Five tips for all the PMs and PMMs who struggle to become an effective duo
Q&A with Stuti Dutt and Bruna Barbosa, Hootsuite
Hey, growth buddies 👋
Lots of companies from startups to well-established enterprises face difficulties in separating the roles of product manager and product marketing manager. What’s more interesting, the specialists themselves often cannot agree on how to delineate responsibilities and stop stepping on each other’s toes.
The areas of overlap often include roadmap, customer research, developing the value proposition, appropriate messaging, and many more.
However, some teams do manage to find common ground and become an effective duo. We have found such a team in the LinkedIn post of Richard King, Founder & CEO at Product Marketing Alliance.
He posted a meme with a question — whether product managers are friends with product marketers. People left 170+ comments, making jokes and tagging colleagues, trying to find out their relationships. Among them we noticed a team from Hootsuite that was absolutely sure about their fantastic connection.
Stuti Dutt (Senior PMM) and Bruna Barbosa (Senior PM) work on the Hootsuite Amplify, a B2B SaaS employee advocacy and social selling solution. It helps companies leverage their employees to safely share pre-approved content on personal networks. Overall, with over 200,000 paid accounts and millions of users, Hootsuite powers social media for organizations of all sizes, from the smallest businesses to the largest enterprises.
To know more on how they built strong collaboration, we invited Stuti and Bruna to the Q&A. Unlikely they told us all the secrets, but here are some of them.
1/ Appealing to the previous experience of colleagues
Stuti had been in product marketing for more than 5 years before she joined the team a year ago. Previously she has mostly worked with startups, and Hootsuite has become her first mid-growth company.
When she came, it was already clear what her job responsibilities were. The PMM position at the company wasn’t new — Bruna worked with another PMM who took a different opportunity within the company.
So the logic of their collaboration was inherited from before and adjusted gradually along the way. Having clear guidelines from the very beginning allowed them to focus on building personal relationship.
“When I joined the product team two years ago, my boss said that an alliance with a PMM is really important, though many other PMs don't take that seriously. That's what I learned since day one. So when Stuti came in, we were fresh on our personal relationship and from the very beginning we were trying to make it work,” Bruna says.
Editorial tip: if you’ve just made the transition from another role to product marketing, study fellow colleagues’ experiences to understand the background and reach out to other departments to know how they used to collaborate with PMM.
2/ Clear distinction of roles through the product development cycle
Stuti and Bruna say that their relationship has a very clear distinction on each stage of the product life cycle. They have an agreement on what tasks they do together and which are only personal responsibilities.
During the ‘before’ stage Stuti’s job is to bring Bruna all the customer insights and feedback: are there any features that they are demanding? Do any of the competitors offer such features? She would find it out.
Stuti collects data from customer NPS and CES surveys, takes the product feedback from the win-loss analysis, and makes sure that the product team is armed with everything that's going on. She also listens to the sales conversations and keeps an eye close on what salespeople are posting within the internal communications tool.
“Bruna herself is great at getting those insights too. So if she comes across something we need to build on, we discuss it together and try to collaboratively understand where's the need,” Stuti adds.
When it comes to actually building out those features, that's truly Bruna's responsibility.
“Of course, we have our own product vision and things already planned, but if any feedback or insights are coming from Stuti, they also become a part of how we think about the roadmap,” she says.
Also, Bruna does the demos and oversees internal communications when it gets to the release phase. As for the tech brief, Stuti kicks it off and then tags Bruna and other people who should be part of that conversation.
When a product goes live, depending on the release size, that's something that Stuti owns. For example, she decides whether to put something on a product newsletter or any in-product notification.
After the release, Stuti and Bruna monitor how users adapt the new features to discover whether they need to run another round of communications or bring more awareness.
They both also run quarterly business reviews. These QBRs provide insights to the wider organizations of how good they did within the quarter and what the areas of improvement are.
Editorial tip: describe your roles and responsibilities at each stage of the product (feature) development process — idea, validation, prototype, messaging, building the product, release, rolling out improvements.
You will probably find out that you have some activity of mutual interest. That’s completely okay because shared tasks make for better communication and understanding of each other's roles.
3/ Collaborating on metrics to track
At Hootsuite key metrics are divided into two groups — financial and product ones.
From the financial side, Bruna and Stuti both estimate how well the product is doing in the market. They look at a win-loss analysis, renewals, and upsells. That works in cross-collaboration with the product, marketing, sales, and CSMs teams as well.
“If there's any product-specific feedback that we are losing deals to, we bring it to the product so they can work on it. The churn rate is my responsibility. I try to look at the key reason behind it, but if we need to bring some changes to the product, that’s where Bruna comes in,” Stuti mentions.
Other than that, Stuti’s main metric is an awareness of the solution both internally and externally. The latter means releasing thought leadership into the market — not talking only about the product but also how it makes life easier.
Bruna as a PM owns all the other product-related metrics. She looks at how users are maintaining their program and how that actually works for their company.
“When we are releasing a specific feature, I have events for it. Let’s say, the goal of the feature is to make our WAU (weekly active users) higher than MAU (monthly active users). Did we get this — yes or no?” she says.
We've chosen the top ten metrics for B2B SaaS products and asked Stuti and Bruna to mark the ones they track. It turned out that they coincide in 9 out of 10 points and differ only in the behavioral metrics, which include such indicators as feature adoption, task completion, etc.
Editorial tip: create a list of metrics that you should track together or separately and discuss them with your colleague. A clear distinction will bring transparency around the team and prevent you from stepping on each other’s toes.
If you want to learn more about specific metrics that product marketing managers deal with, this article covers them all.
4/ Single vision of the team’s goal
Stuti and Bruna share a single vision on their product. It is to help customers be successful at social presence and leverage their social selling and employee advocacy efforts.
Working towards that vision helps them keep stable and productive during the changes that are constantly occurring.
For example, when Stuti joined Hootsuite, product marketing was reporting to marketing, then it was moved to the product. And a couple of months ago, the company decided to make a shift again.
Now the PMM department reports to marketing and its new CMO. As a result, Stuti’s OKRs have changed. But as both Stuti and Bruna are marching in the same direction, this shift didn't really affect their relationship.
Editorial tip: set up a shared dashboard or integrated checklists of your team’s goals in Confluence or another workspace to ensure you’re always on the same page.
5/ Open communication to overcome disagreements and overlap
During the settling-in period there was a bit of learning.
“Both of us used to create the tech brief or quarterly business review. We were working on a copy and we were like ‘I started’, — ‘Oh, no, I started’. But those were really small things and easy to solve because we’re very collaborative and try not to steal each other’s thunder,” Bruna shares.
Stuti and Bruna believe it all boils down to communication. They facilitate all the difficulties during the one-on-ones and iterative planning meetings with other team members.
The biggest risk comes when you have a lack of collaboration. That’s the reason you create a gap between how your product is perceived in the market and what your product really is.
Editorial tip: encourage your fellow colleague to give you feedback during regular meetings or check-ins. It’s also helpful to prepare for each one-on-one meeting and write down all the debatable points.
That was the first issue of the Behind the Growth Newsletter. And if you liked this post, why not engage with it?
Cheers 👋
The Epic Web3 team