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[1] I’m hosting a workshop in February on Connecting Product Work to Revenue - if you enjoy my content on B2B PM/GTM topics, you won’t want to miss this live 90-minute session where we’ll talk through how to orient product strategy towards moving levers which ultimately ladder up to top-level business KPIs (i.e. revenue).
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One of the more interesting and evolving discussions in PM circles in 2024 was around the future and fate of the role given the emergence of AI-based tools that automate a lot of mundane tasks as well as comments about the necessity of the role made by industry leaders. These conversations went in many directions, including talk of converging the inbound (design + development) and outbound (distribution + monetization) aspects of the PM role.
My personal view is that truly building delightful experiences that significantly address customer pain in a way that leads to commercial success and business impact is a very complex job, and that job can be split up in many different ways across PM and other functions. The evolving definition of product management and people’s reactions to that transition is not a new topic; there is no right or wrong setup as far as I’m concerned, there is only the model that works for your company and scales with it.
But I was intrigued enough by the chatter to reach out to Aatir Abdul Rauf from Behind Product Lines for a discussion on PM/PMM collaboration, since that is a topic he frequently writes and shares about. As we talked, we realized there were many, many facets to the PM/PMM partnership that we could delve into, but one that we were both keen to explore was product launches…and how they go sideways. In the video above we each go through our top 5 mistakes that we’ve seen - you can watch the recording (< 30 minutes) to get the full top 10 list, but in this post I wanted to recap some of the recurring themes that cut across these issues.
To start with, the biggest undercurrent of sub-optimal collaboration between PM and PMM is the fact that, well, they don’t actually collaborate a lot of times. In many organizations PM gets the product to a point where it can be released, and then PMM takes care of the launch and subsequent steps. This sequential operating model results in a disjointed narrative on several dimensions: target audience, monetization path, distribution channels, competitive positioning, differentiated capabilities, enablement story, and success metrics. Ideally, the why behind a product, the who it’s for, and the how of winning in the market is a consistent (albeit iterative) talk track from inception to launch. And in order for PM and PMM to be coherent in their storytelling to their respective stakeholders, they need to be reading from the same script - in fact, they need to have co-authored that script together. If such a partnership exists, then things like aligning objectives and sharing goals becomes much more possible.
A big part of joint storytelling is managing the narrative, both internally and externally - and multiple mistakes in our top 10 list are a byproduct of mismanagement of the narrative, either with internal stakeholders or external customers. A simple example is dropping the ball on sales enablement (either the content or delivery) to a degree that different reps are pitching different versions of the same product in their prospect meetings. Or not anticipating competitor response and having FAQs and battlecards ready. While enablement has tiers of details - the technical detail you go into with a professional services team that configures your product is deeper than what you share with your demo engineers - there has to be a steel thread of a story that spans all the launch collateral. Again, this is ensured by PM and PMM being collaborators early and often vs doing a hard hand off weeks before launch with things falling through the cracks.
With the acknowledgement that the messaging is told and retold in different channels and varying formats comes the realization that the message may not apply to all stakeholders and customers; meaning, not every feature is intended for 100% of your user base. In fact, your customer list is probably not a homogeneous group - there are different cohorts who signed up at different times for different reasons, and their appetite for the newly launched features may vary drastically. This is another root cause we covered - namely the attempts to push launches broadly that should be more targeted and tailored - it’s not only a waste of time and resources to go broad when you don’t need to, it also tends to not land as intended. If you’ve had a PMM involved with a product since the business case stage or if you’ve got a PM who understands the market segmentation, you can prevent such miscues well in advance.
Assuming you have a relevant announcement for a primed audience, another issue that crops up is the focus on features vs workflows. From a customer point of view, and even a sales rep’s perspective, the important part is not what the product can do but rather how it fits into the larger job to be done (JTBD). And too many launches don’t contextualize the customer problem - they just hype the solution without context. In order to explain why your product is the right solution, you have to first demonstrate an understanding of the problem, ideally in the customer’s own parlance. Too many companies explain products in their own internal jargon instead of meeting the customer where they are. If you can bridge that translation gap, getting your point across on differentiation becomes more viable. This also prevents obvious issues like a launch that’s missing must-have functionality - when PM and PMM are well versed in the customer workflow and user JTBD, there’s less likelihood of an incomplete solution that falls flat in the market.
Check out the video for the full top 10 list of blunders, and keep an eye out for future posts on the partnership between PM and PMM. Wherever you are in your product launch journey, you can apply the learnings from this discussion to your product today - again, if you have questions or want to continue the discussion, join the discussion via the Slack community or Substack chat!
If you’re interested in learning more from Aatir, you can reach out to him on LinkedIn.
Note: if you’re a fan of the practical advice I dispense in this newsletter, read more about how you can work with me as an advisor / coach and let’s collaborate - you can reach out via LinkedIn or just click the message button below
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