So you just landed the job as a SOLO product marketing manager. This means you’re the entire department, responsible for the full spectrum of product marketing activities. While this might be very challenging, it’s also an incredible opportunity to make your mark. But being the sole PMM can be overwhelming, especially in those initial months. How can you navigate it successfully and thrive?
I have been a solo PMM twice in my career and while it was difficult to gain influence and drive impact the first time, it was so much easier the second time.
This in-depth guide is designed to help you prioritise, strategize, and execute a successful 30-60-90-day plan, ensuring you make a significant impact from the get-go.
From Day One
Before diving into your 90-day plan, here are some essential principles to guide your success from day one:
- Document Everything: Keep meticulous records of your processes, decisions, and feedback. This will not only help you track your progress but also serve as a valuable resource for future reference.
- Align with Business Goals: Gain absolute clarity on the company’s objectives and ensure that all your product marketing efforts are geared towards achieving them.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Resist making assumptions. Base your strategies and decisions on concrete data and observed customer behaviour.
- Set clear expectations: Don’t promise what you cannot deliver, set boundaries on time, be clear about deliverables and deadlines, and communicate when something might be delayed.
- Always Conduct Research: Maintain research as an ongoing process and dive deep into both internal and external research to understand the product, market, customers, and competitors thoroughly. Knowing the product, customers and competitors more than anybody else will always make you a valuable asset
- Question Everything: Ask as many questions as needed, especially during your initial weeks. Clarifying your doubts now will save you from potential missteps later.
- Collaboration is Key: Communicate proactively with all relevant teams, explaining your role and how you can contribute to their success.
- Masterful Communication: Practise your presentation skills and become really good at it. The ability to articulate your thoughts clearly and persuasively is important to building influence.
- Prioritise Ruthlessly: Stay calm and organised. Create detailed to-do lists and prioritise tasks based on their alignment with business goals.
- Talk about your wings and learn from your mistakes: When you do something really good, talk about it and document it too. You’re a SOLO PMM so your colleagues are still adjusting to how you add value. If you do not promote yourself internally, it will be difficult for them to see your impact. At the same time, avoid making the same mistakes twice and just like your wins, document them so that it’s easy to remember what NOT to do.
Now, let’s break down your 90-day plan:
Your First 30 Days: Laying the Foundation
In your first 30 days as a solo PMM, you’ll be bombarded with information and seemingly impossible expectations. Staying calm and focused is really important. Instead of feeling pressured to deliver instant results, prioritise building a solid foundation for future success.
At this stage, you are not a marketer, you’re a business strategist and your primary goal is to deeply understand the product, industry, customers, and market dynamics. You are not meant to start running marketing campaigns. You need to focus on understanding how you fit in, how the business works and where you can add the most value.
This first 30 days is about immersion, understanding, and building relationships; these are some things to focus on:
Understand Expectations: Meet with your manager to clarify the company’s expectations for your role, the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll be measured against, and what a successful performance looks like. If you don’t understand how you’re expected to add value, you will struggle to measure your successes. There are many ways to add value at all times so make sure you’re focused on the key areas where the business expects you to drive the most results.
Get to Know The Business Goals: Understand the company’s business goals. How does the product fit into the bigger picture? What are the most pressing challenges? What are the revenue targets, user growth expectations, or market share ambitions? Product marketers play a key role in the business strategy so you need to show that you see the big picture and can help the business achieve its goals.
Organisational Awareness: Study the company’s organisational structure. Identify key stakeholders, decision-makers, and the teams you’ll collaborate with most closely. This will help you navigate internal dynamics and make it easy to work with each team when you need to.
Build Relationships: Meet with key stakeholders from Sales, Product, Marketing, and Customer Support. Learn about their pain points, expectations, and how you can best support them. In many cases, some of these stakeholders would not understand what product marketing is or what value you can bring. You need to educate them about your role and tell them how you can support them. If they don’t know what you bring to the table, they will shut you out and you’ll struggle to get meaningful work done.
Conduct In-depth Research: You need a very strong understanding of the product, target customers, industry and competitive alternatives. My go to research style is to split the research into an internal audit and an external exploration – based on the data gathered, you can create an early hypothesis that will come in handy when you start interviewing customers.
- Internal Audit: Thoroughly examine existing data sources within your organisation. Analyse product performance metrics, roadmap details, distribution channels, current marketing strategies, and especially customer feedback. If available, review competitor analyses and market trend reports. Exhaust all internal resources and pinpoint any knowledge gaps that remain.
- External Exploration: Learn about the industry, join online communities frequented by your target audience – forums, groups, social media platforms, etc. Engage in conversations, observe discussions, and gain insights into their preferences, pain points, unmet needs, and how they perceive your product and its competitors.
- Hypothesis Building: The goal of your hypothesis is to formulate relevant questions and early assumptions that can lead to more clarifying answers.
- How do customers perceive the product? What do they love, and where does it fall short of their expectations?
- What aspects delight them the most?
- Where does the product fail to meet their needs or desires?
- What unmet needs or desires can you uncover?
Identify Opportunities: Based on your conversations and research, pinpoint the areas where product marketing can have the most immediate and significant impact. Discuss these with your manager and prioritise short-term and long-term goals.
A strong start as a product marketer is key to building your credibility and making a meaningful impact. If you don’t get it right, it becomes significantly harder to regain lost momentum and make a lasting impact. Your early superpower lies in providing clarity and connecting the dots for your team and stakeholders.
Day 31-60: Quick Wins and Deeper Insights
From day 31, you should have understood the short term expectations of your role. Your focus will be on channelling your early research and understanding of these expectations to deliver quick results.
Execute Quick Win Projects: Start tackling projects that can deliver tangible value quickly. This could involve refining messaging, creating sales enablement materials, or conducting targeted customer surveys. Your quick wins should be easy to execute and drive mild to significant changes. The way you execute these “simpler” projects will determine whether you can be trusted to handle bigger projects or not. It is your opportunity to show your problem solving, project management and collaborations skills.
Voice of the Customer (VoC): Actively engage with customers. Conduct interviews, listen in on sales calls, and analyse feedback to understand their needs, pain points, and goals. To make this more meaningful, put together a summary of this project that helps the business understand customers better and clarify actionable steps that each team can take to improve the customer experience.
Competitive Intelligence: Develop a comprehensive understanding of your competitors’ products, pricing, positioning, and marketing strategies. The best way to understand your competitor is to become a customer. Try out their product, sign up to their newsletter and Identify how they are different. You must genuinely understand what your competitors are best at to understand how you’re different because customers will be considering them too.
P.s. Sometimes your competitor is not another product but can simply be an alternative way that your target customer gets the work done – which may not always involve another product.
Map the Marketing Funnel: Analyse how customers currently move through the marketing and sales funnel. Review the key touchpoints and Identify bottlenecks or drop-off points where you can make improvements.
Day 61-90: Strategic Vision and Tactical Planning
If you’ve successfully completed the previous steps, you’ve likely demonstrated your value, gained a solid understanding of your role, and identified the long-term initiatives needed to achieve business goals. While you continue to deliver quick wins and conduct research, aim to accomplish the following by your 90th day
Showcase Results: Present the outcomes of your quick win projects to stakeholders. Highlight the impact your work has had on business goals and customer satisfaction. It is best practice to “show don’t tell” so utilise any piece of data that can make you look good and show your impact.
Develop Your Strategic POV: Synthesise your research and initial experiences into a comprehensive product marketing strategy. Identify gaps in the market, identify growth opportunities, and outline a marketing plan for the next 6-12 months. As the only product marketer on the team, your strategic vision about what product marketing can focus on to drive the business goals will be refreshingly welcome so don’t be afraid to share your thoughts. It’s better to share and get feedback than to not share at all. You want to show that you know what you’re doing and that you’re aligned with the business goals.
Build Your Toolkit: Start assembling the tools and resources you’ll need to execute your plan. This might include marketing automation platforms, analytics software, or content creation tools – be mindful of budget restrictions and only use tools that are absolutely necessary.
Refine Marketing Assets: Update and optimise your product positioning, messaging, customer personas, go-to-market plans, and other marketing collateral based on your research and strategic direction. Try to avoid making any assumptions because they could be biassed. Use available data from your research to optimise and refine these assets if they exist. And if they do not exist, you have to create them.
Product marketing assets like positioning and messaging documents or GTMs are not meant to be rigid so it’s okay to keep refining them as you learn.
Establish Communication Cadence: Set up regular sync calls with product, sales, and support teams to encourage communication and collaboration, share updates, and gather feedback on time. This ensures that everyone is aligned and working towards common goals and reduces information silos that often get worse as the company grows.
And that’s it folks! My take on how to structure your first 30-60-90 days as a solo PMM to achieve success and build the influence you need to make an impact
Remember, no two companies are alike. Some may have a detailed onboarding plan, while others leave you to chart your own course. Adapt this framework to fit your company’s specific context, but never lose sight of your core superpower: driving clarity and bridging the gap between business goals and customer needs.
