Design a Great PMM Team

PMM leaders thrive when they lead a high-impact, innovative, and happy team.

Everything’s clicking.
Everyone is doing great stuff.
The company sees it and calls it out.

I was on teams like that 5 times in 21 years as an employee.
In 7 years of coaching, I’ve seen it another 2 times. 
It’s rare.

Each high-performing team had great variety in its individual members’ 

• Ways of thinking
• Presence & persona
• Motivations
• Stage in career
• Background & experience 
• Skills

I saw this variety making the people on the team more stimulated by each other, learn more from each other, produce better, bigger results together, and have more fun.

Hiring is Magic
The primary way to move your team closer to that state is through hiring. 

When hiring, most leaders focus on 
the best person for that specific job.
This is good, 
but misses a higher impact question: 

who is the best type of person to add to the team?

Example: early in my time on the CRM team at Salesforce, we added (to our team of young, type A, careerist, fast-thinking, fast-talking PMMs) a mellow, saxophone-playing Canadian who ordered his suits off the internet. It made a qualitative improvement to our work to have someone in the conversation who would ask “what do you think is causing that?” rather than just piling on with more whipcrack ideas.

The Perfect PMM?
It’s tempting to think of a singular ‘ideal PMM’ profile, 
but homogenous teams where everyone is as close as you can get to one profile… 
have less impact, innovation, and fun.

How do you get started on designing the perfect team? 

Written exercise: your team today
The first step: understand the team you have.

Example: I was on a post-dot.bomb PMM team (we’d been acquired by Primavera), and we had 

• a Tasmanian devil powerhouse genius who loved to break glass
• A mom who bounced out of bed every morning to make the trains run on time
• A quiet technical guy whose biggest smile came while telling you it wouldn’t work
• me

It was a terrific team, and we wound up in the driver’s seat on our acquirer’s strategy.

Notes I write down for each person on the team

How does each person think & show up

• Who on your team is a voracious information sponge and fount of knowledge?
• Who’s more a spreadsheet vs. who’s more of a novel? 
• Who’s a professor type? Who’s an Insta reel star?

Motivations & reward systems

• Who is curiosity-driven, and enjoys feeding that curiosity?
• Who thinks about the long game first, then the short-game?
• Who loves being a battlefield emergency triage hero?
• Who likes and creates a predictable, ordered environment?
• Who gets really excited about digging deep into complex questions?

High headroom vs. proven producers

• Who is growing like a weed?
• Who is more focused on applying what they’ve developed over years?
• Who is mentoring & teaching others?

Relationship propensities
Who is better at relationships with which types of people?

• With aggro sales people? 
• With frustrated customers?
• With happy customers? 
• With shy people? 
• With cerebral types?
• With self-involved blowhards?

Domain expertise vs. pattern expertise
Some PMM leaders insist on hiring only PMMs who deeply understand their market and customers.

I see it differently. 
I like a mix.

Who do you have on the PMM team that deeply understands your specific market, customers & product?

But who else do you have that is newer to your market, but brings patterns from experience with other markets? With other types of businesses?

True story: one of the best Director of PMM hires I’ve helped a client make, was bringing in a really thoughtful guy whose background was…. marketing running shoes?

Experience, but look again
Absolute years of PMM experience seems like an obvious, single-axis good.
And more experience is better, on average.
But less experienced PMMs ask questions the long-tooths might not.
And tackle things in novel ways that might be superior to ‘the proven way’.

At one of my first coaching clients the 3-person PMM team had 

• a brilliant guy who’d started a business, then taken a job as a product manager, then had become a PMM just 2 years prior
• A 5-years of experience classic B2B software PMM
• A new-to-PMM “junior” person who’d most recently been a web developer

That last person, she instigated and led the best positioning work the team did.

PMM Skills
I consider skills last because it’s the most coachable facet,
and a team on which people have things to learn from each other
is a more engaged, happier team

Coda: Build for the Future

Once you have all this written down, you have a map of your team today.
Gaps and surpluses will be obvious.
What types of people you should add will be obvious.

But don’t think only about today’s gaps and surpluses.
Think about where the team is likely to be in 18 months.
People are gonna leave. People are gonna grow and evolve.
Use that as an extra thumb on the scale when hiring.

From the front porch in Moss Beach,
Tenders