 Hello, everyone. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Ruslan Mursalzadeh and I will be your host today. I have the honor of hosting some of the product marketing leaders from technology space today. And we're going to talk a little bit about the synergy between product marketing and product management in technology companies. Obviously, both of these roles are extremely important and them working together is oftentimes crucial for organization success. So we'll discuss what kind of strategies everyone is adopting or experienced to be able to drive this synergy. Before I get started, I'd love to ask our panelists to introduce themselves. Emma, would you like to get started? Yeah, sure. Hi, everyone. My name is Emma. I'm a PMM at Spotify. I've been at Spotify for a little over two years. And before that, I was at AWS doing product marketing as well. Daniel, would you like to go next? Sure. So hello, everyone. My name is Daniel and I'm the Global Product Marketing Director for N26. For those that don't know N26, one of the first challenger banks in Europe overseeing our core markets, being the main European countries before this long career within the financial services industry was within product marketing. So happy to be here. Great. Hi, Sam, would you like to go next? Great. Hi, everyone. Good morning. I'm Aetan. I think I'm the only product manager on the panel, the rest are PMMs. So it'll be fun to see how he answered questions from different perspectives. I was at Google for 15 years, worked for a decade in ads, a variety of internal areas, ML and so on. Started my career as a software developer, business school, startup, PM. And excited to be here. I was part of the wave of layoffs almost exactly a year ago this month and was excited to embark on a new journey. Thanks for having us. We'll be nice to you. All the PMMs here. And then last but not the least, we've got Irina. Hi, everyone. I'm Irina. I'm former product marketing manager at Metta. Before that I was working in consumer goods industry and product and also product marketing at L'Oreal and AVEN. And now I'm leading product and marketing consultancy. And excited to be here. Great. Thank you all for being here, our great panelists. Obviously what we know that the product management and product marketing roles are crucial to organization success. Oftentimes product marketing acts as the voice of the customer and drives messaging positioning while the product manager owns the roadmap as well as the product development. So I'd like to get started by talking a little bit about how you define the relationship between product management and product marketing and what is crucial for success of these two roles working together. Maybe Emma, we could start with you on that question. Yeah, I'd love to answer the question. So I think to me, the most important thing to understand when sort of defining the PM, PMM relationship is understanding that there's a shared goal and a shared mission. And that's ultimately just to make the product as successful as possible. So a lot of times I work with PMs that maybe have never worked with PMMs before and sort of what I tell them that my job is to make their product successful and to do everything my power to make sure that they're successful generally. So I think starting off the relationship just by defining that shared mission and shared objective and then working to bring insight to the PM so that they can put together the best roadmap and product strategy possible. Atom we'd love to also get your take on this as a product manager. What's your been your experience. Yeah, that's a great question and I love Emma's answer. I'll say something similar just from a slightly different lens. So generally speaking, I think it's, you can answer the question the same way, regardless of which relationships is a, you know, PMM and UX and PGM and engine, you know, PM and all of them. And so to drive a successful business and it's a bit my answer is a bit skewed to be to be but you can see the same and be to see where you want to have a sales strategy a marketing strategy a services strategy a product strategy, an overall business plan. That's working hand in hand lockstep. And so the partnership is very much aligning on a shared vision and mission and goal as Emma was saying, everybody's trying to achieve the same thing and everybody has certain assets and skill sets they can bring into that goal. So it's interesting and unique about a PM. And I don't know if this is a shared view of everybody sees this but it's sort of your intentionally sort of leading the cross functional team. And so you need to be really good yourself at meeting with customers pitching the product understanding their needs, thinking about how to position overcome competitive, you know, customer objections and all of these things. So make sure everything is there and in place. So you're absolutely accountable to make sure there is a marketing plan and strategy and a sales plan and strategy but you're not building it yourself, just like you're not building the engineering plan. You're relying on those partners to do that and you typically aren't overseeing those people from a reporting structure and so it's really all about relationship and having like excited partnership and shared goals and collaborating and doing it together. And to put it, especially in larger organizations oftentimes folks like engineers are reporting up to you a PM so influencing inspiring and leading it becomes a key part of it. And you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the differences that you've seen in these roles and how you've been able to overcome those differences. Yeah, definitely. I think the roles of the product marketing managers very much depend on which team you are at. And obviously your connection to the PM and to the market would be slightly different depending on which team you are at. For example, at Meta, I worked in the integrity and safety team, and I was very much focused on the, you know, focusing on the real ability of the products, finding some vulnerabilities of the products. Therefore, my technical communication with the PM was very, very close and with engineering teams, while my colleagues who were very focused on the B2C side of the products they would be focusing on the user experiences. Therefore, their challenges were mostly focusing with their markets, feedbacks and their customers reviews. Therefore, you always have a slightly different challenges depending at which team you are. Definitely and depends on the organization as well how they've structured their teams. Daniela, maybe you could talk a little bit about how we put based on your experience, how you've seen the PMM role and potentially how it has been different in different organizations based on your experience. Absolutely, you know, that's a great segue. So I think it depends on where the product marketing team sits because it really differs from company to company. Sometimes it's in the growth organization, marketing organization, sometimes it's in the product organization itself. And of course, on the business model, if it's a B2C, B2B, B2C or B2B, so obviously there's different flavors to product marketing. I think in my experience, let me use my most recent. So in 26, the product marketing is sitting within the growth organization. And I think the advantage of that is to be able obviously to sit on a fence because on a daily basis you're working with the product team. And you're working of all the nice things that my colleagues have just explained, right? So you're working with engineering, you're working to make sure that we have a shared vision and goal. We're working on the PNL, we're sharing the insights. But then on this other side, we're actually working with the marketing channels, right? And so that is an advantage of sitting within the marketing team. And I think the most important piece that we are able to do in 26 is the fact that we're sitting in the marketing team that maybe most organizations is the timing of a launch. Looking at go-to-market strategy, right? So to really have that balance between when a product is actually going to be ready for launch and involving the channels while they're doing other things as well. I always find that the most crucial and the most complex piece because you want to brief them, you want to give them information, you want to give them more creative time to think of what is the best campaign platform to use for a specific product launch. But then in the meantime, in the back, you have the product that is being developed, but it could move. And so you do want to brief them and all it might change in the value proposition because there's, especially within FinTech, things are moving quite fast. So these are some of the elements. In other organizations, maybe within a B2B2C, in my experience, you have to work closely with the sales team, you have to work closely with the commercial team. And so I think the common denominator across all organizations is that product marketing is at the center of many, many, many stakeholders. And that creates an embedded responsibility for PMMs, right? And I think building relationships is one of the key aspects for PMM. Absolutely. There's this myth that product management owns putting products on the shelf and product marketing owns taking them off the shelf, but that's very much a myth. Like you said, product marketing needs to be involved across the entire journey and product development cycle so they can provide that customer input, that customer voice throughout the journey of the product all the way to the launch. What I would like to talk a little bit about are maybe some of the specifics based on your experience of what product management owns and what product marketing owns. Emma, could you talk a little bit about some of your past experience and what are the key components that you've owned in the past at Spotify or AWS that maybe are sometimes subjective and organizational? Yeah, I think there's a ton of overlap right in PM and PMM sort of roles and responsibilities and I think you particularly see that around anything that like involves the customer. So customer research is often sort of shared just to kind of set the foundation of how much overlap there is in terms of specific things that I would own versus a PM. It's coming up with that marketing strategy. So what is the end-to-end marketing strategy that's driving product success? However, the PM and PMM define it, whether that's growth in users, growth in revenue. So that would look like, are we doing an inbound or outbound strategy? What are the specific tactics that we're deploying? So that sort of like typical kind of like marketing is really owned by marketing specifically. I think a lot of other type of like marketing deliverables that maybe PMM leads and PM consults on would be like, you know, what's the product narrative? That's something that you know I would typically write up and then ask for the PM to consult on and for engineers to consult on as well instead of people building the product. Yeah, so that's kind of like my high level answer. There's, I feel like there's so much overlap and often, you know, things are really collaborated on equally as opposed to owned solely. But yeah, that's that. That's a good take and that's a good segue to maybe some of the challenges. If there's overlap, there's a lot of challenges, you too. I'm going to pass this hard question to you, A-10, to see based on your experience, what type of challenges you see in the collaboration and the synergy. Actually, if I may, I'm going to try to give an extra lens on the last two questions in a related way and then segue into this. So something I've seen over the years, there are cultural differences across companies, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Meta, I know a bit less, AWS. And so like the biggest contrast I remember hearing years ago was that at Microsoft, PMMs were responsible for pricing, customer facing, you know, inbound and outbound, and then PMs just built this down, which I found, which was not my experience at my experience at DoubleClick and then ads at Google. So it comes down to company differences. And then for very large companies like how Google Ads operates versus Google Cloud operates is different. And then specific teams, depending on the resourcing they have might be quite different. In my experience, both at DoubleClick originally and then at Google, the PMMs were shared. There's a group of PMMs who sort of covered a wide range of products and kind of went in and out as needed. But structurally, while structurally PMs were fixed, it was, you know, the PM and the end team were responsible for a given product, which meant the time spent, the availability was just simply different. It was more of a, as a PM, you spent time with the customers and all that stuff, developed insights and knowledge, then conveyed that to the PMM, and then they helped craft the plan from there. There are other places I've seen where it's the exact opposite. And PMMs are much more in front of customers and the market. And a competitive research and all that stuff and PMMs are much more the, okay, you're sharing all this information with me and I'm translating it into a product strategy and roadmap. And so for folks on the call, as you're thinking about your future career and where you want to be, there's sort of a wide range of, here's all the range of experiences and skills you might have and apply. Which of them do you most want to, most enjoy? Which of them do you most want to build on? And based on that, which company sub org team do you want to be on and ask the questions to understand ultimately what's different there. From a challenges perspective, I think the, as I'm saying this thinking out loud, I think the primary challenge was when it was a horizontal. I don't think I've ever had a relationship challenge of like, oh, we're stepping on toes or whatever. Most teams are so stretched, nobody has enough time. Oh my God, please, if you have time to go do competitive research, thank you. If you have time to go speak with three extra customers, I couldn't get to, oh my God, yes. More often though, my experience has been more with a shared horizontal team, whether it's UX or PMM or some other functions. And so the challenge is that they don't have as much context for, you know, all the various levels of elements. And so you spend a lot of time yourself as a PM thinking through the bullet points of USP, you need sales proposition and value prompt and all of these things. I think that sort of, which goes again, sort of any team, sometimes you're missing a UX, you're short on UX, sometimes you're short on PM and there is no PM. And so you just sort of have to roll with it depending on your team makeup and resources available. 100%. That's when the prioritization challenge comes in where maybe PM has different priorities than the PMM. So resource challenge has always become a key driver of those issues. Yvina, maybe you could give us your perspective as a PMM in terms of what types of challenges you face and how you've been able to overcome those challenges and your collaboration with PMs. Yeah, I think I would elaborate on the previous points. I never had like any relationship challenge. However, I did have a challenge with resource, especially when you are shared PMM and you're working across multiple teams across multiple priorities and every PM is obviously expecting you to prioritize them. Therefore, in this case, you need to see a larger picture what, which kind of challenge you would like to take and where you can support the team. And therefore how you can actually collaborate with your ex-offense like UXRs, for example, or like designers to support you on this journey and maybe divide and conquer. So I guess resource was the key challenge and obviously you need to continue, you know, support your relationships with all the PMs you're working with. Therefore, it's kind of a little bit tricky sometimes. However, if you have a strong supporting structure within the UXRs or like fellow PMMs, you would be able to succeed. Those are great points. I think one of the challenges that I've experienced also is communication challenges where there's not a clear communication or roadmap or framework in terms of how PM and PMM should work. Daniela, maybe you could talk a little bit about how you've been able to overcome those communication challenges and overall how do you communicate with PMs in terms of messaging, positioning, product launches, etc. I think I'm touching upon the relationship piece. It is fundamental in the sense that what we tend to do with the product team. So N26 is one of those companies going back to what Aitum was saying is that we are the ones that does the comparative analysis and brings insights. We are the ones talking to the customers and so then we bring that to the PMs and they're super happy about that because they don't have the time anyway. So in that piece or maybe what they focus more is in UX research, right? So we do a lot more on that side. But then going back to your question, I think what is really key is that we start any sort of discussion from a roadmap and what's coming really, really early on. And so I think another topic that can come up is a divide and conquer situation where we sit down together. They know what our expertise is and as Emma was saying, there is overlap. But we sit down and we make sure that A, there is an ongoing sync between a well-defined team. So we outline roles and responsibilities from the beginning. I mean, without saying is that PM does product and we do product marketing, we will take it to market and we'll make sure that we have product adoption once it's launched. But I think ongoing circles, ongoing communication, off-site discussions around what makes sense and what doesn't. And I think we try to do things called GSTDs, which is getting stuff done days, right? So we isolate completely from meetings and we sit down and we just focus on the launch of something or what we're going to do over the next three to six months. Once that plan is outlined, then we know exactly what's happening. Obviously, things can pivot, things can change, strategy changes. But overall, I think that's the key to communication, right? And again, I'm stressing the relationship piece because if something happens, then either the PM or PMM will cover for the other person. And that's the sort of things that tends to happen. But as I said, sometimes, especially when you have the shared, so my team is structured by vertical, right? By sort of products, we have a PMM that is mirrored to every single segment within product. And so you have a one-to-one relationship. But I make sure that that circles, that moves. And so one PMM is not always going to look after one segment. They will look after another segment at some point in time. So there is a wider relationship building and everybody knows everyone. And so that's how we cover and make sure that capacity is managed. That's great. I love the idea of getting things done, Bayes. Yeah, I think you've convinced most of the viewers that they want to join your team. It sounds so good. It's not all that. It's not always that great, right? There's always challenges, of course, and there is frustration like any team, but we try to improve as much as we can. Absolutely. I want to double down on maybe talking a little bit about specific moments in product journey or specific times that PMM and PMM should collaborate more. And maybe I'd like to ask you this question. You've also worked on the consumer side of things at Spotify and then the business side of things at AWS. Maybe you can bring in that perspective and say, how have these been different based on your experience in terms of how PMMs and PMMs collaborate? Great question. I think generally, I think the fundamentals don't really change that much. When you're a PMM, for example, regardless on the product that you're working on, the foundation of your role is pretty much the same. You are supposed to build product narratives. You're supposed to have a deep understanding of the user and have an empathetic lens and understand their pain points and what moves the needle from their perspective. And then you're supposed to sell the product or market it really effectively. The tactics change though. The tactics and the end-to-end marketing strategy and the core deliverables that you're working on change. If you're working on B2B, you'll be working on a lot of sales collateral and making sure that your sales pitch is really, really smooth and ironed out. If you're working on just targeting a specific end user and they have the purchasing power on their own, maybe you're looking at more social. Maybe you're looking at Reddit or paid ads or something like that. So the tactics change quite a bit. So I think that's generally some of the differences that I've noticed in PMM. Was there another part of your question that I'm leaving out? Maybe what stages of the product launch or programs should they collaborate more or maybe less have been involved? Any thoughts on that? Yeah, so I think when coming up with the product launch, it's like getting together with the PMM and just understanding what's going on. So generally, I like to get a really firm lay of the land and talk with the PMM and talk with engineers to understand what the product is and how it's differentiated from their point of view. I actually really love talking to engineers in this aspect because they're building the product so they are excited about what makes it really special. So I think that layer of collaboration where I'm in the learning phase is really, really important. Once I've had that learning phase, then I go off and do my own thing where I come up with the general marketing strategy. And that's when I come back to the team, to the product development team, kind of ask for their advice, make sure that they're aligned. And then when coming up with the deliverables, mostly I'm just like in an execution standpoint, but there are key areas where I want the PMM's health and collaboration. So an area that I already talked about is product narrative. I want to make sure that the PMM is brought into what I'm selling and what the value props are that I'm mentioning. Any type of part of the user journey where maybe we're talking about how a user finds the product on the website and what that discovery process looks like all the way through getting access to the product. I think that we talked about this before, but that is a critical part in the user journey that affects product usage. And so that's a key area of PMM and PMM overlap. So those are kind of the core areas that I see overlap between PMM and PMM with product launches. Yeah, you brought up some really good points. Oftentimes the engineers, the product managers that are working in the product, they're the most passionate about it. They do the research and they really spend a lot of time with it. So getting their perspective is extremely important. Similar to getting the sales teams perspective, similar to getting the analysts and market feedback, essentially. So you brought up some really good points. And I want to switch gears into some positive thinking in terms of maybe you can tell us one story, one success story of where you worked with the PMM and it really resulted in great outcomes. Awesome, would love to. So I'm going to add one extra element to the last question if I may, just because it's actually, it's kind of rare. And so it might be helpful. So back in the day at double click, this is like 15, 18 years ago, we put a lot of rigor into a new, what we called commercialization process. It used to be that you'd build a bunch of product, throw it over the wall, and sales services marketing would figure it out and it would just work. And then that started failing. And so double click, put more rigor into a thoughtful structured commercialization process. And I mentioned this at double click because at Google, it was much more ad hoc shoot from the hip kind of processes. But we would, we came up with this classification of a commercialization level one, two or three, C1, C2, C3, it might be ABC, whatever you want. And it's sort of, this is a whole new product category that you're launching. Is it a new sub feature? Is a new sub product? Is it a feature? Is it a range of bug fixes? And so depending on the level, the scale of the launch and the thing, the level of effort and the type of engagement changes. And being able to have that sort of framework in the language to say, this is like a really big one. We need to start collaborating 12 months ahead of launch, 18 months ahead, developing all the elements. Or no, as Emma said, it's sort of, you're already in the know on it all. And hey, there's a significant feature upgrade. It's a much later touch in terms of the effort involved and so forth. So I think just having that kind of framework in the language to think of that context can be super helpful. As far as a success story. So, and a wonderful, wonderful PMM partner years ago, Desmoda Mehdi. She moved on from Google to Meta then to Spotify. And I think she just joined Salesforce on the off chance. Anybody knows her. She was wonderful. We were working at Google on interest based ads. And the history prior to all of that was targeting context, understanding the context of the webpage and matching and add to that context. We introduced the notion of the audience. And so the user behind the computer, what are the people's interests demographics prior sites visited and tailoring that way. And so we had this opportunity to kind of reset the narrative. And together sort of worked through this idea that, you know, you want to reach your site visitors. Then you want to reach people who look like them. And then you want to reach people who are just generally potentially interested in your space. And within your site visitors, there's also like the smaller kernel of those who created a shopping cart and abandoned and so on. And so thinking about these sort of concentric circles of audiences and how that relates to other elements and, you know, targeting, you're not targeting keywords. You're actually targeting people. It just so happens that the keywords represent the interests of the people. And so coming up with all this new narrative and language and framing and positioning, she and I just spent hours together putting it together, developing slides, visuals, worked with an outside agency to make it visually stunning, developed a variety of sort of speaking engagements and so on. And so it's just a ton of fun, great partner. Just we had a fun relationship and a good vibe. And we're excited to do something together. And so it's just had great outcomes in the business, of course, took off and eventually became many billions of dollars of success. That's great. I love those happy stories where you look back and like we really did a good job on that. Daniel, do you have some similar stories to share with us? Maybe even bringing in some global perspectives on how you've worked with local markets and how you've been able to deploy across the globe. And 26 is adopted across different parts of the world. I'd love to hear your take. Yeah, not sure. I think there is always a crucial matrix combination between PMM, the launch of the product, working with local markets and how this comes together. And I think in 26 operates mainly within the European region, as you know, there's so many different countries and so many different cultures. And to that extent, working with the local marketing teams is crucial. And so as what I was saying earlier on, when we kick off the work on a specific product, the local marketing team is also brought on board. It's rare that we usually do big banks in all of the markets, probably because of the complexity of the European landscape where it's totally different from a regulatory, legal, compliance perspective. And so it's probably easier from that way. So we start off maybe with Germany and then we'll roll out to Spain and we'll roll out to France. But that gives us an opportunity to work one-to-one with the local market and the product team. And so even from a discovery perspective, it's fundamental because there might be some things to keep in mind. I don't know, we're launching a savings account or launching equities that has different implications in terms of which regulatory bodies we need to go to, what kind of T's and C's from a legal perspective we need to take into consideration. And ultimately also from how you position, how you localize from a translation perspective. All of these aspects are really, really important. And so the working team gets bigger. But then the crucial aspect of the most difficult part is how do you then take that and you move on to the next market and you can reuse what you have to scale or you have to change everything. So these are important aspects of the PMM and sometimes there's overlap between the PMM and the marketing team. So in terms of positioning, storytelling, target audience, who decides the marketing strategy in terms of which channels to use and that is difficult sometimes. But again, it's about how you work together and why you, because I think people get really tight on what's on paper in theory versus what the practice is because when you go into the actual practice there's so much work to do anyway in that it's just a matter of coordinating and making sure that we're looking at the north side for the company and not personal agenda. Yeah, you bring in a great perspective where you're learning from each of these launches in different cultures, different languages and you're bringing that learning to new markets. We are almost out of time. I want to ask my last question to Irina. We talked a little bit about different stakeholders we brought in, marketing for example in this case and we've talked about some of the other stakeholders. Could you talk a little bit about the other stakeholders that the PMM and PMM should collaborate with closely and what's the best way to collaborate with them? Definitely. I think it's very important to hear the market's feedbacks but it's also very important to work with your ops teams that can provide you even deeper understanding of what is happening, especially if something is not happening right that would be your key partners to identify the issue, jump on it and help to resolve as well as data scientists to understand deeper the opportunity of your launch understand your results of the launch and deep dive and understand how you can improve as well as user experience researchers and this is the partners with whom you can divide and conquer some of the research targets that you have in your roadmap and you can collaborate together as well as product designers when it comes to designing some nice user experience and visual identity that would be I would say the core cross-functional collaboration points for you. Absolutely. I want to thank all of our panelists today and I want to thank the audience for attending. We covered some very interesting topics talked about from challenges to synergies to success stories of product marketing and product management. I hope you all learned something today. Thank you all for your time. We appreciate it. Have a great day.