Product marketing is messy (but that’s the fun part), with Wendy Werblin, ScriptPro

Speaker A: The messy part, I mean, really just refers to all of the things around, you know, the learning, the education, the, uh, being new in being like bringing a new function to a company, right? It's going to be messy, right? It's going to be. Feel a little complicated at times. You may feel like you don't know what you're doing, which is where places like, you know, PMA shine. Because you can find other people who have done this before and, and you can find other peers who can help you, right? Like navigate through something that's hard. Because I think that's the other thing is as a founding pmm, right, like, you're not going to have a whole lot of mentoring inside your own organization. You got to look for it elsewhere. Um, but like, then working through that messiness and getting, you know, people to adopt customer first language, getting people to really think about, um, you know, like, it's only a good product if someone actually wants to buy it from you. And understand, like, what does product market fit even mean? Like, when that messiness starts to drive clarity, it makes it fun.

Speaker B: Hello. Hello and welcome back to product marketing life. I'm your host, Sid Kaitan. I'm a staff product marketing manager at Loomapps, and today I'm joined by Wendy Werblin. She's a director of product management and strategy at Script Pro. Wendy, welcome to the show.

Speaker A: All right, thanks for having me, Sid. I'm excited to be here.

Speaker B: It felt so official. Like, I feel like I'm officially just settling into being a podcast host. Um, Wennie, can you start by just telling us a little bit more about yourself, your background, what do you like to do for fun?

Speaker A: Yeah, you bet. Um, so Sid mentioned you mentioned. I'm currently, I am the director of product marketing, product marketing, product management and strategy for a company called Script Pro, which is in the healthcare space. Um, specifically pharmacy technology, which is super interesting and really complicated. Um, company's based in Kansas City. I am based in Seattle, Washington, and I have actually been in product marketing and related product roles for, honestly, longer than I care to admit. Um, I've, uh, you know, my original, original claim to fame is I was one of the product folks behind, um, the commercialization of the automated external defibrillator. So if you are, when you're in an airport or you're in a shopping mall and you see one of those little boxes hanging on the wall, you can think of me. Um, outside of being a product person, I'm also a startup mentor here for student startups through the university of Washington, um, a community builder, um, in the health tech community. All you Seattle folks, if you are looking for a health tech community in Seattle and wondering where to go, go find Sea health tech on LinkedIn and sign up little plug. Um, and in my spare time, I love to do anything outside walking my dog. I am involved with my daughter's scout troop, um, so lots of hiking and backpacking. Um, and we've also just spent the last like seven or so years since studying to become black belts in karate. So uh, I'm a pretty busy person.

Speaker B: Together with your daughter, you've both been studying karate?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: That's awesome. Okay.

Speaker A: Yeah, we both became black belts a couple years ago.

Speaker B: Really? That's awesome. Um, technically I'm a black belt as well, but it was so long ago that I feel like now I have to like renew my certification, you know, like I don't think it counts. Yeah, no, I really do. I really want to. So maybe this is the inspo. Um, maybe this lends itself to the next question which is what is a non marketing skill or habit that makes you better at your job?

Speaker A: Oh, I gotta say, being a parent. Okay, why is that There are it. It's just something I have realized over time is there's so many and um, maybe other parents who are listening will appreciate this. But all those lessons that you learn about coaching and about letting people make mistakes and about uh, you know, sort of finding kind of, you know, like finding the right, you know, the right sort of path to like keep things on track applies absolutely. Applies at work and applies at home. Applies in life as well. But I will honestly say I didn't actually realize this until I was a parent. Right. And now I have an 18 year old with so many of those lessons about interpersonal dynamics and about project management. I have absolutely. I have brought those into the work, brought those into the workplace and they've been tools that have worked really well.

Speaker B: I love that. I thought you were going to say that you should do, you should learn how to train for a black belt with your co workers. Like that was the transferable skill. I love that. Okay, that's a really good answer. I don't, I think I've heard it once, but the way you described it was really interesting. So being a parent makes you a better product marketer? Um, um. Wendy would love to hear a little bit more about your career. I think it's an interesting path, uh, as you mentioned, like owning parts of product marketing, product management. Um, um. Yeah. Can you walk us through that?

Speaker A: Yeah. You bet. Um, um, so like I said, I've, you know, I've, I've spent, I've been in product and product related roles. Right. For my entire career and all of it in healthcare too, and all of it on, um, the B2B side of things. Right. Um, I've had this assortment of product manager, product marketer, product strategist, kind of all these sorts of related roles. Of what? Like fundamentally what, you know, sort of really like, sort of. Why, why do I do this? Well, I think is I like solving really hard things. Um, and being in these types of roles has just given me the ability to make an impact on an organization on like multiple levels. Right. Currently I actually own both product marketing as well as product management. Right. As um, the director of product management, product marketing sits underneath me. So I have, I've been a product marketer under marketing and I've been a product manager under product. Um, product marketer under product. Yeah. Um, you know, the company that I'm currently at, I was their first director of product marketing. They never had a product marketing function before. First I reported to the company president, then I reported to marketing. Now I sit inside of actually product development. I, um, and I think what's just really interesting about kind of the role that I've been able to create here is it really kind of allows me to use almost every professional skill that I have across change management, product marketing, product strategy, customer discovery. Um, and I've also found that, you know, when it comes to things like leading teams, like I really enjoy teaching. Um, and these roles have given me the opportunity to really do that as well. Um, so, you know, it's been kind of a long, circuitous, winding path that has not been crafted with a whole lot of intention, but it's been crafted with a lot of curiosity. And um, the roles that I've chosen to take on have sort of, at the time that, at the time that I took them on, you know, we're all just like things that I thought presented really interesting opportunities even if the path was not completely linear.

Speaker B: I love that. And I think when we were talking before, it's like you've done founding PMM at uh, like multiple companies now. Um, yeah. What was like, what was that like? And like, why, uh, why do you enjoy that so much?

Speaker A: Um, I think because I'm a glutton for punishment. Um, and you know what's, what's interesting is being a founding pmm, um, and sort of carving this function out in an organization. The thing that I noticed is So I mentioned I like solving really hard puzzles. Right. Well one of the things when an organization realizes that they need a PMM function or they need a product function in some way, shape or form. Right. Uh, they're coming to you to help them solve something that's really difficult at a point in that organization's life cycle when they've realized that they need to make a change or a pivot because they can't keep doing the same way. To me, that's really interesting and lets me kind of blend. I also have a background in change management, um, from some time that I spent as a, as a management consultant earlier in my career. So it really allows me to blend like the, that like coaching through change through the lens of product and through the lens of customer. Um, and the ability to really make an impact on an organization. Um, and that, that's been fun for me and it keeps me entertained.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's fair reasons including the glutton for punishment. Um, so yeah, let's talk about now you are a director of Product management and strategy and you own kind of both remits of PMM and product management. Um, yeah. Can you even tell me you're we're talking about your team? Like what's that? Like how do you manage these different pieces of the org.

Speaker A: Sure. Um, um, yeah, as I mentioned I own there's sort of three functions underneath my team today. We share the same remit though. Right. As we think about. Right. So as I think about the structure of that, the structure of the team that I've recently completed building. Right. Um, it's really like aligning with the overall company goal which is really around um, scaling and around positioning the company for growth. Right. Company that I'm with has been mid sized round. You know I, I will say sort of middle of the road and you know, middle of the road and revenue and has been kind of flat for a few years. The company acknowledged that they need to do something different. They need to. Right. Like uh, there, there needs to be, needs to be some change made internally in order to help accelerate externally. Right. And meet those challenges in the market that they didn't used to have. Increasing competition and all of that. Um, so the goal of my team is fundamentally about bringing um, you know, understanding and discovering and bringing the right products to market for the right audience with the right value. All right. And fundamental. And then, and in making it really easy for our teams to sell and implement those. And so the, the roles that I have on my team, Product management. Right. Is all about what and why, what do we need to create, why do we need to create it and for who Team that up with now product marketing, right? And now we're like, that's, that's the role that says, well, so what, uh, really being able to help, help the entire organization understand the customer's point of view, understand the buyer's point of view and translate the thing that we're, translate the thing that we're building into like clear value and be able to help demonstrate that then. The third function on my team is a bit more technical in nature. We call them a technical product specialist. Right. In some organizations, you can think of them kind of like sales engineers in a way, but their whole, their whole job is to. Then, you know, is to take these very technically, like, technically complex products that we create, right. And simplify them and work very closely with the sales team to make sure that as the sales team is going through their process, we're really able to deliver what's actually going to create the value for the customer. So it's fundamentally, it's really about holding the full picture from what gets built all the way through to how it gets sold. Like, so it's solving like both ends of the equation around product, market fit and go to market at the same time, um, while also being able to go really deep with customers and with the market to deliver things that really make it different. Right. Um, and that's what's, what's exciting. Um, and we've already, you know, even though it's early days, like, we've sort of already started to see that we're kind of starting to shift the needle.

Speaker B: Yeah, but when you say it like this, it kind of makes a lot of sense. But, uh, it seems like a lot of companies, at least the ones I've been at, either it's like somewhat fragmented or even if product marketing sits under product, it's like, it's not necessarily like eye to eye with all the PMs. Like, why, why is that the case? And how did you fix this problem?

Speaker A: Um, well, and I won't say that it's perfect. It's definitely not. Right. Um, you know, when I, you know, first walked into the company, right. And it's been, this has been a year and a half journey, right. To, you know, to be sure. Um, you know, the. I was walking into an organization that kind of knew they needed something, but they couldn't, they couldn't quite name it. Right. So came into the company as a, ah, you know, they called me the director of product marketing, for lack of a better term. Right. Um, and what I really started, started doing was just a lot of listening, a lot of asking questions, right? Understanding, trying to really understand like what the internal pain really was that leadership like couldn't, really couldn't concretely articulate, right? So like they knew they needed something, they weren't quite sure what. Um, spent a lot of time on a listening tour around the organization learning how the, like the current state of operation and then translating that into something more concrete. So like thinking, thinking very much from a product perspective, right? Um, to sort of then take those identified problems if you will and then kind of through the lens of, through the lens of product, you know, through the lens of then product marketing, you know, figure out like how to actually, you know, sort of solve that towards you know, sort of small changes. So you know, initially we would talk about things like product market fit and what in a fairly large portfolio like was doing well, what wasn't doing well. Digging into data in a way that they hadn't really understood it before. Understanding, riding along with the sales team to sort of really listen for like what got in their way, right? So just doing a lot of observing initially and bringing those observations back in a way that, that, that, that hadn't really been served up before. And then sort of what that ended up becoming initially was you know, first diving into frankly some product marketing fundamentals, right? Uh, Personas which had never In a company's 30 year history hadn't ever been documented. It was, there was a lot of just tribal knowledge, right? Um, delivery roadmaps, buyer's journey. These are things that really needed to be put in place in order to start now. Breaking down silos between teams, understanding all of the connected interconnectedness, um, and really start to then understand what is what they wanted and how to sort of start to sort of chart the path to get from point A to point B be right, like just like I'll give you like a micro example of something that actually even happened this week was one of the C suite executives called me up on the phone, called me on the phone super frustrated, super frustrated that a particular product, you know, sort of, that the sales team like just wasn't, wasn't getting it wasn't really understanding how to sell it wasn't really, you know, wasn't able to create the relationships that she thought they needed to be creating, um, in order to, for, in order to move deals down the, down the line, right? And what kind of started out as a, I will say a Complaint about perhaps a lack of available sales tools or the right sales tools or the lack of, um, you know, lack of competitive analysis or battle cards. And the fact that we even understand to use this language now is actually like light years ahead of where we were a year and a half ago. Right. Um, actually turn that into a con, like listening to those concerns. It's actually able to turn that into a conversation where it was really more about the fact that she was concerned that we were going to look back a year from now and we weren't going to have. We weren't. We were. We weren't going to be able to land like kind of the net new deals that she understood we needed to get, but maybe no one else did. And so the behaviors weren't, you know, beh. Sales behaviors weren't really aligning with expectations because those expectations weren't necessarily clearly communicated in that conversation. Was then able to actually turn it into strategy, then turn it into strategy to say, aha. Uh, I acknowledge, okay, we're doing this. We need to get to this. We need to be more clear about this goal. And now we can build against that. Right. We can actually, you know, work with m marketing, work with sales to now build a go to market motion and a machine that actually can. Can get to the results that we're saying we need. Um, so it's been super interesting to even get to a place where we can have those conversations because those were hard to do a year and a half ago.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Like, speaking of. Right. Like, like you said, I'm guessing when you got brought on, it was like, all right, need to deliver more product faster and we need to uh, increase revenue and go this way. So when you came in and said we need to get our Personas and buyer journey down, how did that land? How did you like, convince and like build, do that early change management?

Speaker A: Um, it was a journey. Definitely a journey, as I mentioned. Right. And certainly was not something. Not something that you can do. Like out of the eight. Right. Um, I probably spent as I joined the company in September of 24 and seriously, I spent my first like 30 to 45 days on a listening tour asking questions, understanding the current state of how things worked. Like everything from how to, you know, how are we positioning? How are we messaging? Hey, guess what? It was all feature, feature, feature. Um, what was the sales process? What was the marking motion? How did you know customer service and support relate to, you know, relate to sales and relate to marketing? Um, what did our product life cycle look like? Shadowing Some sales calls and some demos, um, interviewing customers, right. I did all of that in order to build trust because that's kind of like job number one when you're new in a role is like you've got, if you're making change, you've got to build, you've got to build some trust. And once I had like that lay of the land and like have those relationships, right, I was able to come back and sort of provide some observations about the fact that, you know, teams were working in silos. There were other things that were working well. There were other things that were not working well, right? Um, bringing in prior experience, like my prior experience. A lot of folks at my current company who have been there for a really long time, like it's the only place they've worked. M. And you know, I've been with enterprise, I've been with startup, I've been with a bunch of other places. So bringing in some of those prior experiences and like really then like get working to get heads nodding in the right direction around like what wasn't necessarily working well or not working well, right? So we all acknowledge we got agreement. You got to get agreement on the problem first, right? Once you got agreement, once, once we get agreement on the problem, then like that's, then, then you can move on to sort of the next steps, right? And so I said like buyer's journey is an example. Like that was actually, you know, sort of like step four, right. Um, post the listening tour, post. Sort of creating some like super quick wins with you know, some like market analysis and like being able to, being able to share some information that enabled, you know, even just like little bits of change, right. Then I introduced the idea of creating these Personas, right? And what I actually did was I took a bunch of people from different teams and I put them in a workshop together and introduced the concept of a, of a buyer Persona. Back up just a little bit is one of the key observations was that this was a very engineering driven, product focused company. So one of the major sort of changes in language and changes in mindset we needed to make was customer empathy and being able to just get everybody else to really think about, uh, think from the point of view of what the customer's trying to do, how the customer feels, right? So that meant first Personas, right? Personas over products, right. So I took a bunch of people from different teams, sales, marketing, customer service and support, even from product and I threw us all in a room together for a few hours old school with you know, like big Poster boards. And we did this in person, like big poster boards and post it notes. Right. Um, to craft our initial, like, core buyer Personas, create those drafts, then start using them and start testing them. Once people realized the value of that kind of work, then I was able to actually get them, you know, to then get people to participate in a buyer's journey workshop where we took those Personas and we said, okay, now we're gonna, we're gonna spend three hours, you know, talking about Frank the pharmacist, right. And Frank's problems and how Frank, uh, is solving problems and what Frank is doing when he is researching, you know, a new system, whatever it is. Right. So we spent a lot of time documenting, like, what's happening today and what we want to be happening, how we want the customer to be feeling, where the places where we wanted to remove friction. Um, and from there, like started to be able to plan towards from a product marketing standpoint. Right. How we wanted to sort of map towards a better experience. And I would say, like, end to end. That was like a, that was a six, seven month thing, right? Really starting with a lot of listening, building trust, building relationships, and kind of getting, getting people kind of along. And what's real interesting is like, now I actually said, the customer service team came to me last week and they're like, okay, can you teach us more about like, how we can do journey work specifically for post sale implementation? Which is awesome, right? Because now we're speaking the language.

Speaker B: I love. That, um, was interesting to me that I clocked was you said observations instead of recommendations. I observed what was going on in the organization versus, like, I just started telling people what to do. Um, and the other was, I think, uh, these types of artifacts usually PMMs, go and, you know, go into their ivory tower and create it. Whereas you were doing workshops and like, brought people along. Um, this one, I'm asking for a friend, but like, how did you convince, you know, engineers and some of these stakeholders, like, hey, let's have some customer empathy. Because, yeah, when you're in like a product focus, engineering focus, it's like that kind of company. It's hard to make that shift even if they are in the room. Um, is there like any, do you have any secret sauce for that?

Speaker A: I don't know if it's so much a secret sauce, um, as it is like just creating a share, shared understanding. Right. Um, the more I got to work with the engineers, the more I started to understand that very often they knew what they were, they knew what they understood the task that they needed to do. They understood, right. They needed to code a thing that you know, executed A or B or C. They never knew why they didn't understand the value or the impact that what they were doing was actually going to happen. And if you don't make that connection, like how can you possibly have customer empathy? Right. Like you, you can't. Right. So in, in some of what. One of the other things that I've kind of, now that I've built some trust after a year and a half, one of the other things that I have kind of foisted upon the organization is um, we're now publishing ah, an ah, 18 month delivery roadmap inside this organization. It is an artifact. So we've always had a roadmap, right? There's a strategic roadmap. It's a thing on a page. It says, hey, here's what development is working on this year. It doesn't say anything about when we're actually going to be ready to deliver a product to a customer. Um, and the development team has all their sprint teams and what they're working on and user stories and. But we never actually had something that said that actually that communicated right for this market segment, right in this quarter. Here's the thing. And the value that it's going to deliver and we never made that transparent across the organization. Well, we now do this and so in a quarterly, what used to be a, uh, quarterly R and D meeting where we talked about development. Development is now half the conversation and delivery is the other half of the conversation. And in addition in the delivery segment we are also talking about adoption. So we're bringing in the why. The first time we did this, the engineers actually the development managers and the engineers lit up uh, because they never really knew, right? They didn't know how many people were using what they built. They didn't know like you, you know, they didn't know like what some of they weren't getting the feedback right? That was, that was the direct like you know, customer feedback saying this feature, you know, uh, this feature helped us deliver more safely or this feature, this product help us, you know, help the customer like improve their own bottom line or do things faster. So now they get that and now that they understand that. Right. Way more willing to play. But you've got to bring the business context and don't expect that just because someone is an engineer they're not going to understand or that they don't care. They absolutely care.

Speaker B: Yeah, I have a lot of engineers that come Come to me saying, like, I want to know the why. Like, no one's telling me, but I want to know it. Um, it's going to help me in my job and I think now more, more than before, which is actually really exciting. Um, I'm just going to ask you something. Yeah. Like with these wins, customer wins and adoption, like, so I'm guessing that's a tight relationship with your CS and account management team. Like build that into the storyline for them.

Speaker A: Um, I mean, how do we kind of build, build into the storyline for CS and account management?

Speaker B: Sorry, like, yeah, how are you able to pull these different kind of adoption metrics from the, from the business and then present it to engineers?

Speaker A: Um, it's been super, super simple. Right. Like, thus far. Right. Um, really what we're kind of doing is just looking on a, for our, you know, know, the key products, the key solutions that we're focusing on right now. From a sales standpoint, we're just looking real high level. Right. How many were there last quarter? How many are there this quarter? Right. Uh, from a customer service standpoint. Right. For things that we have in the field. Right. Um, how many, how many issues did we have last quarter? How many issues do we have now? Are those numbers going in the correct direction? Right. Um, and how does that actually ladder up to the overall goals of the company? Keeping it pretty high level right now. Pretty simple right now because it's still. It's kind of like early days. And um, I think it was a, it was a little bit of a pleasant surprise for some people to start seeing these metrics show up on slides. Um, but I'm a real metrics nut and I am, you know, one of my other, uh, I'll say it's not really a, this is not part of my product job, but, you know, one of my other kind of commitments for myself and for the organization is just to try to, is to, is to just bring more transparency to those really important metrics that tell us how we're doing. Because, uh, if you don't know, you don't, you don't know. And how can you be better? Right? How can you know whether you're off track or not?

Speaker B: Yeah. How do you do that specifically for PMMs, uh, I think, uh, you know, we've had a lot of guests on the podcast and there's really no, there's no silver bullet. But, um, I'm just curious how, how you go about that, maybe especially when you have the product hat on.

Speaker A: What's funny is, um, yeah, like Metrics are, you know, it's actually like knowing whether or not your work is like, on track, like before you get to like a revenue number. What are those leading indicators? It's super specific. Like, it's, it's specific to organization, it's specific to campaign, it's specific to motion. Um, this is actually one of my favorite questions to ask, uh, job candidates. Um, a lot of the leading indicators are going to come from marketing or they're going to come from sales, right? Uh, what are your, like, what are the campaign metrics that, you know, you've hopefully jointly own these with marketing, right? Uh, whether it's, you know, eyeballs or opens or engagement or whatever that, whatever that looks like, but it's going to be specific for a product, it's going to be specific for a campaign. Um, you know, sales win loss, right? Sales even. And I call it like, I'll call it like early win loss. Where are they getting stuck? Where are they getting engagement? Where are they not? Um, like analyzing and digging in on their opportunity pipeline, their funnel. Like just even on, like understanding, you know, getting an understanding how quickly, how quickly are things moving, right? Again, depending on the campaign, depending on the product. Um, and, you know, from there, you know, then you can, you can kind of understand, you know, you can start to get a sense of whether or not those things are moving in the right direction right before you get to the end of a year or the end of a quarter. And you know, because revenue is very much. That's looking backwards, right? That's like the end result. But tracking some of those other things, like in the interim, um, you know, is, uh, you know, is important.

Speaker B: Yeah, makes sense. Um, I want to shift gears a little bit because I think this was much earlier than conversation when you were talking about, uh, product management owns the who, product marketing owns the. So what? And it just got me thinking about, like, how it's, uh, at least for me and where I'm at, like, sometimes those lines blur, especially between product and product management and product marketing. And how do you, how do you see the m. The overlap versus the contrast?

Speaker A: Um, it's a super interesting question because it is again, this is something that's going to be super organization specific, right? Uh, depending on how. I mean, how big is your organization, how specialized can your roles be, right. Um, and really need to consider kind of the scope of. And the continuum that is product management, product marketing and marketing. Um, like in PMM specifically, right? There's a continuum of work, right. That ranges from what I'll call upstream like very product oriented discovery, product strategy, roadmap, packaging, pricing. Right. It's more closely related to product but where you have a tech, more of a technical products team and your PMM is likely going to be needing like doing some of this more I uh call it like upstream stuff. Right. Um then there's the more downstream things, right? Brand content, demand gen, messaging, right. Campaigns, right. Um then that's a little bit of more of a negotiation with, that's the more cross with the marketing team. I'll say market research, competitive stuff, sales enablement that like lives somewhere in between. Right. Um, in my experience, right, if you know product marketing is more upstream oriented which like in my organization today it is right Then it makes more sense to co locate it with product management. Um where like my product management is much more focused on um. I, it's is I will say more, more technically oriented towards user um discovery figuring out like again like the what then the why, like the what's next. Right. Whereas product marketing more focused on kind of the competitive and the market opportunity. Right. Those two teams are going to work together, right. If we're thinking about a new uh, product or a new feature, a new solution. It's you know product management is really getting in to understand the workflows and the process and the cus like what those customer needs and values are. Product marketing is supporting that with market analysis. Broader I will say kind of like broader um value oriented research. Like is this an important problem to solve? Is it an urgent problem to solve? Is anybody going to care if you actually have a solution for it? Um and those two teams are then going to work together to actually figure out what does the opportunity look like. Um and you know, and then you know we have obviously the super tight partnership with marketing right. In my organization where product marketing kind of stops in a way, um is in the go to market strategy and in the positioning right in the sales enablement strategy and then where marketing kind of picks up is, is really more what are the actual execution, the activities, the tactics that are going to help you know kind of that are going to sort of help bring that go to market to life. Um so PMM is very much in the like they're in the middle of everything, right. Um and really kind of a quarterbacking that, quarterbacking that go to market. But you know uh, in another organization like other organizations that I've been in, pmm uh has lived under marketing but it's had more of that downstream orientation. Right. So I would say like you've gotta. If this is like, something that, like, you're, like something you're trying to suss out and, like, figure out, um, you really just have to kind of look at where, um. Right. Like, sort of what that scope and like, continuum is like inside your. Inside your organ, your own organization, and where the specific, really specifically where are the gaps? Right. Like, I always kind of like to say, like, be aware of the. Like, be aware of overlaps, but mind the gaps, because the gaps is where you can make it as a PMM or you can make a difference.

Speaker B: Very interesting. That's a good answer. Yeah. It's not like an arbitrary thing. Right. Like, it totally depends on the origin, like, where things sit. Yeah.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah, yeah. And actually, like, super interesting. I was listening to a leadership podcast the other day, and they were actually talking about kind of where when you're structuring a new team, like, you kind of need to, like, overweight on the, like, when you're launching a new team. The importance of overweighting on that structure can't be underestimated. But most people, like, research has shown, like, most people don't spend enough time, like, really thinking through what does that structure need to be and setting that structure up. Well, um, but it was something like the ratio they were talking about was something like your ideal state is you can spend 60% of your energy setting up a new team thinking about the structure and the goals and the norms, 30%, like, kind of launching that team, like, getting it off the ground, and 10% is your ongoing coaching. I thought that was really interesting because a lot of us get it backwards. I know I certainly have.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, so it was just. It was interesting and timely as I think about the team that I am in the process of launching right now.

Speaker B: So you're saying it does matter where you end up deciding to put product marketing.

Speaker A: It does matter

Speaker B: to join the LinkedIn vernacular. Yeah. The discourse out there, I love it. Okay. I think you made a good, good argument for it as well. Um, you kind of, kind of covered this, but, like, for someone, let's say they're listening and they're jumping into their first founding PMM role. What, uh, is something they're probably not thinking about that they should think about.

Speaker A: Um, say you're going to think, if you're jumping into. I think this goes for a PMM role. This goes for almost any new role. Right. But especially if you're taking on, like, the first of your thing, your first product marketing, you're the first founding product marketer.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: You're going to think maybe based on like a job description that your company has like the scope and breadth of your role figured out. They don't. Trust me. They don't. Right. Um, you're also, I mean, we all do this with new jobs. You're going to be compelled to come in and deliver something fast right through their. Need your own drive. Right. What I would say is I'll go back to the word that I used earlier. Observe. Try not to come in right away with recommendations. Observe. Build trust. Be intentional. Learn the market. Find out what is most important to customer. To customers, what assumptions your company might have made for better or for worse. Right. Um, and also just be prepared to do a lot of educating. Um, I've done a ton of educating about like, what is, what is product marketing? What should the mission of product marketing be? Right. Um, if product marketing is done right, here's what it looks like and here is what the impact will be. Right. Um, asking for the collaboration, right? From marketing, from sales, from product, from customer service, from engineering, from all the other, from, you know, all of the teams. Right. Um, and kind of always coming back to. So you know, why, why it's important, why it's impactful. Um, so it's like be prepared to do. Educate about. About that. Right? Like, why do we. We've. We know our customers, right. We've been around for know X number of years. We have an installed base of Y. Right. We don't need to do positioning and Persona work. Well, here's why you do. Right. So be prepared for that.

Speaker B: I love it. Okay, well, um, yeah, we're getting towards the end of the convo and, uh, I just want to ask you a few more questions that I love to ask. Um, one of them is product marketing is blank. Fill in the, the blank.

Speaker A: Messy and really rewarding.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: It's both.

Speaker B: Can, can you elaborate? I mean, the whole conversation explained it, but can you elaborate anyways?

Speaker A: Uh, sure. I mean, the rewarding side is obviously when you, you get to see the impact that your work has made. And frankly, you know, when you get to see the impact that your work has made on actual human beings who are the benefactors. Right. Of the work that you've done. Right. Um, you know, if I think back, you know, to my time when I was at Philips, to hear stories about the lives of human beings that were actually saved because an, an automated external defibrillator was where it needed to be when it was needed. Like, and know that I had a part in that is like super cool, right? To know, you know, in my work now, to know that, um, you know, a pharmacist can, you know, can now like actually go home and have dinner with his family, be where he couldn't before because he was so behind on, so behind on manual work that we were able to help automate, right? Like that's, that's, that's cool and that's important, right? And bringing those stories back into the organization is like, super. Is super fun to do, right? The messy part, I mean, really just refers to all of the things around, know, the learning, the education, the uh, being new in being like bringing a new function to a company, right? It's, it's gonna be messy, right? It's gonna be. Feel a little complicated at times. You may feel like you don't know what you're doing, which is where places like, you know, PMA like shine because you can find other people who have done this before and you can find other peers who can help you, right? Like navigate through something that's hard because I think that's the other thing is as a founding pmm, right, like you're not going to have a whole lot of mentoring inside your own organization, right? So you got to look for it elsewhere. Um, but like then working through that messiness and getting, you know, people to adopt customer first language, getting people to really think about, um, you know, like, it's only a good product if someone actually wants to buy it from you, right. And understand like, what does product market fit even mean? Right. Like when that messiness starts to drive clarity, um, that makes it fun. I love that.

Speaker B: Um, yeah. How can. This has been an excellent conversation by the way. Um, how can people. I'm m just digesting. So now that this is where we're at, um, yeah. Where can people learn more about you, your work and follow along?

Speaker A: Um, probably the two best places to find me, I'll admit I'm not, I'm not super out there on social media. Um, but the two best places to find me are any one. You know, just look me up on LinkedIn. I'm literally. There is only one Wendy Werblin in the world, so I'm easy to find. Um, and you know, I'm. I'm also out there on the, you know, the PMA Slack universe. So that, that would be another place where I will pop up.

Speaker B: Awesome. Sounds good. Well, thank you so much. Um, this has been a pleasure.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for everyone still tuned in. Thanks so much for listening and if you enjoyed the podcast, please help us spread the word to other product marketers. Thanks again and have a great morning, afternoon or evening, wherever you are.