Building a product marketing org at a hyper-growth startup

Our story begins in November 2019. That's when I joined Mural as the first product marketer. In my first few months, I spent a lot of time learning and educating stakeholders about the role of product marketing at a B2B SaaS startup. 

However, my plans changed – as they did for all of us – in March 2020 when COVID took hold. Seemingly overnight, every company went remote. Also overnight, Mural (a visual collaboration platform) went from a "nice-to-have" to a "must-have" product. As a result, we experienced 15x growth in a matter of weeks. 

To say we had to quickly come up with a growth plan would be an understatement. At this stage, the company only had five marketers, including our brand-new CMO and me – one lonesome product marketer with less than six months under my belt.

As you can imagine, my workweeks got very long, very quickly. I had calls early in the morning, late at night, and throughout the weekend. Sellers were sending me Slack messages left and right, asking for messaging and materials. Executives were rethinking our entire go-to-market strategy and needed support building the narrative and training our sales and customer success organizations.

In short, I had three burning questions on my mind:

1. How do you meet the product marketing needs of a company in hyper-growth?
2. How do you scale the impact of your solo product marketing efforts while moving at 100 miles an hour?
3. How do you recruit a team of rockstar PMMs who can take on the challenge of building the plane while flying?

The solutions to all of these challenges fell into three buckets: 

1. Knowing your audience
2. Building a foundation
3. Hiring great people

Let's dive into each one.

Knowing your audience

I get that knowing your audience doesn’t exactly sound revolutionary, but when you start seeing a waterfall of demand from every corner of the business world, top universities, and even government institutions, you really need a clear picture of who you're targeting. That’s going to help you maintain and build on that inbound demand.

At Mural, we built a target audience framework that's driven our go-to-market efforts ever since. We pulled data from all possible sources to build it – the product, our content, customers, and tenured employees.

The framework resembles a radar or bullseye, divided into slices representing each of our target teams. Within each team, we identified the roles most likely to find value in our product. The closer to the center, the more quickly that role would realize value. Ultimately, we want to see every role moving toward the center as they get more value from our product. For each role, we also listed the top five use cases. 

This framework guides our messaging, positioning, webpages, one-pagers, training, demand campaigns, email copy, and much more. It's been a guiding force in our success.

Building a foundation

With skyrocketing needs from internal and external product marketing stakeholders, we needed to create foundational resources that could scale as we grew to meet that demand. 

Whether it was internal comms, one-pagers, slide decks, business frameworks, presentations, demos, or training, we had to put scalable things in place to support our growth.

Having a solid tech stack, even when I was the sole PMM, was vital. Here are the tools we adopted:

• Highspot – To organize and centralize our sales enablement materials, pitch decks, and one-pagers. We also adopted 
• Crayon – To centralize our competitive intel and amplify our efforts in tracking the category and competitors.
• Confluence – Our new single source of truth, where stakeholders would go first to find the answers to their questions. 
• Slack – We created a dedicated product marketing channel to share updates and let stakeholders ask us questions.

Some of these tools required significant budget outlays. However, we quickly proved the value of each tool as the needs became self-evident across the organization.

Finally, we established a regular cadence of live product marketing update meetings, where we could present information and take questions on the fly. These started monthly but quickly moved to bi-weekly as we had more and more to share.

Hiring great people

Whenever anyone asks what I love most about working at Mural, I always say the people. I love the product marketing team we've built, and the teams we get to partner with day in and day out. 

As Doris Kearns Goodwin said,

"Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation."

I wanted not only to hire people I’d enjoy working with, but also people who would challenge me or even make fun of me sometimes! I wanted to create a psychologically safe environment because that's an absolute requirement for a successful team, especially in a high-pressure hyper-growth organization.

So when I was hiring the second product marketer and beyond, I first looked to cover the core tenets of product marketing: 

1. Messaging and positioning
2. Product content
3. Feature launches

Let’s explore how we tackled each of these areas.

First, we needed consistency in our messaging. I was less than six months in, and it was all over the place. To support our growth, everyone needed to sing from the same song sheet.

I also knew our product content needed elevating. At that point, we had one in-house designer and one contractor using all their bandwidth to help us add polish to our materials so prospects would have no choice but to adopt Mural. 

Over time, we added more internal creative resources and took on a top-notch video production agency to uplevel our website, videos, gifs, email and social assets, and more. However, we needed a PMM to guide these efforts, ensuring messaging resonated and was consistent across all deliverables and channels.

Lastly, what is a product marketing team without feature launches? It wasn’t just our product marketing team that started to scale in March 2020 – our product team was scaling up too. Our release cadence went from every three weeks to weekly so we could ship improvements in near real-time. 

We needed someone dedicated to working with the product team early and often. That way, we could enable our stakeholders to drive the adoption of new features at scale. Bringing on a product marketer with experience in launching features also allowed me to focus on filling gaps and clearing blockers across the whole team. 

Key takeaways

In summary, building a product marketing machine amidst explosive growth is no mean feat. It requires a laser-focused strategy, a solid tech stack, and a kickass team of PMMs. 

If you ever find yourself charting the choppy waters of hyper-growth, keep these key lessons in mind:

🎯 Develop a clear audience framework to maintain focus and build on inbound demand as it skyrockets.

🧱 Invest in scalable resources like enablement tools, competitive intel platforms, and internal knowledge bases.

🤝 Create a psychologically safe environment that empowers your team to challenge ideas without fear.

⚡️ Build a team that can tackle the core tenets of product marketing: messaging and positioning, product content, and feature launches.

🌟 Hire amazing people you genuinely vibe with – it'll make those 18-hour workdays much more bearable!

This article has been adapted from Sean Lauer’s talk at the Product Marketing Trailblazers event. You can enjoy the video of the complete talk here. 

Since the time of recording, Sean has taken on a new role as the VP of Marketing at Instruqt. Congratulations, Sean! 🎉