You can find numerous lists of interview questions, and of course, you’ll want to ask why someone’s interested in the role and the company. But here are some of my favorite product-marketing-specific questions to consider:
- How would you improve the messaging on our homepage? (see how someone thinks and whether they’ve done their homework)
- Tell me about a project you worked on that you’re most proud of. (find out what motivates them)
- Tell me about a time that something wasn’t working. What did you change? (learn how someone adapts to setbacks and make sure they're able to understand and solve issues)
- What’s your approach to learning about new industries or customers? (research plays a big role in product marketing)
- How have you used AI to improve your work? (are they innovative and adapting to the current environment)
- How do you handle conflict or a difference of opinion? (determine how they collaborate and factor in outside views)
- What are some of the most important metrics to track for product marketers? (are they aware of the bigger picture and how they influence the business)
Don’t forget to ask about their working style, how they'd like to be managed, and their communication preferences to make sure you’ll mesh well together.
Setting up your team for success
Structuring the team
There are many ways to structure a product marketing team but some of the most common are:
- By product line: Product marketers are responsible for a particular product or solution.
- Inbound versus outbound: In some larger organizations, like Meta or Oracle, product marketing is split into inbound and outbound. Where inbound focuses on research and strategy, outbound is more about sales enablement and go-to-market planning.
- By product marketing function: you might have experts in competitive intelligence, analyst relations, product launches or sales enablement. Someone who moved into the role from another team, such as customer success, may be better at customer marketing, win/loss interviews, and writing case studies.
- By region: If you’re a global team, there will undoubtedly be variations in how you market to prospects in different countries. Cultural variations mean you want to tailor messaging and have experts on the ground listening to customers and uncovering nuances.
Your initial vision for the team may change as you figure out everyone’s strengths and work priorities shift. Give your team projects they can excel at and some stretch projects where they’ll be challenged and learn.
Setting goals and timelines
Product marketers are no different from any other team. They need clear goals, realistic timelines, and resources to do their job well. Each project should ladder up to company objectives, whether they're about driving adoption of a specific product or reaching a new audience. Make it clear which broader business goals the project will contribute to and set challenging but realistic timelines.
Meetings and collaboration
Product marketing is a collaborative role whether you’re on a remote team or in an office. Information sharing within the team, as well as with external stakeholders, is crucial. If possible, having the opportunity to work on projects together can help bring the team closer and share ideas.
Set up regular check-ins to review what’s working and address issues. Pull in different stakeholders when relevant to provide their insights and feedback in real time. Ensure they understand their role in the meeting and what's required beforehand. More experienced product marketers will do this automatically.
Growing the function
Measuring the success of product marketing
To expand the team, you need to prove a consistent impact on the business. Proving value is one of the biggest challenges for product marketers as their work impacts so many departments. It’s easier to focus on the volume of content output or the perception of a project launch happening smoothly. However, product marketers have a broader impact on the business. Sales cycles, product development timelines, and external market factors all influence metrics.
Revenue growth and product adoption are typically the ultimate goals but there are additional leading metrics to assess simultaneously. Metrics should be defined and evaluated alongside the other teams that are involved. For example:
- Product adoption. If your team is responsible for launching a new feature, track interest in the feature before looking at direct sales impact. Factor in promotional budgets and outreach, sales cycle length, and whether the product is a game-changer versus a catch-up feature to get on par with competitors. Track webinar attendance, engagement with social posts or even visitors to a new product page or video before looking at adoption rates.
- Revenue growth – Sales enablement programs, such as competitive intelligence, or trainings on objection handling or new messaging, aim to drive pipeline and revenue. Consider measuring conversion rates and looking at meeting outcomes and sales cycle length as well as pipeline and ARR.
- Content engagement - There are some helpful content tools to track how often particular pieces of content are read or used by the sales team, such as Highspot or Seismic. If product marketing spends a lot of time producing one pagers, guides or FAQ documents, you’ll want to know that they’re both effective and being used.
- Messaging acceptance. While this is harder to measure, getting buy-in for the company narrative is essential otherwise, you'll appear inconsistent. Qualitative feedback from sales or listening to recorded calls is a valuable way to sense test this. You can also try spinning up quick landing pages or running a small ad campaign to look for engagement and conversions using a specific angle.
Knowing when to make team changes
In my experience, tech companies never stand still. There are new markets to go after, new products and innovations to deliver and competitive challenges to address. Don’t just set the team structure and forget about it. A team leader’s role is to understand the bigger picture and adapt. Make the case for new hires or external resources if everyone is overworked or change projects to fit skillsets if you see someone struggling.
Mistakes to avoid when building product marketing teams
Prevent team members from getting burned out or frustrated by avoiding these mistakes.
Unclear roles or imbalanced workloads
As with any team, disjointed projects or imbalanced workloads can be demotivating. Check in regularly with team members to make sure they understand their roles and the projects they're working on are progressing. Giving people ownership over a specific function or product can help them feel valued. But first, figure out people’s strengths and how fast they work to ensure they’re growing in their role and tackling projects that suit their skills.
Too many tasks, not enough prioritization
One of the best parts of product marketing is that it’s a varied role that interacts with many different teams. But this is also the biggest challenge. Product marketers can find themselves pulled in many directions, with competing priorities and tight deadlines. Help team members prioritize based on milestone dates and the tasks that will have the most significant impact.
Being your own worst marketer
The rest of the organization often misunderstands how valuable a strategic product marketing function can be. So, ensure the entire company is aware of your work. Advocate for your team, be visible and share projects across every channel, including company meetings, via email and Slack.
Not getting stakeholder approval on messaging
There’s a delicate balance between gathering enough customer intel, listening to internal stakeholders and getting things done quickly. Set up regular check-ins with stakeholders to ensure the work is on track, and always bring data or feedback from message testing to the meeting.
Being out of sync with big company initiatives
Similarly, not fully being in synch with product release timelines can lead to marketers scrambling to get things ready or missing deadlines. Make sure your team forms relationships with relevant product, sales or leadership members and knows how their work fits into broader company goals.
Being too short sighted
Hiring too quickly or too slowly can impact the success of the function. Of course. If your newest team member struggles to meet deadlines, their work quality will suffer, and you'll end up with a poor reputation. Instead, think six months to a year in the future, as it can take time to get product marketers up to speed on everything that’s going on so they can deliver.
Hire and retain the best
Building a successful product marketing team will help showcase the value of the function and be a boon for product marketers everywhere. Others will want to copy your strategy. So, hire wisely, don't be afraid to make changes, and advocate for your work and team far more than you think you should.
