Tamara’s Path To PMM

Tamara is a career product marketer, who’s been in product marketing for over a decade, focusing on building and scaling teams. She was the director, VP and Chief Strategy Officer at Unbounce, then VP of Product Marketing at Adobe and today she runs the PMM Camp, a resource for Product Marketing leaders. Tamara started this community to share resources and learnings with the PMM Community.

Tamara has a background in writing and publishing and started working in magazines. She found the pace to be slow, while digital was exciting and fast. That’s how Tamara specialized in the publishing world around digital content, and somehow, she ended up working in tech!

Tamara’s Definition of Product Marketing

Being a product marketer at its core is all about storytelling, but it really is a two-way door. As a PMM, you’re the voice of the market back to the product team or company at large. You’re also the voice of the product back to the customer and market. It’s a two-way street! You tell stories internally to get people to understand the market and then you’re building stories to get customers to care and buy.

It’s all about facilitating that two-way door activity.

How To Tell Stories As a PMM

Whether you’re marketing a book or the most boring app out there, you need to tell a story. Tamara shares the following steps to do this effectively:

1. Understand and make a decision on who your audience is. The more refined this step is, the more powerful your story will be. What do they talk about? What problems are they facing?

2. Connect the customer and their pain points to the value your product is offering.

3. Incorporate that into your work, and iterate.

Good storytelling is good storytelling regardless of who the audience is, whether it’s B2C or B2B!

Building Messaging and Positioning

Tamara suggests working with data and being as unbiased as possible in the discovery stage. She tries to focus on criteria that you can use to cluster customers around (e.g., a certain industry, persona, role..) and make sure you have a lot of them so that you can efficiently promote products to them.

Measuring Your PMM Impact

I personally find this to be the most challenging thing to do as a PMM, and like Tamara’s breakdown for metrics based on “altitude”:

• Strategic team mandate (high altitude): you’re not able to influence this; try to assess your overall mandate. Choose a high-level metric on which your team can align. You can try segmenting metrics (e.g., achieving a certain conversion rate for a trial to paid customers). As a PMM team, we’ll increase the CR of a segment customer. You can then work on different areas that make sense to that segment, and you have something to contrast it with (the average customer) to showcase change.

• Project-based KPIs (low altitude): getting clear on what the metrics should be for 3 months post-launch. Being clear on the change you’re trying to drive through specific initiatives (e.g., making sales more confident in intell, increasing retention, increasing acquisition…).

Pricing Learnings

As a big fan of pricing strategy, Tamara talks about the Importance of internal buy-in when it comes to determining pricing. Pricing is beyond marketing and revenue. It impacts how sales sell and renew the product, company projections, financials, customer experience…

Tamara shares key pricing tips: compile a stakeholder team, assign every person on the team a goal so they are clear on their responsibility, and they get to come to the meeting and bring the perspective of their teams and share with their teams what’s happening with the wider team.

The Future For PMMs with Artificial Intelligence

Tamara sees AI impacting PMMs in 2 ways:

• Efficiency gains: ways to simplify mundane tasks (e.g., call recorders) such as Fellow or Granola AI.

• Impact and amplification: using AI as a strategic thought partner to make you think. Either you’ll refine your argument,t or it’ll introduce a new perspective. Chat GPT takes the win on this one.

Wrapping Up

A few resources Tamara shared with me:

• PMM Camp Community: Success isn’t just about having the right tools or skills — it’s about having the right relationships. Join the waitlist for PMM Camp, the only community built for product marketing leaders. 238 leaders are waiting for you inside.

• Pick Tamara’s Brain: Need a product marketing mentor? Book a 60-minute 1:1 session with Tamara to cover any topic of your choice, from launch planning and product positioning to goal setting and personal branding.

Thank you for listening to tl;dl! You can keep up with the show by subscribing to YouTube, Spotify, and all your favorite platforms. Until next time!