This presentation was delivered at 2022’s Product Marketing Summit in Austin. Catch up with a variety of talks with our OnDemand service.
With more companies recognizing the value of product marketing, we asked a panel of experts for their advice on how to build a team from scratch, gaining perspectives from:
- Dylan Hoeffler, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Hologram
- Erin Koops, Director of Product Marketing, Consumer GTM at Realtor.com
- Nisha Goklaney of Director of Product Marketing at Hubspot
In their discussion, they focused on:
- Knowing when it’s time to start building or scaling your PMM team,
- Advocating for a product marketing team,
- Hiring the right product marketing talent, and
- Realistic expectations for the recruitment process.
Nisha Goklaney: Hi, everyone. I'm happy to be here. My name is Nisha Goklaney. I've had about 16 years of global experience with product marketing across North America, Asia, and India. Most recently, I’ve worked in product marketing orgs for the Asian market at Intuit and Sage. I currently work at HubSpot, driving product marketing for a $1.5 billion business across one of our newest and biggest hubs.
Dylan Hoeffler: My name is Dylan Hoeffler, and I've been working in B2B SaaS for a little over 10 years now. I was lucky to work for Bazaarvoice for a while. After Bazaarvoice I helped build out the product marketing team at Dialpad and post their Series E, and I’m at Hologram right now. We had our series B last summer, which helped us build out a new product marketing function.
In case you’re not familiar with Hologram, we help connect things to the internet. For example, a lot of e-scooters and e-bikes have hologram SIMs inside them.
Erin Koops: I’m Erin Koops, and I’m 10 years into my B2B go-to-market career. I relocated to Austin about five years ago and joined a series B SaaS startup that had already embraced product marketing, which I think is pretty unusual that early. That was fun.
When we were acquired by Realtor.com – a much larger tech entity focused on a lot of verticals, including buyers, sellers, and renters – we realized we had a deep B2B organization, but we needed to scale out our B2C.
And so two years ago, I became the PMM for consumer number one with a dual mandate: first, to roll out a customized go-to-market framework for B2C, and second, to scope and scale a team out of that.
Compared to my fellow panelists, I'm quite early in my arc. I think if I’d had the opportunity to learn from their experience two years ago, it would have prevented a lot of missteps and extra work on my part. Hopefully, you’ll feel the same when we're done.
With that said, let’s kick it off by looking into the signals that tell you it's time to start scoping and scaling your PMM team.
