You may be the first person at your company with a PMM title.
But remember, your founder was the original PMM.
Take advantage of that.
đź’ĄÂ They created the first positioning
đź’ĄÂ They wrote the first narrative
đź’ĄÂ They designed the first go-to-market strategy
đź’ĄÂ They closed the first deal
As a solo PMM you can often feel alone. Like you need to figure everything out yourself.
But founders, or even early founding employees, have a ton of historical knowledge.
They have likely thought hard about, maybe even tried, many of the things you’re exploring.
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A quick story:
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.
Chances are they love (and miss) talking about it.
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