Description

Welcome Shannon Vettes, CEO and SPO at Usersnap, to unpack the real value of Product Marketing and why PMMs should be involved long before a feature is ready to ship.

Shannon shares why she sees PMMs as strategic partners, not content producers.

What we cover:
👉 The two PMM archetypes and why one is deeply undervalued
👉 How PMMs help shape strategy through research, competition benchmarks, and market insights
👉 Why PMMs are essential decision partners during product discovery and validation
👉 Misconceptions that make the partnership harder
👉 The mindset shift needed for true PM–PMM collaboration

Why listen now?
Because if you want to make better product decisions, reduce blind spots, and elevate your product strategy, this conversation will change the way you work with PMMs.

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00:00 Hot takes about PMM and PM working together

04:01 How to better leverage PM x PMM relationship

10:56 Misconceptions about Product Marketing

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Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hello, I'm Carlotta. Welcome to Product Marketing Stories,

• Speaker #1

  the podcast that decrypts methodologies, shares advice and concrete learnings to make product marketing understandable and accessible. to deliver the most value. What's your take on product marketing and its collaboration with product?

• Speaker #0

  I will be a self-proclaimed fan girl of product marketing. I have worked with product marketers before and I find there's two flavors that I've worked with. The first flavor is where they're sort of underutilized and underappreciated. This is the situation where it's like, I've got a product, it's done. go write me the content to promote it. And I find this so reductive on the skill set. The way that we work with our growth team, which plays a product marketing role for us, they help us conceive which markets we're exploring and how we should explore them. They help us bench competition and emerging opportunity. They help us explore the strategy quite deeply. integral part of our strategy development. I feel genuinely I couldn't have done it without our head of growth, who is by my side this whole time, playing the PMM role for me. And she and I together were looking at the market and what was going on, looking at the potential, exploring the value propositions that we could be interested by. And I feel like this is a seriously underutilized capability that product marketers provide. that's the second flavor. I prefer that drastically. To say to a product marketer, your value to me is to write this blurb for LinkedIn, is to not recognize the talent that they can bring to the table. And I prefer to say, hey, product marketer, or in our case, growth playing the role of product marketing, help me explore and bench the competitors, their pricing, packaging, help us evaluate where we are strong, where we are weak. where we need to develop battle cards or objection statements that help us think about how to craft messaging and positioning for the product that differentiates us, help us find the right way to reach our audience and the right channels. So I think it was Maya Boj who gave a really great explanation for how PM and PMM can work well together. So I'm gonna, again, augment and echo the words of another woman in product that I really love. So she said that you can be very... like a product manager is a chef in the kitchen. We can cook up some magic with the right team. But we may not be super strong at writing the menu or promoting the restaurant. And this is where a PMM can be very strong. They can influence you and tell you, hey, that restaurant over here that's similar to ours is doing these recipes. And they're really getting a lot of great reviews for it. Maybe you want to think about positioning us this way. And they can bring you that external eye. And they can say, when you talk about your dish, you can try this wording that seems to work really well with the audience, really resonate with them. And maybe you want to market it in this space, maybe in this particular location, because there's great foot traffic or something. So they can help you to utilize the magic that you've cooked up. And they can help you understand how the market will perceive it. talk about it in the right way, in the right places to the right people. And I think that that is a deeply undervalued talent, one that I really enjoy exploiting in our growth team.

• Speaker #1

  So what would be your advice for PMs, product people, to better leverage the collaboration with product marketing managers?

• Speaker #0

  All right, three pieces of advice. Number one, include your PMM at the very start. When you are thinking about... customer or the problem space or whatever you're trying to decide, grab your PMM and pull them into the brainstorming session or whatever it is, because not only does it really help you to have a sparring partner to think these things through, but they will bring this really intelligent and global perspective that I think a lot of PMs have a tendency to just rely on their product sense and just feel really comfortable in their assumptions. So having product marketing in the room for me is an extra challenge point. And it's a brain expander for me. So when I'm looking to make a decision, I love to spar with my product marketer. A second piece of advice. And when you make that decision, ensure that they are involved in the planning and the coordination. So when you're orchestrating how you want to bring this solution about, include the product marketer. They can not only anticipate the right channels, the right audiences, the right words, as you would expect them to be able to do, but they can also help you think about price package position in addition. to just the product. So they do bring a global perspective of how you should test and bring to market certain things. And I am a big fan of A-B testing price and package. And so they can sometimes have a great opinion informed by the market and your products on that type of validation. So don't just craft your solution and say, we'll put it in this package at this price. Include your product team, including PMM. on that type of decision making. And the last thing that I would say is if you have questions, don't forget that they are an amazing research tool. A lot of product teams don't necessarily do the deep dive and go out and look. Product marketers are really good at that. And so when you are trying to make these decisions, if you don't have the research, sometimes it's a great mission to give to your product marketer. and say, I would love for you to bench the price points of similar products for this feature set. And they can bring you this amazing research, in my experience, on what is out there. And a lot of product managers are like, well, I can do that too. Of course you can. You can do the research if you want to. You don't have to always delegate it. But I find that there's, as a product person, so much to orchestrate already that it's really great to just have someone I can trust and delegate that research mission to. And I find that they like it generally. So they feel well-utilized and well-valued. And you get to focus on coordinating CS support, documentation, sales, and all the other business lines that need to be involved without also having to do every single deep dive yourself. So the underlying advice that applies to all those things. Trust your product marketing team with things that you don't know and be ready to let go a little bit and let them do some of that work and you will benefit for it and they will get better utilization. You'll get better value out of that role.

• Speaker #1

  Yeah, I think you just say a key word, which is partners. And it's really see the PM and the PMM collaboration as partners and working together. And it's not. the PM that is taking the job of the PMM or the opposite is more about how do we put together our brains and when we look at one thing, we won't look at it in the same way. And I think this is where there is this added value and that we can really have great conversations because we each add a different ingredient and this makes the conversation level up and also see things that I couldn't see as a PMM with my... way of thinking and the same for the PMs.

• Speaker #0

  Yeah. I think of it so much, the relationship PM and PMM is so much like relationship product design or product engineer or, you know, product support. Like when you are partnering with a discipline, you don't assume that you know everything about their work and they don't assume to understand fully the breadth that you're dealing with across all those teams. Like when you are partnering with an engineering leader or manager on an opportunity, you trust them when they say, hey, this is an XL effort that you're putting to us here. And this is why they can explain the complexity, usually, why that would be so. And this is the same type of conversation that we should be having with PMMs. And stop, we need to be a little humbler and stop assuming that we know everything about product marketing just because we know product. I do believe that product marketing is a different type of discipline, very aligned with growth. And it is something that you have to be willing to delegate. Sometimes delegate and trust are things that I think a lot of product people are uncomfortable with when it comes to product marketing tasks. And it's because we think that we know everything about it. But I do think it's a whole other, you know, line of business. to know how to make the cake and write the recipe and put the you know cake in the right window with the right price and the right sign and all that stuff It's a pretty talented person and someone with a lot of time and no pressure who can do all of those jobs simultaneously. And if you don't have to, if you can work with someone on it, just like I wouldn't want to estimate every single, you know, mission that we're trying to do. I like to delegate that to the engineers and let them speak for their voice of what they think the complexity is. So I would say the same thing about product people and partnering with product marketing. Trust that they are able, willing, and... should be allowed to do some of this strategic and alignment research with you because they do have expertise that you can leverage and you don't have to do it all by yourself and they're not taking away from you they are adding to you they are augmenting your knowledge and ability do you have other like

• Speaker #1

  common ideas about the product marketing that also you you disagree that we say on the market on that you have already listened and you say okay no i i really disagree with that

• Speaker #0

  that people say about product marketing jobs in specific?

• Speaker #1

  Yes, product marketing jobs or the collaboration between PMM and PMs.

• Speaker #0

  I think I only disagree with the people who want to relegate you to blurb writers. I don't agree with that.

• Speaker #1

  And how do you explain the fact that, like you were saying, that it's... almost natural to work like the duo between product and design, product and engineering, et cetera. How can we explain that it's more difficult to create this kind of partnership with product marketing?

• Speaker #0

  I think it's because a lot of product people think that they can do the job. I think it's because they're like, why do I need someone else to do this? Like, you can also estimate stories if you want to. Every product person should have some level of technical understanding that you could make assumptions. The question is, should you? And a lot of product people do it without thinking, like, should I be doing this? So I do think that there's, like, the disagreement that I have with people in the product space who don't believe in the PMM role and who think it's BS. I would say you have a high opinion of yourself and your ability to know all things about the market and to know all things about because it has the word market in the job. Let's remember, please. And marketing actually preceded products. I don't know if everybody remembers the history of how this role even came about. It was marketing first before it was product or before it became product marketing as a subset of the product role. So marketing was actually there in Mad Men days and all this stuff. Like they were there before us thinking about problems and channels and all this stuff. So I do think that there's, you know, a need to remind people your job isn't just to be a coordinator and executor. Your job isn't just to be a problem finder and a solution explorer. Your job is to be a collaborator. And more importantly, you should be listening to the right voices. If you have access to a product person outside of your domain who can focus on the market, why wouldn't you listen to that level of expertise and depth? It just seems silly to me. So if you have access to that, if you're lucky enough, and I count them very lucky, you should definitely be using it and stop trying to be challenged by it. They're there to enlighten. So, like, utilize it.

• Speaker #1

  Merci d'avoir écouté cet épisode jusqu'au bout. If you liked the episode, don't hesitate to share it on LinkedIn by tagging me. You can also support me by leaving a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and leave me a comment. Your help is precious to help me make Product Marketing Stories known and also encourage me to create more content. So thank you!