You may be the first person at your company with a PMM title.
But your founder was the original PMM.
Remember to take advantage of that.
After all, they:
↳ created the original positioning
↳ wrote the first narrative
↳ designed the first go-to-market strategy
↳ closed the first deal
As a founding PMM you can often feel alone.
Like you need to figure everything out yourself.
But founders have a ton of historical knowledge.
They have likely thought hard about, even tried, many of the things you’re exploring.
One of my favourite PMMs, Mark Assini, recently invited me to join the Product Marketing Life Podcast to talk about life as a founding PMM.
I shared a quick story related to this topic:
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In my early days at Klue, I took on the task of formalizing our category narrative.
I hosted a workshop with our executive team to walk through some of our initial ideas and messaging.
After the workshop, our CEO, Jason Smith, sent me a Slack message sharing 5 different Evernote files of things he had written over the years.
"Duh," I thought to myself. "Jason’s been internalizing this narrative for years." 🤦‍♂️
There was so much gold in those pages.
Luckily, we were early in the process, so we started working together to build out the narrative more closely after that.
But for many product marketers, this realization is often too late.
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So, even if you get hired as the first PMM, there’s always someone you can learn from.
Will you always agree, or need their input on everything? Of course not.
Trust your abilities, while taking advantage of an experienced leader that’s done it before.
And to the founders out there. Don’t expect your founding PMMs to “get it” from day one. Take time to give them the backstory, share your old notes, whatever it takes to give them the context they need to help communicate your vision internally.
#productmarketing #foundingpmm
PS.
Go check out our episode of the Product Marketing Life pod