From service provider to strategic partner: Level up your PMM game

This article has been adapted from Sudha’s brilliant talk at the exclusive Product Marketing Misunderstood event. PMA members can watch the recording in its full unedited glory here.

Are you ever overwhelmed or caught off guard by questions and requests from partners? Do you wish you had more influence to drive strategic priorities?

Don’t worry – I’m here to equip you with the skills and frameworks you need to become a highly strategic, influential product marketing leader who can confidently navigate requests, drive business outcomes, and shift from reactive support to proactive partnership.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• How to think strategically
• A structured approach to problem solving
• Skills for distilling and conveying insights effectively
• Ways to cultivate personal presence and credibility
• Tactics to bring partners along and drive influence

When you nail these skills, you'll be equipped to step up and guide the business toward the future like the strategic leader you were meant to be.

Let's jump right in. 

How to operate as a strategic, proactive partner

The term “strategic, proactive partner” gets thrown around a lot in business circles, but what does it actually mean to be one? I like to break it down into three core skills:

1. Strategic thinking: Identifying focus areas priorities so you can influence the business in the most meaningful way possible.
2. Problem solving: Optimizing for both efficiency and effectiveness in the way that you solve problems
3. Moving beyond service provision: Developing a proactive point of view on what’s important so you can navigate incoming asks, manage your time, set boundaries, and be effective in the things you choose to do. 

Now, let's go into each of these skills in a little more detail. 

Core skill #1: Strategic thinking

I think of strategic thinking as the sum of three key skills.

The first is business acumen. In other words, do you know how the business that you support as a PMM makes its money? If you don't, that's the first thing you need to figure out. What are the levers that drive revenue for your business? The more you know about your business, the more of a partner you can be to your leadership teams. 

The second skill is orientation towards outcomes. By understanding how your business generates revenue and the levers your team can pull, you’ll be better equipped to define outcomes that’ll have the biggest broader impact. 

What levers drive revenue, and which can product marketing directly influence? You've now narrowed it down to a subset of levers within your control. Now you can define your team’s desired outcomes against those levers. All this will flow into your workstreams, OKRs (objectives and key results), and priorities.

This is the best way to become a strategic partner. Your partners in sales and product management are constantly thinking about growth. By adopting the lens of business growth, and defining your OKRs and priorities accordingly, you're one step ahead of their requests.

Finally, we have prioritization and trade-offs. People see strategy as this big, amorphous, magical thing. But really, strategy is about choice-making. Given the plethora of different ways to deliver desired outcomes, which ones will you strategically prioritize to drive the results you need? 

Core skill #2: Problem solving

Problem solving can be pretty chaotic at times, with people jumping to conclusions without taking the time to get to the heart of the problem. 

Let’s say your business’s revenue is declining. Your leadership may come to you claiming the issue is that the product isn’t serving customers well – that’s a pretty big leap to make if you haven’t dissected the problem properly! 

I’m going to share three steps that will enable you to do just that, so you can manage these types of conversations effectively and confidently. 

Step one: Problem identification

The first step is to identify the real problem, not just the symptoms. It's one thing to look at problems on the surface – declining revenue or lower user engagement, for instance – but it's another thing entirely to find the possible root causes. So, that’s the first skill to develop.

Step two: Hypothesis-driven analysis

The second big skill here is what I call hypothesis-driven analysis. This involves taking all the possible root causes of the symptom you're worried about and gathering enough information to zoom in on the true culprit or culprits.

Step three: Moving to solution

Eventually, once you've identified the proven drivers – the root causes truly impacting the symptom – you can focus on resolving the most critical ones. Use a framework of impact versus effort. How much effort will it take to address this cause, and how much impact will that have on your business? This allows you to prioritize the right solutions.

This problem-solving skill set empowers you to be the strategic partner who says, "Hold on. Let's examine the root causes, find the high-impact ones, and tackle those," and bring focus while everyone else runs around like headless chickens.

Core skill #3: Moving beyond service provision

The final piece of being a strategic partner is moving beyond just service provision to become truly proactive. So, how do you get there?

First, you need a really solid understanding of why you picked your current OKRs and the potential business impact you hope to drive with them. What's the reasoning behind your priorities? 

Then, be curious. When you get a new request from a partner, seek to genuinely understand what impact it could have on the business. This allows you to do some relative prioritization of the ask. 

Next, you want to ask yourself if your team is even the right one to be taking on this request, or would it be better directed to customer experience, sales enablement, or someone else?

If the request does indeed fall within product marketing’s remit, here’s the next important question: Is this new ask more critical and impactful to the business than what's already on your team’s plate? If the answer is yes – if you truly believe the new request could drive more business value than your existing priorities – then you need to decide what you can say no to on your current OKR list to make room for this.

And if it doesn't seem like the new ask is more important than your current OKRs, you need to communicate the business impact of saying no. Explain what other high-priority initiatives that “no’ enables you to say “yes” to. That will make it an easier pill for the requester to swallow.

Of course, if that doesn't work, you may need to escalate this conversation while clearly outlining the relative business impacts of your competing priorities.

Building influence and reputation as a PMM team

Let's move on to the second major step towards being a strategic and influential leader – building influence and reputation as a PMM team. Let’s unpack what that looks like.