Product marketing, from zero
For years, Lumen5's product marketing was me, in the gaps between PM work. Then I made the case that it shouldn't be, and hired the function into existence.
The setup
Early-stage companies don't skip product marketing. They just do it without noticing, badly or otherwise. At Lumen5 the work landed on me: landing pages, launch emails, social posts, plans and pricing. A team of one, running in the margins of a PM job.
That era taught me the craft the honest way. You learn positioning fast when you're also the person writing the landing page that has to convert.
What I owned
- The team-of-one era: landing pages, launch emails, social, and the plans and pricing pages, built and shipped myself.
- The launch engine: release notes, walkthrough videos, emails, and social for three to four launches a quarter, every quarter.
- Enablement as part of every launch: training sessions with CS and sales so they could speak to new features with confidence, not a day after launch. During it.
- The camera work. I presented launches on video myself when the feature deserved a face (there's one in the dispatches).
- The case to stop doing it alone: I identified product marketing as a gap, made the hiring case, then helped hire and mentor the PMMs who built it into a real function.
- The player-coach era that followed: mentoring the PMM, project-managing launches, and staying hands-on where it counted.
How it played out
Lumen5 went from a PMM-shaped hole to a function with real owners, and I moved from doing the work to coaching it, while keeping a hand in. I still ran launch project management and did the sales and CX training sessions myself. I've been called an honorary member of the marketing team, which I choose to take as a compliment.
It's also why I don't treat product and product marketing as separate careers. The best positioning work I've done came from knowing exactly what the product could do, and the best product decisions came from knowing exactly how they'd be told.