One of my first lessons when creating our PMM Charter at Klue

One of my first lessons when creating our PMM Charter at Klue 👇

I had a blast chatting with Andy McCotter-Bicknell and members of the Healthy Competition community recently.

We covered a bunch of topics, like the importance of sharing your work early, category creation (and ways to measure it), and how to be productive as a product marketer.

But one topic that struck a chord was the concept of building a PMM Charter. 🚢

It’s always challenging entering a new company as a PMM leader, especially when the function is relatively new.

When I joined Klue, a charter was one of the first things I worked on.

For us, it’s a document that contains a few key things:

➡️ Our mission - our high-level why within the team. How to sum up what our objective is within the organization and what we do.

➡️ Our team - who’s on the team, and what are we each responsible for (at a high level since there will always be some overlap).

➡️ Our wheelhouse - this is the meatiest part of the document that we use to define which functions in the business are owned by product marketing. This is where we define the things we drive, our top priorities, vs the things we support.

When we originally started presenting our charter to different teams we were framing our wheelhouse as:

🟢 “here’s the things we do”

🛑 “here’s the things we don’t do.”

Early feedback showed that this was the wrong approach 👎 Other teams were off-put by me coming in and saying "here's everything we don't do"

In hindsight, an aggressive move when trying to build relationships with other departments as a new PMM.

But this feedback helped us iterate on the document and position things more as:

🟢 “here’s what we own”

🟡 “here’s what we don't own but can help support”

Which felt like a more realistic representation of our relationship across departments.

A great example of learning and iterating as you go.

#productmarketing #teamwork #marketing

P.S. If you’re interesting in watching the full session, grab the episode below.

P.P.S. I’ve also dropped a copy of our original charter template. Hopefully it helps inspire yours.