 Hey, hey everyone. This is Carlos and the founder and CEO at Product School. Today I'm here with a colleague, Jason Gatov, who's an executive in residence at Product School and before he was a VP of product marketing at Pendo. Welcome to the show, Jason. Thanks for having me, happy to be here. And we've had so many conversations in private as part of the team and I thought it would be a great idea to have you share some of your knowledge with the entire community. Love that. Love that. Happy to do so. So maybe to start from the top. Why don't you tell us a little bit more about what is your professional experience as a product marketing leader? Yeah. I mean, I think like many of us of my age, there wasn't necessarily a career path for product marketers or product managers of that nature. So I kind of had a twisting path to get here. I actually started managing a warehouse and drive a forklift and this was in the 90s and I wanted to get involved with tech. I didn't know exactly how to do so. But at the time when I was researching the internet because it was relatively new back in the late 90s, you know, this company called Forrester Research kept on being quoted in the Wall Street Journal and in the Economist. So I applied to Forrester to try to get involved. I was an economics major undergrad, so I understood research. I was like, hey, this is my opportunity to learn more about the tech industry. From there, that was my introduction to the tech industry. And they actually placed me as a junior researcher on what was the enterprise software team. So I've been in enterprise software now for 25 years, more than 25 years, because they thought that they were attracted to my supply chain background, my warehouse background, because in enterprise software, supply chain is one of the key areas. From Forrester, I was actually recruited to my very first marketing role, and that was at one of the companies that we covered. So I spent a couple of years, a few years doing marketing roles at, you know, large publicly traded category leading software companies. But I always knew I wanted to work at a startup. You know, this was right after the dot com bubble during the dot com bubble was really appealing to me. So when I felt that I knew enough to be dangerous, I moved out here to the West Coast. And for the past almost 15 years, I've been either running marketing or product marketing at mid stage startups. I'm really exciting companies. I've had the privilege to work with more than seven unicorns. And I've been very excited to be able to work with you guys now. Seven unicorns. Those are companies value that at least a million dollars. What are those? Well, most recently, I ran product marketing at Pendo, which was an amazing company. They actually were, I was a customer back in the 2015-2016 timeframe, then I consulted with them and then I had the opportunity to join full time. But I also work with companies like segment and checker abnormal security. And I don't want to name drop too much. You can find me on LinkedIn, but a lot of different industries. But with a common theme is that I kind of came up through that enterprise software that has some sort of a sales motion. So some sort of world that even if they have the PLG motion, they have some sort of a sales led motion as well. They have some sort of sellers who are interacting with their customers and prospects. And you and I go way back. I remember when I started out at school around 10 years ago, maybe in year one or two, I met you. We were at a conference. I think you were consulting for, was it Pendo or another company, don't remember? It actually goes even a little further back. When I was at Optimizely, I initially ran product marketing and then I became interim CMO. And at Optimizely, one of our secondary personas were product managers. And in order to be authentic in what we're writing, I started going to the meetups that you were having. This was like 2015 timeframe to learn what product marketers were using, what were the words the product managers were using. So I could then bring that back to the product marketing team. We first cross paths then, but then you're right. We got, we reunited at a conference where I was working for Pendo. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. I was hosting these in person events in San Francisco. And you were kind of an outlier because at the very beginning, our community was for product managers. And then it came to me and told me about product marketing and the opportunity to create a stronger partnership between PMs and PMMs, as well as the opportunity to involve companies that were targeting product managers. The original idea of organizing events with potential sponsors. And at the beginning, you opened my eyes because I didn't think about it. And many years forward, here we are with all these companies that you mentioned and many others today are active contributors to our community. Yeah. And for me, I've always found these events tremendously helpful. Right? Like one of the things that we'll probably talk about in this discussion is one of the roles of a product marketer is to be the voice of the customer, voice of the market. And the best way to do that is to actually listen to your target persona. And at many of the companies I've worked at, my persona is the product manager, right? So being able to be in the conversations when they're actually, when I can hear what are the challenges they're facing? What are the words they're using? How do they describe what they're using, what they're doing? So you don't just use marketing speak. So all of these conferences and meetings have been tremendously helpful to actually hear what product managers are actually saying. And here we are. Many years later, talking about product marketing. Because when I started, product management wasn't even a thing. So forget about product marketing. I like that now we see there's much more awareness in the market. Since the product teams grow, we see not only product managers, we also see a lot of product marketers. In fact, I'm very proud that you joined us as an executive in residence to build the product marketing manager certification to help more aspiring PMMs get that first job. And it's one to learn more about your own interpretation of product marketing. What is that? And how is that different than product management? Well, let me start because when I first started in marketing at software companies, that first job after Forester, even when I was at Forester, product marketing was, it seemed to me to be a discipline within product management. It was a specialized role within product management. Product marketers typically reported into the product management organization. And they were more the customer sales facing role while the product leaders were focused on the overall strategy and a lot of the product managers were more focused on building the product interfacing with the development teams. And there was a very natural marriage there between product marketers and product managers. And there was different skill sets. Sometime over the years and like in my career inflection was around the 2009-2010 timeframe, it seemed that product marketers started to more and more report into marketing. And regardless where it reports, the job function is still the same, right? The product marketers typically responsible for identifying that initial positioning. Who is that target customer? What is your position relevant to the competitors? What parts of the world, like really identifying the positioning? So then you can develop the messaging and then you could launch products and develop go-to-market plans. So when I think about the fundamentals, the foundations that every product marketer does, whether it's B2B, B2C, big company, small company, those are kind of the three to four main pillars that we always focus on. Then based on the company, sometimes you might be more focused on competitive intelligence, pricing and packaging. You might be more involved with the PLG motions, the self-serve motions. But the foundational part that regardless if you report in a product management or marketing, that positioning, messaging, product launches and go-to-market plans is pretty consistent. I like that. Positioning, messaging, product launches and go-to-market. That is a very clear way to identify roles and responsibilities because, especially in smaller companies, there is no product manager. It's usually one of the early employees or founders who is wearing that hat. Then as the company grows, it gets to a point where it's necessary to have someone full-time wearing the product manager. I think still at that point, product marketing is not maybe totally required. Maybe the product manager is still wearing the product marketer hat. As the product evolves and there are more product managers, there are more engineers, there's a bigger need to start launching products, start getting more of those from the market. Then we see that additional segmentation and why some companies have product managers as well as product marketers. 100%. Just to build off what you're saying, I always say that the CEO is always the first product marketer. Even when the CEO hires that first product manager, the company or I should say the CEO founder is the first product marketer, it's still their baby. They're still passionate about how you bring this product to market, how you talk about this product to the market. Especially for product marketers or heads of marketing working for technical founders, you need to consider the CEO founder as the first product marketer. Their opinion really matters. The good news is they're usually very passionate about it, so it leads to very productive conversations. What is the standard ratio product manager to product marketing managers and companies? That's a really good question. The last data I saw, some of the really big companies before this kind of market readjustment, they would have three product managers for every product marketer. That was the fang type companies, the very large companies that had that luxury. The research went down to say that the average company typically had closer to five product managers for every product marketer. I hate to use the answer, it really depends, but that's kind of the ratio. I can tell you this much, when you're at a company and there's one product marketer for 12 product managers, there's a problem. Yeah, I agree. I've seen something similar happening with PM to engineer ratio. When we started, the ratio was around 10 engineers per product manager, and now that's dropping dramatically. We're seeing around one PM for every three to five engineers because now the impact of the PM, the responsibility is becoming much bigger. I can expect that in the future, the ratio PM to PMM might be closer to one to one. Yeah, that would be ideal. I've yet to live in a world one-to-one. I would love that, but definitely getting more. One of the things I think is interesting. Some people refer to this environment that we're living in right now as wartime. There's a certain amount of intensity that happens right now. When there's intensity, sometimes what happens is everyone wants to try to help, and with good intentions, what sometimes happens is collisions. You want to have clear responsibility. I've witnessed firsthand that I've heard through some of my colleagues in the industry is that as some product leaders want to be more revenue oriented, want to be really focused on some of those go-to-market activities, that sometimes there's a duplication of efforts. They only come from good intentions. There's a desire to move the company forward, but what's really important is having clear, defined roles and responsibilities. I'm not wed to any of the racy frameworks, whatever framework someone wants to use, but being really clear that the product leader is aware of all of the messaging and go-to-market activities that are happening, but they might not necessarily be driving it. They're more of a contributor than an owner, and what has happened sometimes over the last 12 months is that who's owning these activities, but that line has blurted it. Yeah, I think of this as a co-pilot model, where PMs and PMMs are working closely together. There are obviously situations where each of them have to be a tiebreaker, and I like what you said about the PMM being the tiebreaker when it comes to positioning, messaging, even pricing, or go-to-market. That doesn't mean that there's not going to be input from other stakeholders. And vice versa, there are situations where the PM is the tiebreaker when it comes down to roadmapping slash feature prioritization, user stories, and how to go about actually building a product with engineers and designers. 100%. And depending on the scale of the company, it might even be the CEO or some member of the executive team. I tend to work at rapidly growing startups, kind of growth stage startups, and the executive team is very involved in a lot of these decisions, but it's very clear who the decision maker is, whether that is the CPO, whether that is the CMO, whether there's the CEO. Yeah, well, let's talk about Ryan Chesky, CEO at Airbnb because he recently had a couple of interviews talking about things related to product and product marketing. One of them was that he considers himself the chief product officer as well, and why it's important for founders to be very involved with product and be the ultimate tiebreaker in some of those strategic decisions. Another thing that he mentioned was that in his case, as he's calling the team, he's trying to integrate product with marketing as much as possible and calling a lot of the people that product marketers, because he believes that product managers also need to know about the market. This is not just a technical role, building something with engineers and designers, so what is your take on that? Well, first of all, it's been fun to be a product market over the last five or six months since he initially made those comments at the Figma conference, and then he clarified it further in that recent podcast, Lenny's podcast, which for those of you who are interested, I definitely recommend checking it out. It outlines his thoughts. I think Airbnb is an outlier, and it's built itself on another outlier, Apple. And I've never worked at either of these companies. But much of what he said, the way I interpreted it, was the coming together of product and marketing and product management. It just so happens that at Airbnb, they're calling them product marketers. But I think if you really read what he says and listen to what he says, he's wanting product managers to be more go-to-market revenue aware. They need to be really deep in how to message a product. What are the problems people are solving? Within his own experience, and again, I don't want to speak on his behalf, he'd observed that maybe some of the product managers have become more project managers. And that's a very specialized role and a very important role. And I believe they actually elevated the role of a project manager. But in their world, to make sure that the people responsible for building the products were aware of the market, were aware of how to bring it to market, were aware of how to drive revenue, they call that product marketing. I think that it's more of a, the way I took it back, that there's a coming together in product managers more and more need to learn product marketing skills. It doesn't mean that product marketers don't still deliver those things. It doesn't mean that product managers now need to be called product marketers. But I think that what it's going to do is it's coming together, the skill set, and really just kind of shine a light on that. I agree. And I, if I look at the Airbnb's career stage, there are tons of positions open for product managers as well as for product marketers. And I think it's a good point about PN's needing to know how to go to market and as much as possible their users and how to monetize their product. Because in many cases, they might not have the, the co-pilot, they might not have a product marketer and they'd be wearing that hat. But even if they do have a co-pilot, they still need to know as much as possible about the market. And I think one of the things that gets lost is that this really changes based on where someone is in their career, right? Product leaders, all the good product leaders I've worked with for the last 20 years have been go-to-market aware. When someone's more of an entry-level product manager, it's understandable that they're more focused on building that specific product, hitting specific deadlines. And they might be go-to-market curious, but they might not be as opinionated. And, but so I think that there is a difference that, you know, I think that some of the narratives I'd read on LinkedIn and Twitter was saying that, you know, maybe some product managers were not as revenue aware or customer aware as they should be. And I'm sure that's the case in some situations. But when it came to the leaders, all the leaders that I've worked with, I've had the privilege to work with, they have been. I think it's the kind of disseminating some of that information, some of those skills throughout the organization. And especially now, as you mentioned, it's work time for many companies. As the product function is elevated because more strategic, it's absolutely critical for those product leaders to be able to drive business outcomes, including revenue and not just focus on adding value to the user. Obviously, adding value to the user is important and we cannot fake an excellent customer experience, but there has to be a connection with market, otherwise they might not be long-term. 100%. So I heard you talk about the product marketing teams being under marketing function sometimes or being under the product function in other times. So in your opinion, when are the scenarios where you put the team in one team or the other? Yeah, I mean, I think it really depends on the leaders and the company itself. I'm a big believer in complimenting skills. So if it makes sense, like for example, if there's a product organization that would benefit from having a direct injection of some of more of the go-to market skills, it makes perfect sense. If the leader has managed that sort of function before, I also think that helps. I was consulting with a company back a few years ago and the product marketing function reported into the marketing team. But in that specific industry, marketing was really about brand. And the product marketing team, they weren't getting the attention they needed, but they happened to have a CPO who was very revenue and go-to-market aware. So I made the recommendation that they should move the product marketing team under the product organization. They did, and the product marketing team then began to flourish more. And this is not anything negative. It was just the nature of their business. The product marketing team really didn't fit in on the marketing organization, which happens quite frequently. So I've seen it work really well at both. I've had the benefit of working for both and I've really, really enjoyed it. I think one of the challenges actually is at my level. I think the challenge there is the career path. I've never seen a VP of product marketing, an SPP of product marketing become a CPO. I have seen a VP of product marketing become a CMO. So when you get to a certain stage, the career path, that's very, that's limited to a very few number of people at the top of the hierarchy. But for the people on the team, I think it can work really well in both organizations. Let's talk about the product marketing career path. I think that's a great point. I haven't seen a chief product marketing officer yet. I've seen chief product officers and chief marketing officers, right? So probably the highest level I've seen is VP of product marketing. Yeah, VP, SVP is the next level, but you're right. I mean, if we really think about it, the CPO is a relatively new role. And I personally don't foresee a world where there is a C level role focused on product marketing. I think it's very natural that that product marketer will either be happy and content, contributing in a meaningful way. I mean, I think this is one of the many parallels between product managers and product marketing is that both of our roles are all about influence and not necessarily authority. So if you're looking to have a C level role in a big team, product marketing might not be the best role for you, unless you want to become a CMO. And I find a lot of startups, the benefit of being in the Bay Area here, a lot of startups want a head of marketing, a CMO with a product marketing skill set. Some of these big organizations that have GMs of business units, and that GM might be a product leader, it might be a sales leader, but they'll have a dedicated CMO for that business unit. And those CMOs frequently have product marketing skill sets. So there's a lot of opportunities, but I just don't necessarily see it being a C level role anytime soon. Yeah, the career keeps going up, even with a different title, and it's good to be aware that usually those last steps tend to be under marketing as a CMO or even as a GM. I mentioned some passing. I've seen product marketer become a CRO. I've never seen a product marketer become a CPO. And then talking about the career ladder from the beginning, what is the first, what is the most entry level marketing role and what are the most natural next steps? Well, I'd say most frequently it's just a product marketing manager, which is sometimes counterintuitive, right? The title is product marketing manager, they're not managing people, they're an IC level role. Some companies do have associate product marketers, but I wouldn't say that's pervasive. That happens at some companies, but I'd say the most standard entry level role is a product marketer, and then it goes to a senior product marketing manager, and then it would go to a director. And then at that level is when there might be a branch, right? Is that person more of a people manager or more of a barely strong IC? Because at that level, you typically can become like a senior director of product marketing or something that some companies call a principal. And what was really important to show is that within a product marketing team, because product marketing is a pretty lean profession, managing people isn't the only way to have career progression. These principal product marketers, which is effectively a senior director level person, they are amazing at their role. They have huge impact. They have the trust of the team, the trust of the company, and they get assigned some of the, they have the opportunity to work on some really major projects. And then there's typically a VP role and sometimes an SVP role. It sounds very similar to the product manager career ladder. The entry level position is product manager, some cases associate product manager and then senior. And then we see the option to continue growing as an IC, usually called principal or then more of a people manager, group PM or director. I've seen a lot of PMMs move into product. I haven't seen PMs move into PMM. What is, why is that? I've actually seen a couple of, I've seen some product managers come into PMM, especially some of these companies that have inbound versus outbound product managers, right? Sometimes one of those variations smells quite a bit like product marketing. I don't want to call it any companies in particular, but like I've seen some product managers go into product marketing, but I think that the motivations are slightly different. I think a lot of the key characteristics, the ability to influence without authority, to effectively collaborate with various stakeholders, there's a lot of commonality there, but I think it's more where you spike. Like, do you want to spend more time partnering closely with the development and engineering teams to build products? Or do you want to spend more time with the go to market side of the house, whether that's marketing and or sales to drive revenue, right? So I think that they do attract different skill sets. And what I've seen a lot of product managers, including in the courses that I've had the privilege to teach with you guys, is that there are product managers who are taking the product marketing course because they want to learn about the product marketing fundamentals to help elevate their product management roles. They're not looking to go into product marketing. They see those as really needed skills that they're looking to hone so they can keep on moving up the product management ladder. As you said, in order to continue growing as a product leader or product executive, it's absolutely critical to have product marketing skills, go to market skills. So I agree. Like I see a lot of PMs wanting to learn about product marketing, even if that doesn't mean that they want to become a lot of marketers. And I think another reason is drawing compensation. Like what is your take on compensation for PMs versus PMs? I think that's very fair. I think that especially at the earlier stages, product managers tend to get compensated higher, especially at startups, early to mid-sized startups. When it comes to the equity aspect, I'm not going to make this across the board. But what I've observed is that product managers and other technical roles, they do get more upside in the equity side than the go-to-market counterparts. I will say, though, that does level out the further up you go. When I have a lot of peers who are VPs of product management, and we talk about compensation openly. So when you get to a certain level, I do believe it evens out. But at the earlier levels of the career, the product management profession, especially at the large companies, or at least it was true 12 to 18 months ago, was a more lucrative role. But it really goes down to like, what are your skills and what are you motivated by? And skill. And still, both careers are extremely lucrative from a money standpoint. That shouldn't be the only driver, of course, but it's good to recognize that they're very well paid because they're high impact. It's totally, totally worth it. And I think a good way for those professionals to show why their worst amount of money is to actually show business impacts. I want to ask you about most common metrics that PMMs are responsible for. Well, let's say the unfortunate reality is the most common metrics are probably output metrics. They just measure like, I've done X, Y, and Z, and I constantly advise against that. When I work with teams, there's some role for output, but I think of metrics in four key buckets. First and foremost, I try to get as close to revenue as possible. Right? If you're working on a product launch, share that ARR target for that product, that product specific revenue. Try to have a product specific expansion revenue number. Then there's also more of a, what I try to position as a customer count type goal, because that's really important when you're trying to have social proof and validation. And customer count can come up in a couple of different ways. For example, opportunities generated. You launch a new product, how many opportunities have you generated? You haven't closed them yet. And I should take a step back. This is, I've largely worked in enterprise software where our sales cycle could be longer than 12 months, right? So you want to have a measurement to see momentum. So I'd say like revenue first and foremost, secondly, some sort of customer count, and that could be in the form of opportunities created and sign deals. And I think this is really important because when I've worked at companies that are launching new products, it's very natural to have a revenue target. But if you sign one customer that meets that revenue target, is that a success? And for me as the product marketer, I need to advocate, I need X number of logos because that's going to help with sales. And as soon as you bring that into discussion, people tend to nod their heads and they agree, but that customer count is very important. More and more, I see product marketers getting more involved with product adoption, right? There's all this energy enthusiasm about the launch of a new product. And then sometimes the spotlight goes on to the next new product you're launching. But you need to get people to actually use the product. And I've worked very closely with customer marketing teams or have had product marketers on my team itself work on that product adoption to make sure that people are actually using the product. And that has a direct impact on expansion revenue. And then lastly, I don't overlook key milestones, right? A product launch, did you launch the product on time? Frequently product marketers are very involved with like website updates. Did the website go live on time? You know, those, I never leave with those. I don't want those to be the only metrics. But when you're working on a massive cross-functional project, it is worth measuring and celebrating or holding people accountable to hitting the read-up on timelines. Jason, thank you so much for the masterclass on product marketing. Always good to learn more about career paths, how PMM is being structured across different companies, key skills that are required to thrive at different stages of a career. Rather, how PMMs can be great partners for PMs and vice versa, as well as the future. It seems like future is bright for product and product marketing professionals as more companies try to become or act like software companies and need to enable the revenue team, especially on digital channels, to increase, to drive more business outcomes. Absolutely, it's a great time to be a product marketer. Thank you so much for your time, Jason. Thank you.