Stakeholder and Leadership Alignment
Are we all rowing in the right direction across product, marketing and sales?
This topic is near and dear to me as I learnt a lot about what matters and how to stay true to my core values while navigating the stakeholder alignment.
We're going to talk about internal stakeholders and senior leadership alignment.
Here is a video that I presented at the PMA Product Marketing Misunderstood event.
As a product marketer we love wearing multiple hats and roles. And I always empower my team to think of what's that one role in product marketing that you actually love and that you would love to do every day. And when you find that role, keep refining your craft. For me it was messaging and positioning as I loved storytelling and connecting the human element for products and companies whether it's a fortune 500 or a startup.
Product marketing success depends on our internal stakeholders and senior leadership and how they value product marketing. So in this article, I'll be sharing my lessons learned over the past five years and how to bring together product, marketing, sales and leadership alignment together with shared OKRs (objectives and key results).
Let's dive in …
If you are thinking, where to start:
Here are some of the questions and together we will find the answers on what does it mean to look at internal stakeholder and senior leadership alignment.
1. What does authentic leadership mean?
For me, authentic leadership means being your own true self. Knowing that we're all human and that we need to respect and care for each other.
Now that's a different kind of Leadership. I've been inspired by our fearless leader, Steve who is always there no matter what for his team and always empowered us to be our best every day. And having this opportunity to lead a team and teams of teams around the world, I know that this is the kind of leadership style that I want to bring forward.
If I had questions and if I wasn't sure about what I need to do next I would just ask myself what would Steve do and asking that question helped me get the clarity that I needed.
As leaders we have to make tough choices and our teams may not always understand why we do what we do and this is where we need to be transparent and share to the best of our ability because our decisions impact their day-to-day work and we need to be mindful and respectful of that every day.
I'm privileged to share and serve my team and i'll do anything to help them succeed in their endeavors.
2. As a product marketing leader, how do you bring cross-functional alignment across product, marketing and sales?
We know that product marketing is at the core of working with different teams and stakeholders whether it's across product, sales and marketing. A clear and tight alignment is crucial and also making sure that we're communicating our cross-functional efforts so that there are no duplicative efforts across teams.
And also how can we best amplify some of our core initiatives is just as challenging. There's always a learning curve no matter which company I join.
I spend my initial onboarding to make sure that folks understand what product marketing can and cannot do - what our core value is. In a recent role, a lot of what we were asked to do was traditional marketing and it takes a lot of time and effort to explain and educate where we can bring our best value and making sure we're prioritizing the right efforts and resources.
It's also very important to work with the broader marketing team so that we can focus on our core competency and stakeholders and other teams can focus on what they do best.
3. How can product marketing influence the product roadmap and help with portfolio roadmap prioritization?
This is crucial as the portfolio or platform is a big change that we have seen as compared to single products. The reality is that our customers are looking to solve a specific problem and what we are offering whether it's a solution irrespective of whether entails as one product or multiple products or a platform doesn't matter.
And this is where I advocate for portfolio marketing as our biggest strength because we can bring together products, solutions and services across different industries and verticals. As challenging as it can be when you get the roadmap priorities right you know you're off to a good start.
And this is why it's important for product marketing to be part of the conversation for roadmap and the portfolio roadmap prioritization is like a crystal ball that guides the path to make sure we stay focused on the right projects and priorities.
My learning has been that prioritization is where we make the trade-offs, the decisions on which project or priority we want to take forward, which we want to hold off or de-prioritize and move it to another quarter or below the line.
This is easier said than done but when it's done right you know that all the teams are rowing in the right direction.
4. What is the importance of OKRs for product, sales and marketing alignment?
As a product marketer because we wear multiple hats, it's important to know which hats add the most value - which roles, which metrics and OKRs can help us make sure that we are focusing on the right priorities and tailor to the right roles and responsibilities. And some of these initiatives are more focused on soft skills and may not be directly measured but the reality is proper alignment on KPIs or OKRs are critical for success in defining product marketing success.
And it's important to make sure we have a good synergy across product, marketing and sales. We need to make sure our goals and objectives are aligned with the sales team and that we are prioritizing on the right initiatives because we will never have enough resources to do everything. We cannot be throwing darts at the wall and hoping something sticks.
And that's why it's important to make sure our OKRs are aligned with the leadership team. Having that lock step is important to have an effective go to market and this also makes sure that our time and resources are focused on the right initiatives and that we are all growing in the same direction.
The way I looked at our OKRs were closely tied to our core values of inspire, influence and impact and we tied it to three disciplines of success.
Inspire was linked to employee
Influence was linked to business and
Impact was linked to customer
In this way we were taking care of all the core stakeholders - internal and external that was important to make sure that as a business we were doing the right thing.
5. What do you think holds the future for product marketing?
Now, product marketing is becoming more and more relevant in organizations that don't have this opportunity today. You'll see that product marketing is the first hire when you go into organizations with marketing. And you may hear companies request for go-to-market, competitive intelligence, messaging and positioning as focus areas. All of these things are great but the reality is that's the underlying recipe for successful product marketing is mastering the art and science of product marketing.
Imagine a rockstar product marketer. This is someone who is empathetic to customers, empathetic to our stakeholders and to our team.
We are the voice out of the market and we need to bring forward use cases and business requirements just to make sure that we are aligned along all the ways.
Our focus is to drive customer advocacy and success stories. That's why I like to think of the buyer journey all the way from discovery to advocacy.
And our rockstar product marketing team is a mix of folks who are great storytellers who can bring different narratives together and tell the story that will make us feel and move from a state of complacency to a status quo to making change happen.
This is the beauty of product marketing and this is why the future of product marketing is very exciting. You have seen with the Product Marketing Alliance how thousands of product marketers around the world have come together.
This is what excites me when I think about mentoring product marketing leaders of the future because we all have our story to tell and we are all here making that change.
I truly believe that product marketing has been undergoing an evolution and when you think about the product marketing role itself it's more than messaging and positioning.
We are working with different stakeholders and teams in marketing to bring the entire customer journey all the way from awareness to consideration to decision and it doesn't end there. It goes all the way to advocacy that's why whether you're working with marketing teams whether it's demand generation or customer marketing team, whether it's your content marketing team, you are making sure you have that tight alignment so that we are all working towards the same goals.
When you think about product, I am a product marketer that is tied very closely with my product manager. When we talked about the portfolio roadmap prioritization if we are not in lockstep with our product manager, we might be working on different priorities and may not be making the best use of our time and resources.
When you think about sales, my best success has come when the sales leaders are with you all the step going forward. They're here to make sure that you are successful and make sure that we are helping sales be successful.
Now, that's where product, marketing and sales come together to make this amazing experience together and this is why product marketing is that central linchpin because we have the opportunity for cross-collaboration: work across different departments and teams and make sure that we are bringing forward the best ideas and projects forward.
If you think of the future on how to move product marketing forward it's making sure that we have that cross-functional alignment - that we are thinking about teams and opportunities together.
I invite each of you to think of what is that one PMM skill - your signature recipe that is strongest in your tool belt.
This is a great opportunity for all of us going forward and I encourage each of you to take this step forward to start thinking about stakeholder alignment.
Tune into PMM talks to hear from product marketing leaders on stakeholder management!
