Product marketing as a connector: Bringing teams together and becoming the catalyst for action

I’m Irit Schwartz and I’m the Director of Product Marketing at Digital Turbine.

Before I move into the main topic of this article, I'll tell you a bit about me.

I've spent six years in the product marketing space, five of them leading PMM efforts at Facebook for SMBs.

Last year, I took on the role of Director of Product Marketing at Fyber, which was recently acquired by Digital Turbine, and now I'm building out their product marketing organization.

I've spent 12 years in the advertising industry, first in digital advertising, then moving to traditional advertising, before switching back to digital advertising.

I've moved around quite a bit, from Tel Aviv to Dublin to now being based in London. I'm a proud mom of two, and my girls keep me busy. I'm a relentless coffee drinker. I love everything about coffee and probably should have more coffee right now. That's me in a nutshell.

In this article, I'll explain:

What a connector is.
How to explain what it is that you do.
How to communicate effectively when you're launching a product.
What to do when product is speaking about features while clients care only about outcomes.

What is a connector?

I'm here to share my thoughts on how we PMMs are connectors and how we lean on this strength to bring teams together and drive actions.

Let’s delve into that “connector” term for a sec. I first encountered the word connector as a strength in the StandOut strengths assessment, which I did while I was working at Facebook.

The StandOut strengths assessment was created by Marcus Buckingham in 2011. The idea is to identify the strengths or natural talents that people lean on in their day-to-day work and how they can become even better by nurturing these strengths. That assessment identifies nine different strengths and highlights the top two.

My top strength was being a connector. That didn't really tell me anything, but when I looked at the definition, I found out that connectors are multipliers, always trying to bring people and ideas together to make things better than they are now. Connectors are also catalysts, speeding up reactions between people and groups.

Cool, I thought to myself. But ironically, I didn't really connect with the definition. I was in sales at that stage and I didn't understand how the idea of a connector related to me.

It was only when I became a PMM that I realized that, you know what, I am a connector. I do lean on my connecting abilities to bring different teams and different processes together – I should own that! So I did.

The way that I found out that I was a connector is by finding and fixing the disconnects in communication and processes I saw every day at work. Here are the three main disconnects I used to find myself coming up against:

People didn’t understand what I do.
Teams were not communicating properly during product launches.
Product was communicating features, but my clients care about value.

I found that through the processes that I will happily share today, I was able to overcome these obstacles and connect teams, ideas, and people. Let’s dive into how.

Help! People don’t understand what I do!

Let's face it: the PMM role is not as straightforward as that of an engineer or a sales manager, so it kind of makes sense that people don't understand what we do. In fact, 70% of PMMs don't feel like the product marketing role is fully understood, and this is according to a Product Marketing Alliance report, so you know it's true.

So what do you do when people don't know what you do? Well, you explain and you explain again.

I'd like to share the framework I use to explain to stakeholders what my organization does and delivers on. I built this framework when I first joined Fyber. Since the acquisition, there's been even more need to introduce what my function does because I meet people every day who have never worked with a PMM before.

Here’s how I like to summarize product marketing:

My organization's objective is to drive business growth by bridging between our products and business teams and translating product capabilities into business value and outcomes and amplifying this through our messaging and activations.

Ten points to me for including everything product marketing does!

This is true for Fyber specifically. We're a B2B company and highly sales-led, so we lean on our sales teams to push product adoption forward. I also shared how we do this, and what we deliver on, so our main stakeholders are very aware of what to expect from us.

I also shared how we measure success, and this is key to the success of every marketer, right?

A lot of the time marketing is not considered as connected to the business’ end goals, so to me, it was important for my stakeholders to know that I'm helping them to drive our business.

I'm helping through quantitative abilities like increasing product adoption and increasing revenue through product, as well as by collecting client quotes and case studies. I also contribute through more qualitative aspects like gathering positive feedback from clients and helping to create a positive perception of the company overall.

Another thing I did was talk about product marketing overall for my stakeholders to understand that product marketing doesn't look the same at every company and that our scope, responsibilities, and day-to-day activities vary quite a lot.

I explained our inbound activities that influence the product and the product roadmap – the areas where PMMs lean more towards product and less towards marketing. We can support product with opportunity sizing, customer segmentation, competitive analysis, and client feedback.

I also highlighted the activities of an outbound-facing PMM. They tend to focus on activities that influence launches and the growth of a product in the market. They also look at things like growth planning, go-to-market plans, sales enablement, and all that good stuff.

I went a step further and gave my stakeholders tangible examples of what we had delivered in the last quarter, so they would know, for instance, that this product was growing due to an activity that product marketing had led.

Some tips to help you explain your role

Have a good grasp of what you do and how this contributes to business results.
Share that with your teams and stakeholders.
Share with teams how they contribute to your work and how you contribute to theirs.
Give specific examples.
Train and onboard new hires so that whenever they come to your team, they know what to expect.
Be okay with people not knowing what you do. It's not a straightforward role, so be willing to explain and explain again.

Help! There’s a product launch happening and the teams are not communicating properly!

Let's move to the next disconnect: broken communication between teams during product launches. I've encountered this in multiple roles within Facebook and Fyber.

Perhaps this sounds familiar – marketing says, “This is a super important feature. When are you launching?” and product says “Yesterday.” Or product says, “We've launched a new toggle to increase the CPM on the response feature,” and sales goes “What’s that now?” Or – my personal favorite – sales asks, “Can you make this into a pretty slide? I’m meeting a client this afternoon.”

All of these scenarios stem from broken communication and can be mitigated by building a process together, so that’s what I did with my main stakeholders. I'm going to share some key points from the launch process we built together.

We divided the launch process into three parts: build and test, go-to-market planning, and execution. Obviously, this is not all-encompassing of a product launch.

The aim was to make my product teams aware of things that are important for marketing and go-to-market plans, and for my sales teams to know that they would be involved at an early stage.

Starting with the go-to-market basics, I wanted my product managers to know when they're building out an MVP who the target audience is, what the value proposition is, and what hypothesis we were leaning on when we were building this.

I wanted them to think about product marketing when they’re testing alpha and beta testing because that data is crucial for a successful launch.

At that stage, we need to decide whether the launch will go ahead. If the answer is yes, then ownership moves to product marketing and we do all that planning and project management. We’ll host a kickoff meeting, build a plan, and seek input from our sales teams and product teams.

We also maintain alignment on the go-to-market strategy with business partners, so they are aware of what to expect from this launch and they can provide feedback on what's not going to land well. We then incorporate that feedback into the go-to-market plan and move to the execution.

The execution of the plan is heavily reliant on our salespeople. We leverage them to execute the plan, but also to maintain a feedback loop on how our messaging is landing with clients, how our collateral is landing with sales teams, and whether we’re hitting our KPIs for the launch. If not, they provide feedback.

Another thing I did was build a visualization of how different teams work together during a product launch.

I want my business teams to be very aware that the feedback they gather in their interactions with clients goes into building better products, new features, or improving our offerings.

This also helped me illustrate how we work towards a common goal with product launches. That helped build more empathy and get more people to buy in.

Some tips to help you reconnect disconnected teams

As you build your launch process, make sure you work hand-in-hand with the other stakeholders and that you all agree on the basics.
Find your allies. You can’t do this alone.
Give a sense of ownership and input and importance to whoever is sitting at the table.
Celebrate collaboration. A successful launch is everyone's success.
Create a cadence of working together with product and business teams. I suggest owning those meetings, owning the agenda, and holding people accountable.

Help! Product is only talking about features but my clients only care about outcomes!

The last disconnect is product speaking about features while clients care only about outcomes. It’s quite natural for this to happen, right? Product is super involved in the technicalities of things, but clients will always put business value first.

This reminds me of a quote from Selling Above and Below the Line by William “Skip” Miller. He's a sales guru who has spent decades working in sales and perfecting his sales pitch:

"Buyers do not buy features and capabilities, but rather buy outcomes.”

I feel like that is at our core, as product marketing managers – translating capabilities into outcomes and business value."

We have an incredible opportunity as we interact with different people on the client side, and that’s what Skip Miller is saying in his book.

There are two different ways to sell: above the line to the decision maker, where we focus on outcomes and value; and below the line, to the end user, who cares about the usability of the product and its capabilities and features.

It’s vital to tailor your value propositions to the audience you’re addressing. This can only be achieved by leaning on your cross-functional teams. They have the knowledge that you can translate into your audience’s language.

Some tips to help you reconnect your teams with what your clients care about

Involve PMs and PMMs and conversations with clients so they can hear firsthand how your products are used, what's challenging about it, or why they prefer your competitors.
Bring client stories into product meetings to give the team a sense of how clients are experiencing your product in the real world.
Create resources that translate capabilities into value and ask for feedback from business teams. For example, we're building product roadmap slides for our business teams to take to clients to show what we're building and the value it will bring.
Involve clients in your product roadmap conversations. They can provide invaluable input on what you’re currently missing.

Final thoughts

As a PMM, you are a connector, no matter if you identified as such in a strengths assessment or not. Make it your goal to help your stakeholders shine. By recognizing others, we encourage more of the good that we see.

Finally, be empowered to drive action. In ad tech, we say the more first-party data you have, the better decisions you’ll make.

Well, you have the most first-party data because you have so many contacts inside and outside the business. You're strategically positioned to influence others, and I bet you have a kickass plan to do it.