What do you do if your product marketing collaboration efforts aren't yielding results?

Always start with understanding if it's a process issue, a personnel issue, or a capability issue. - For a process issue, get stakeholders together and understand where the gaps lie and how we can work better together. - For a personnel issue, understand if there's any friction between team members. Try mediating the situation and remove any existing roadblocks. - For a capability issue, first assess where your team is strong and weak, then leverage your strengths to be the multiplier effect for your team and put an upskilling plan in place to address the current gaps.

If the processes make sense, the issue lies in the people. Here are some reasons why people issues arise: - Some people are naturally bad at collaborating with others. They are the 'troublemakers' who will go to great lengths to sabotage the collaborative efforts for the sake of making themselves look like they did the hard/most part. - Constructive feedback is an art and not everyone is a Picasso of it. Feedback no matter how well intended is not always taken constructively if it is clouded by a harsh tone. - There might be a possibility that a team within the team might be paired wrong, i.e., they are not good at coordinating with one another due to their ego wars, personal dislikes, and more.

A product's goals and metrics often define its marketing success. Here's a powerful strategy: •  Uncover the root cause:Employ a SWOT analysis to gain valuable insights. trust data and gather honest feedback (surveys) to assess your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. • Set S.M.A.R.T. goals: Craft specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound product marketing objectives, ensuring they align with your collaborators' goals and KPIs. Transparent communication and avoiding jargon are key. • Execute with clarity: Break down your goals into actionable steps with realistic deadlines. This keeps everyone focused and facilitates progress tracking.

To enhance collaboration in your product marketing efforts, begin by evaluating your current state and pinpointing the underlying issues. Employ methods such as SWOT analysis, stakeholder mapping, or feedback surveys to assess strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, and the roles, expectations, and pain points of key collaborators. This approach helps you understand your present position, desired outcomes, and areas requiring improvement, enabling you to bridge any existing gaps effectively.

Esqueça frameworks ou matriz SWOT, são ferramentas genéricas que não funcionam para problemas específicos. Para saber se a sua estratégia não está funcionando você precisa ter um objetivo claro e mensurável.

An effective approach is to utilize collaborative workshops or sessions to collectively define and agree on objectives and metrics. This promotes buy-in and ensures that everyone’s perspectives are considered. Regularly scheduled review meetings to discuss progress towards these metrics can further align efforts, making it easier to adjust strategies in real-time.

Use this as an opportunity to increase transparency and right the ship. As a PMM, you're in a unique position to connect with all sides of the organization. Assess the current situation and be objective about what you’re trying to achieve and where things may be falling off. Summarize your finds leveraging something akin to SMART goals. Take them and seek input from key stakeholders from sales to product to marketing. Meet 1:1 (the meeting before the meeting) first and then bring everyone together to work towards alignment. Once you do, set a regular cadence. Transparency and regular communication will be key to ensure you remain on the same page with your objectives and the status of their plan and metrics.

Following that, articulate your product marketing objectives and metrics, ensuring they resonate with the goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) of your collaborators. Establish a unified understanding of success and how it will be measured. Transparent and consistent communication of your objectives and metrics is crucial to ensuring alignment and preventing confusion, conflicts, or redundant efforts. This approach facilitates effective tracking, reporting, and evaluation of progress and impact.

The key here is not just to define and establish the key objectives and metrics. But more important in order to drive cross functional collaboration is to make sure how do they align with overall marketing and corporate objectives and strategy. The latter is the North Star for all PMM and their stakeholders to serve as a guidance and direction to establish downstream goals and metrics and working towards same purpose. It would also help if OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are established between PMM team and stakeholders to create accountability, responsibility and collaboration around a product launch or campaign or new initiatives.

Perhaps as important as the first step in identifying your goals and KPIs, you must establish your processes and tools with your primary stakeholders. Product Marketing Managers (PMMs) are essentially the cohesive glue that binds multiple departments together. If no other stakeholder knows about your processes or tools, or disagrees with the approach, you are not setting your role or the organization up for success.

The third phase involves setting up your product marketing procedures and resources, ensuring they harmonize and mesh seamlessly with your collaborators' operational frameworks and technologies. It's essential to establish standardized and well-documented protocols for tasks like planning, executing, and evaluating product marketing initiatives. Utilize a suite of tools that streamline communication, collaboration, and coordination, encompassing project management, file sharing, and messaging platforms. By adopting these measures, you enhance efficiency, transparency, and accountability while minimizing errors and delays in your operations.

It's all about the team vibe. Get to know your collaborators beyond the work. A little trust goes a long way in making people want to go the extra mile for the project. It's like making sure everyone in a group project knows they can rely on each other.

Aprenda a dividir e comunicar seus erros e frustrações com as pessoas certas e no tom certo. Muitos problemas parecem difíceis de solucionar porque você está mergulhado neles... uma visão mais distante pode ser muito positiva!

In the realm of product marketing, the currency of success is trust. Carve out time, perhaps on a Friday, to have informal chats with your team members. Understand their ambitions, pain points, and how they align with the project's goals. Through these personal interactions, you can uncover mutual benefits and opportunities to support one another. Soliciting their advice also shows respect for their expertise, further solidifying trust. Start with a small, manageable group to seed this trust-building effort. Over time, this practice can ripple through the entire team, creating a culture of mutual support and collaboration.

One key aspect that has helped me to gain trust is to clearly understand the common goals, responsibilities, and metrics of stakeholders or teams the PMM team is collaborating with. It will help avoid misunderstanding and help remove barriers in a proactive manner. Finally, trust can only be built over time and have to be earned by PMM team. They have to lead efforts in serving as the voice of the customer, establish the go-to-market strategy and direction, and deliver value to build trust.

A real world example could be a new product development you brought to market that hasn't quite hit the customer segment you thought it would. Feedback from your customers and sales teams could outline specific product features that haven't worked. A/B testing on your website would highlight changes needed in your product messaging and positioning. Putting what you've learnt into practice and trying new ideas should yield better results, and it's always helpful to remember that you are working in a team. Taking feedback and implementing it, is super key to evaluating your overall performance.

Evaluating and optimizing performance in product marketing collaboration is crucial for continuous improvement. It involves collecting and analyzing data, feedback, and results from various sources such as customer surveys, analytics tools, and sales reports. By doing so, you can identify what worked well, what didn't, and why. Encouraging a culture of open communication within the team is essential. Solicit and provide constructive feedback to foster collaboration and identify areas for improvement. Actively address any issues or gaps identified during the evaluation process, whether it's refining messaging, adjusting targeting strategies, or improving collaboration processes.

When internal efforts falter, it's time to look outside. Depending on the nature of the challenges you've identified, bringing in an external expert could provide the necessary jolt to your collaboration efforts. If interpersonal dynamics are the issue, a leadership coach can offer fresh strategies to enhance team interaction and trust. For process-oriented roadblocks, a specialist with a track record of streamlining workflows in similar environments could be invaluable. Joint training sessions are also an excellent way to unify the team around new approaches, ensuring everyone is aligned and moving forward together. Sometimes, an outside perspective can be the spark that ignites a renewed spirit of cooperation and innovation.

The final step in optimizing product marketing collaboration is to seek external help when needed. Leverage the resources and expertise of others who can contribute to your improvement journey. This can involve reaching out to peers, mentors, coaches, consultants, or trainers who can provide valuable advice, guidance, support, or training. Additionally, consider joining online or offline communities, networks, or events specifically tailored for product marketers. These platforms offer opportunities to learn from others in the field, share challenges and best practices, and potentially find new opportunities and partners for collaboration.

First thing to do is revisit your communication channels. For instance, if the sales team isn’t aligned with marketing, sales enablement materials might miss the mark. Regular check-ins along with a strong process and feedback loops can bridge gaps and boost effectiveness.