This week on Product Marketing Life we’re joined by Nick Knuppe, Product Marketing Lead at Mollie. Nick discusses his role at Mollie, the PM-PMM dynamic, the golden ratio, his upcoming talk at the Product Marketing Festival next month on future-proofing PMM teams, being a PMM in unique regions like EMEA and SSA, stakeholder management, building out a PMM team, and tons more.

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Full transcript:

Mark Assini 0:04

Hi everyone, and welcome to the Product Marketing Life podcast brought to you by the Product Marketing Alliance. My name's Mark Assini, Product Marketing Manager at Voices.

As part of this series, we're connecting with PMMs all over the world about various product marketing topics. Today's guest is Nick Knuppe, Product Marketing Lead at Mollie. Throughout his career, Nick has had a hand in launching several B2B and B2C, eCommerce, SaaS, and mobile products at companies in various stages of growth.

He's also set to be a speaker at the PMA's upcoming Product Marketing Festival next month, where he'll be discussing how to future-proof your product marketing team. Now, I'm sure many of our European listeners have heard of Mollie, one of the fastest-growing payment processors in Europe with over 110,000 customers.

After raising 90 million euros last year in a Series B round to continue to grow and international expansion, Mollie is in a strong position to fulfill its mission of becoming Europe's most loved payment service provider.

All right, with that out of the way, let's get into it. Nick, thanks for joining me today. How's it going?

Nick Knuppe 0:59

Hey, Mark, thanks for having me. It's going well, from a rainy and overcast Amsterdam. Things are good, busy.

Mark Assini 1:09

Yeah, I can imagine, happy to have you here. Hopefully, our conversation today will go a little bit better than the weather is over on your end.

Nick Knuppe 1:16

I'm sure it will.

Mark Assini 1:17

Absolutely. All right. So I've got a couple of questions here, we'll just get right into it. Why don't you let our listeners know a little bit more about what you do at Mollie as Product Marketing Lead?

Nick Knuppe 1:27

So we have three core product marketing workstreams within our product marketing team, go to market with a subset of that is segmentation and targeting and product positioning.

Then we have commerce enablement, why we say commerce enablement is it's a combination of sales and marketing and marketing within our Mollie org fits within commerce. And that's really building compelling product narratives to help enable our marketing and sales teams to attract, engage, and convert customers.

Then we have research and insights, which doesn't typically fall within product marketing teams, but I believe product marketers play the role of the customer advocate throughout the product development and GTM lifecycle. So we found it was quite necessary for research to sit within the PMM team right now, as it helps us keep the finger on the pulse of market, customer, and competitor insights.

Mark Assini 2:24

Yeah, that's interesting to hear you say that because I know at Voices where I work it's a very different setup in a lot of ways but I think the biggest way is that research piece. Our research team actually lives under product and I know we're speaking from a place of luxury in a way because I know a lot of product marketing teams don't have any in-house research resources. I think we're lucky in that sense.

But I do agree with you, that's something I've advocated for is trying to get the research more into the product marketing side of things, or at least more closely aligned. So yeah, it's an interesting balance to strike.

Do you find that because the research team lives under product marketing that you're getting a lot of outside requests to leverage them as a resource, or are they pretty focused on the product marketing assignments that they've got going through them?

Nick Knuppe 3:08

I think as research becomes more mature, and it starts to be more visible, so it's not just the practice of research, but the value that research offers so if you're looking at whether it be insights or competitive analysis, more and more people will want more from research.

So we're really taking it in a phased approach to really understand what the company's research priorities are, and looking through a product lens more specifically, and then how do we extrapolate that to prioritize.

We're looking at alternative payment methods in the German market, how does that contribute to our overall payment suite? And then what are the after-effects of that? And understanding, how does that add incremental revenue to the overall business?

Mark Assini 3:50

Absolutely. Right on and how big is your product marketing team at Mollie?

Nick Knuppe 3:55

At the moment, we are four, and probably growing to five or six in the next quarter.

Mark Assini 4:02

Exciting, so perfect timing for your own topic at the festival itself because it sounds like you're about to scale a little bit, too.

Nick Knuppe 4:08

Yeah, it's been an interesting journey. When you look at Mollie, people look at us as a startup, but we've actually been around for about 16 years, maybe 17 now. When I joined Mollie back in July last year, being interviewed, I took on an assignment with the ambition to build a world-class product marketing engine.

What was more astounding is that there was never a product marketer before me. So you kind of have this blank canvas of what does product marketing do? What does it look like? How does it operate? Which is really exciting.

I look at it as not necessarily a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity but it's definitely up there with one of the things that I think for me personally, in my career, it's something that you want to build and grow and be accountable for on my journey.

Mark Assini 4:55

Absolutely. I think you kind of described the dream scenario for a lot of product marketers is "Hey, you're the first hire, build the team and the function exactly as you see fit". I think that's like you said, kind of best-case scenario. On the topic of your career, I noticed in your LinkedIn bio that you have experience working in both the EMEA and SSA regions.

Without getting too into the weeds, what were some of the immediate differences from an organizational or operational perspective that stood out to you between those two very unique regions?

Nick Knuppe 5:22

So my first introduction to working in tech was when I kind of jumped the fence from agency, I was at Ogilvy, to working at Tencent Africa. So we were a JV between Naspers, which is the largest internet and media company in Africa, and Tencent most people know by now I hope is one of the largest internet companies in China, or at least in the world. That was just such a crazy experience. It was like three and a half years of continuously running through a minefield, just shipping products and you just hope your leg doesn't blow off.

But it was really, really interesting because we were a team of I think when I joined maybe 15 and we grew to 140 in three and a half years and really took it upon us to employ our culture from our Tencent teams in China and we married that with like a hybrid operational approach from learnings from Silicon Valley startups. It was really interesting. We even went as far as learning Mandarin to really engage with the product teams in Shenzhen Obanja. I wouldn't say that there was a glaring difference.

I think, for me, the biggest adjustment was coming from a B2C startup working on mobile products across multiple markets and then transitioning to B2B2B product in a big tech company like Booking, it was just a big springboard jump from one side to the other and the learnings and I think the differences from being at Booking is that it wasn't the Wild West, it was structured, there were much longer lead times on product development, you're dealing with huge data sets, millions and millions of properties and things just took a lot longer to ship.

So your lead times were longer, you were very focused and it was kind of upward management of how you build products, not necessarily a top-down, which was more like at Tencent where this is what we're doing, this is the kind of roadmap that China has given us, and this is what we're launching.

Mark Assini 7:32

Wow, yeah, it sounds like you've got quite the global charcuterie board of experiences there across industries, regions, that experience of working for a large Chinese conglomerate in that part of the world sounds incredible.

Nick Knuppe 7:46

Yeah, it was super interesting. Definitely some of the fondest memories that I have, specifically, I think the best was fine flying business class. I was like, put me on the plane, I'll go.

Mark Assini 7:57

Yeah, absolutely. Can I get in line first, please? I'll happily take that trip. That sounds amazing. I also in preparing for our conversation today noticed on LinkedIn that you say that you're a GTM fanatic. What is it about go to market that you find so fascinating? Are there any cool go-to-market stories you can share with us today?

Nick Knuppe 8:17

I've got some horror stories.

Mark Assini 8:19

Oh, let's hear those, everyone loves a good horror story.

Nick Knuppe 8:21

I don't know another marketing role where you have a workstream such as GTM, and you are involved in the ideation, the development, the launch readiness, the market, and opportunity sizing, employing each iterative phase throughout that process. It's quite beautiful when you think of a product from concept all the way through to execution, and then hopefully, revenue.

As a PMM, I see it as that's something for you to own. That's a really fulfilling, challenging, but rewarding process, that just gets me excited because you put weeks and hours of arguments, blood, sweat, and tears into just trying to get this product live. And when you do start to see the numbers come through and start to show really encouraging signals that there's solid market adoption. I think that for me just gets me really excited.

Mark Assini 9:24

Yeah, I think you've perfectly encapsulated that feeling. I equate it to what I'm sure an entrepreneur might feel like when they have this idea in their head, they are putting it together, talking to different people, pulling all the elements together, but still kind of taking the lead and doing it independently.

I think as product marketers, we often find ourselves in these larger organizations, but we really should be thinking of ourselves sometimes as these entrepreneurs and independent business owners where they might not have come up with the deal themselves, but really taking it as you said from idea and concept to the real world and then actually seeing it perform.

Yeah, you hit on an experience that I'm sure a lot of us in product marketing really get excited about. It sounds like you've got a taste of that for the good and the bad.

Nick Knuppe 10:11

I think on that point, maybe I need to get something off my chest after the day I've had but I don't think product marketers are given enough credit for how much time and effort, and skills go into stakeholder management.

Mark Assini 10:26

Yeah.

Nick Knuppe 10:26

I mean, I just find that personally, we are permanently communicating, we need to be transparent, we're managing stakeholders expectations, we've got our finger on the pulse of what the customer is thinking, we're trying to execute at the same time, we're trying to make sure that if there's something that's implicated on the product roadmap, stakeholders and sales and marketing understand, "Please don't sell this, we don't have it ready".

So yeah, I just wanted to kind of give a shout-out to any of the PMMs out there that really don't think that stakeholder management is acknowledged enough.

Mark Assini 10:56

You know, I 100% agree. And I think you don't really notice it, or you don't really have anybody internally to commiserate with unless it's another product marketer, because like you said, you're interacting with these different teams and these different individuals and the customers, and they're only really seeing it from that one to one of I'm talking to you.

But as a product marketer, you're talking to that person, you're talking to this person, you're talking to this group and that group. You have that 360 view, and they're all coming to you all the time. So yeah, I definitely know that feeling. And I'm sure a lot of product marketers are cheering internally for you getting that off your chest as well because I'm sure they feel the same a lot of the time.

Let's take a look at the topic of your upcoming session at the Product Marketing Festival, and really about scaling your PMM team. So what is it about scaling and building out the PMM function and PMM team that you find so interesting?

Nick Knuppe 11:45

I see the practice of product marketing and how we work within organizations as we're quite service orientated. We're also human, we can only deliver so much. If we look at product marketing almost enveloping itself into the product roadmap, and being the execution arm and interface into field marketing teams, or depending on what your org setup is, I think you really need to be realistic and honest about what you can deliver as one. Because I know what it was like being one product marketer, servicing six or seven product managers. We'll get onto that ratio and the perfect ratio between PM and PMM.

But I think that trying to scale your team is really looking at and being honest with yourself. What are your strengths and weaknesses? And if you had another one of you, what characteristics and strengths would you want that second person to have to solidify your team and strengthen your delivery rate?

Because we really are delivering, that's all we do is we just are trying to push things out. Whether it be content, whether it be training, whether it be aligning stakeholders, and you can only do so much within so many hours of a week, before you actually burn out. I think that was another thing that I was going to mention is that burnout is a real thing.

We're working in unprecedented times and you need to be honest with yourself that there's only so much that you can deliver. I think that's something that rings quite true to me because when I had to upward manage when you're in a scale-up and everyone wants headcount, how does your product marketing voice get heard? Realistically, you have to say, "Well, hey, here's your roadmap, you want to launch 10 features in this next quarter with one of me, sorry, we can launch three of those so pick your features wisely".

You really have to stand up for yourself too. I think it also comes down to having an empathetic manager, someone that really understands the role of product marketing and the value that you deliver, and being able to articulate that and quantify that upwardly to say to management, "Hey, we need two more people here, at least".

Mark Assini 13:59

Yeah, you hit on so many nuggets there. I wish we had two hours to chat with one another. I could talk about that for days I feel like. I think one of the things that you said that really stood out to me was, you're right, at the end of the day, we are still people, obviously, we get a lot of credit intention for the function and the deliverables that you talked about you're expected to deliver.

But I really liked your perspective of when you're looking to scale your team, take a personal reflection of yourself and say this is what I'm really strong at, what are maybe some of my blind spots or weaknesses or shortcomings and how can I augment that with another person? I think often when we look to hire someone or grow a team, we look at who am I going to get along and work with?

Obviously, that's really important and you need to be aware of that relationship and what skills are required to be successful in the role. But really narrowing down on who am I as a product marketer? Where are my shortcomings or areas I need to improve in? How can I bring someone in to fill those gaps or make me a better product maker? I think is a fantastic perspective so thanks for sharing that.

Nick Knuppe 14:58

It's also quite interesting because product marketing can be defined in many shapes and sizes, whether you're in a B2B org focusing on mobile apps, or if you're like myself in a B2B focusing on payments. And it also comes down to the skill set of, we really need to use data in the way that we tell stories, specifically, when you're looking at B2B messaging, which is more focused on utilities. So product utility versus emotional.

But then you have great examples like Slack that really humanize their B2B products, which I always employ and look at. You also need to be realistic, you're not going to find the perfect person, you always have to compromise on something. And I think I've seen time and time again, hiring for other roles, people are just like, we haven't found the right candidate and I'm like, if you have the attitude of trying to find the perfect candidate, you probably won't.

Mark Assini 15:55

Yeah, absolutely. Fair point. And I'm glad you brought up Slack because they're one of the companies, organizations, from a product marketing perspective I personally really admire. I always see them as, for that use case in that industry and that type of solution, the gold standard. Game recognize game, they're doing some good stuff out there.

So what are some of the telltale signs that other product marketers can look for when they realize maybe it's time to start talking to my manager or those leaders about scaling the team?

Nick Knuppe 16:28

I would say, from my personal experience, it's when you start to drop the ball and human error starts to introduce itself with either working long days, or you just feel that you're not putting out the best work possible, or that you're falling behind deadlines.

It also kind of depends on your personality, some people don't always speak out, they have that responsibility characteristic where they just agree to take on more and more work. That literally is when someone burns out. I think it's being realistic, but also, I touched on that earlier, but to be able to look at team members on what's realistic to deliver on a roadmap, and what you can confidently deliver yourself.

I think the first signal is just really trying to maybe move away from the mouse view and have a bit of an eagle view and look at something that is more half-year and say, "This is just really impossible for me to deliver on my own".

Mark Assini 17:30

Yeah. And I think you uncovered that people pleaser syndrome that I'm sure a lot of product marketers find themselves in where, because we're supporting so many teams or interacting with so many stakeholders, you don't ever want to let anybody down. But I think you're right, when it gets to a point where you can't not let someone down because you're doing so much that's the moment we have to realize like, "Okay, I need help".

You mentioned earlier about burnout, I think not just product marketers, but everybody's really feeling that feeling of being burned out. It's important to recognize when you need help, and you have to make sure you know who to go to and have those conversations. Because it's definitely not something you want to see carry on for a while,

Nick Knuppe 18:07

You also need to, I believe, go as far as, if your team is not willing to give you help, then reassess what you're doing there. It's easier said than done. But you need to think, am I being set up for success in this company? If yes, great. If no, what needs to be addressed? And how quickly does it need to be addressed? That's a very simple way of just really removing yourself from that environment and deciding what's best for you.

Mark Assini 18:38

Yeah, absolutely. It all goes back to that point you made earlier, we're people at the end of the day, that's got to take priority over a lot of different things. So you touched on it earlier in one of your answers about when you're looking to hire another product marketing manager or someone to bring into the team about taking that personal reflective look, and seeing where those gaps are that someone can augment.

But how does that differ when you're looking to maybe hire the third or fourth and really start to build a team beyond that team of one or two people? Are there any differences or specific characteristics you would look for in the third or fourth hire?

Nick Knuppe 19:10

I try and keep a common theme to hiring and what I look for, and experience and willingness to learn far outweighs whether you have an MBA or something like that. I think that how I structure interviews, and maybe people won't agree with this, but I like to give a really hard challenge.

Because that's the one intersection where you can really review and interrogate someone's thinking. You can either quickly see that it's their own thinking or it's not. That's definitely one way of understanding not just whether they did a good or bad job of the challenge, but it's how do they take questions? How do they think on the spot?

That, for me, is probably one of the most crucial deciders in whether it's going to be like hire or no hire or do you progress to a final interview or not? So I definitely look at experience and I think culture fit is super important. You can have someone with all the experience in the world, but if they're not the right culture fit, or they're not like-minded in trying to focus on chasing a common goal, then that's also probably a no for me.

Mark Assini 20:20

Absolutely, two takeaways for our listeners there. One is if you're interviewing at Mollie and Nick's interviewing you prepare to be challenged, prepare to get some tough questions, which is great. But also, it's funny, when you look at product marketing postings at different companies, so often, the hiring manager will over-index on "need to have three years in this specific industry and this specific context".

It's just like, you're hiring an Associate Product Marketing Manager and expect them to have three to five years in this obscure industry that just started seven years ago? I think you're right, are they willing to learn, anybody can learn those industries...

Nick Knuppe 20:56

You just triggered me so hard. I was creating a product marketing career framework really looking at what is the career trajectory for a product marketer nd where does it go? And we were using this outside consultancy, and no disrespect to them if they're listening, but when we looked at the career framework in this career framework tooling software, I think there were about maybe 22 or 23 different data points to assess someone's career progress.

I was like, "We're not hiring astronauts". I just feel that the industry is so warped on trying to find a product marketer that has the same data capabilities of a data scientist. Refine it and focus on three or four key things that you're looking for. That goes back to what does your team need and what are you looking for to complement the team? I really get annoyed when I see these ridiculous roles looking for a product marketing associate with three years minimum experience, I mean, come on.

Mark Assini 22:06

I agree 100%, I think one of my favorite ones to see is, and maybe this is just because of my own personal shortcomings, but I love to see product marketing positions where it's like, "must be a proficient graphic designer", it's like, I don't know how to graphic design! I went to business school.

Any product marketer who can do that kind of collateral creation and design themselves, hats off to you, because a) I don't know how anybody could be expected to do that and b) those two skill sets coming together, the logical side of your brain and the creative side to do that, you're a unicorn in my mind.

Nick Knuppe 22:38

It takes years of mastering PowerPoints and how to create the perfect subheader.

Mark Assini 22:44

Agreed. Let's just chat briefly about this upcoming session you've got at the festival because I'm sure a lot of our listeners are excited to register and attend. One of the core areas of focus is how to motivate and persuade management to add the headcount in their product marketing function.

Aside from the obvious financial reasons, why do you think management probably needs more persuasion to scale product marketing than let's say sales or development?

Nick Knuppe 23:12

Good question. I think that if you ask any startup or scale-up nine times out of 10 if you say to them, do you want another product marketer? Or would you like another engineer? They'll probably say, engineer. I think that's just the reality that we face is that there are always other priorities.

But if you had to change the question and say, would you like to launch three more features in order to give you a better competitive offering, how are you going to launch those features? Because an engineer's not going to do that. It's really trying to bring outsiders into your product marketing world and basically upsell your services or your skillset to change the context of how they view it.

I had to do ground-up work when arriving at Mollie, I literally had a presentation that said, what is product marketing? This is why I'm here, this is how I work with you because you're a product manager. It's been a really great experience now to see the frequency and repetition of why I'm here and what I'm doing, now, it's really starting to resonate with the wider org. You can see we're starting to get more headcount a lot faster, because we're starting to just move a lot quicker and the product org's reaching maturity becoming more domain-specific rather than just product team.

You need a product marketer to start working towards that domain-specific approach and not necessarily be service-orientated across four domains. Because the two things that happen are that when you take a more reactive approach, so product marketing is proactive on our own roadmap as in this is our activity plan for H2.

But we're reactive to the product roadmaps, meaning that it's like drip-feeding information down to your product marketing team, and then it's like, "Oh, Let's go launch" but you have zero context of what they've been working on for the last three months, and how that impacts your value proposition to your customer. So, I'm totally all for when we get to that golden ratio.

It depends like at Booking.com, we had a product marketer to a PM, and we had an engineering lead, and then engineers, and sometimes depending on whether you are a product marketer, a senior product marketer, it really depends on what your team needs and the type of products that you're working on and where that product is, in its lifecycle. I could manage to work with four or five product managers, but that's at a stretch, meaning that you're not going to get the best of work out of me, I'm just basically going to ship things because I need to.

What happens is that you really lose touch with your customer, because you're just so focused on material production and shipping things that once it's landed, it's almost too late to iterate on or to try and get feedback. Then you look bad, your product teams look bad, marketing doesn’t know what's going on, and it just becomes a big mess.

Mark Assini 26:01

Yeah, I think you described the situation that I'm sure a lot of product marketers find themselves in is whether it's the 1 to 3 or 1 to 4, I think a lot of the times some of the leaders of those organizations forget that the product team is working on a feature or a new service or a launch for yes, sure, the two weeks sprints, but they're probably working for that specific thing for months.

But if you're a product marketing manager, and you've got four teams that you're supporting, and they're releasing something every two weeks, you don't get those same several months to prepare as the product teams do. Because they release the feature and they're on to the next one. But meanwhile, the product marketer is just trying to keep up and keep up with that cadence of every two weeks something new has happened. I think you described something a lot of product marketers feel regularly.

Nick Knuppe 26:45

It's also the expectation management of your sales teams, where they know we're going to offer this product, and they've got customers wanting it. Then all of a sudden, there's a glitch in the way that we look at compliance or the regulatory environment, or there's another product dependency on the roadmap and that pushes it out by three or four weeks, or six or eight sprints. Then all of a sudden, you've got your commerce team, not necessarily managing new customers or prospective customers’ expectations.

Again, it goes back to stakeholder alignment, transparency of communication, it's kind of keeping one hand on your Slack channels and the other hand on your emails and direct project sponsors, or stakeholders. But it really is tricky. And I mean, that's why I can't stress enough how it's hard to test someone, how good are you at stakeholder management? Until you put them in a very stressful highly disruptive environment to see if they can keep the wheels on the bus.

Mark Assini 27:46

Absolutely. You kind of alluded to it or teased it throughout our conversation here but this idea of the golden ratio, which is a topic that I think every product marketer has had to talk through at some point in their career, and it gets asked often I know.

It's often in the annual Product Marketing Trends report by the PMA but as product marketers, we're so obsessed with this golden ratio, and why do you think we always as product marketers see ourselves through the lens of how many of us are needed relative to our product counterparts? Why is it never the other way around?

Nick Knuppe 28:20

Yeah, that's a good point. Why isn't it the other way around? Again, it comes back to I think the maturity of the product org, and how much experience there is between maybe product managers that have who have not worked with the product marketer.

Because sometimes in other companies, the onus is on the product manager to do the market research, to look with an outward-facing approach on the customer and the market. I haven't yet seen or heard product managers that own the GTM and execution. But again, that sometimes might be different, where you have regional marketing teams or field marketers, where you typically hand the baton over and say, "Here's your material, these are the USPs, go and make a campaign and launch it."

I think with Mollie, we really focus on the customer and you're not always going to have product teams that are customer-facing like you will have potential product teams like infrastructure, where they're just looking at technical debt. So for me, it was creating an org that shows these product teams, I won't touch because they won't need me.

However, these product teams like financial services, or alternative payment methods, are going to be releasing new features, whether it be Google pay or Apple Pay and things like that, that's going to need someone to create an email to the customers, and that's really dumbing it down. We don't just end up sending emails, although that's what product managers think we do.

Mark Assini 29:54

Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's like that meme, it's like what product thinks product marketing does, what sales think I do, what I actually do. It's kind of like if you visualize it like that. Here I am trying to explain the visual meme over audio, classic product marketer here.

I'm gonna just jump to our last question because I think you hit on so many amazing nuggets and I feel like I could talk to you for hours about some of this stuff. But we've got to keep it short for our listeners.

Nick Knuppe 30:20

You can have a separate podcast for stakeholder management.

Mark Assini 30:22

Yeah, seriously. Well, I mean, it sounds like a good portion of your session is about that specifically.

So before I get to my last question here, for anybody who really enjoyed some of the topics and insights that Nick brought up, and there were lots of them, don't forget to catch Nick's session, 'Future-proofing your PMM team" how and when to scale' on June 17, during this year's Product Marketing Festival. To register, head over to festival.productmarketingalliance.com and book your spot at Nick's session.

It sounds like there's gonna be some incredible insights in addition to the ones we just talked about today. So if you haven't already, sign up, you won't regret it. I know I've already registered so I look forward to hearing this from you again.

Nick Knuppe 31:07

Awesome.

Mark Assini 31:08

Last question. It's one I like to ask everybody who's on the show. What advice or tips would you have for people looking to get into or building their career in product marketing?

Nick Knuppe 31:17

I think if you have your sights set on a PMM role, Mollie has these internal values, be bold, and be authentic, and I believe personally if you don't ask you don't get. I think you need to look at really understand what the practice of product marketing is, and what are the types of skills. I mean, you can literally do that by Google search.

Look at yourself and say like, copywriting great skill set for a product marketer to have, I've read multiple times that companies have had a copywriter that's got a great operational skillset, and has moved on to transition into a product marketing role.

The same, like project managers, I mean, that's stakeholder management 101. So really try and identify where your company is, what does the product org structure look like? Because product marketing is not always in product, sometimes it's in marketing. I believe it's product marketing for a reason, not marketing product.

I would just say, have an open and honest conversation with your manager and say, "Hey, I'm really inspired, or I'm really attracted to understanding and learning more about what product marketing is, and how it can benefit the business" and take that initiative and be pragmatic and say, "Who's launching our products?", or "Who's training the marketing teams on what our products do and why they offer value to our customers?", and point out the key dependencies if there isn't a product marketer, and how this can be improved if there was to be a product marketer.

Or, I'm not paid to say this, go to the Product Marketing Alliance and start doing some reading and research because there's so much training there already. I mean, I myself, if it's not in the Slack channel, or if it's not just on the website when you're looking at like guest publishers when they're writing about GTM or messaging. I came across April Dunford on positioning, really awesome. There's so much great content already there, that can give you a better idea of exactly what product marketing is.

Mark Assini 33:25

Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more, shameless plug for the Product Marketing Alliance. Absolutely shameless. I came into the Alliance, I can't remember how I found it, it was probably through Google search as well. In my short time working with them, and like you said keeping an eye on them, I've learned so much.

So anybody who came across this podcast and isn't already a member of the Alliance or hasn't gone through the Slack channel, like you said, or visited the site, absolutely do that. I'll say it again, absolutely sign up for Nick's session at the festival. It's gonna be a fantastic one to attend. I can't wait for it.

We'll wrap up here. Thank you so much, Nick, this was great. As I said, I feel like I could keep talking to you for hours after we've finished recording but I won't steal more of your time. Thank you so much for being here. I'm sure our listeners really appreciate it. I know I did.

Nick Knuppe 34:10

Yeah, thank you. It was an absolute pleasure and really nice to spend some time with you and stepping out of my chaotic work environment.

Mark Assini 34:17

It's always nice to get a break.

Nick Knuppe 34:19

Cool.

Mark Assini 34:20

Awesome. Thanks so much, Nick. Take care.

Nick Knuppe 34:21

You too. Cheers, Mark.