Most startups don’t fail at building a product. Turns out that writing (or should I say “generating” now?) code isn’t that hard anymore. They fail at explaining why anyone should care … and then wonder why customer conversations fall flat, sales gets grumpy and the product team feels misunderstood.
I’ve seen this movie. A PMM gets hired too late, or hired at the right time but given no remit to actually do their job. This checklist is designed to help you audit your readiness, get the foundations right, and set your first PMM up to actually help you win.
Note: Like most posts, this is not designed to be an exhaustive list, or even a specific step by step guide. Think of it as the “I better check that” list of the things that will absolutely come back to bite you at some point.
Phase 1: “Are We Ready?”
Before you hire a PMM, the business needs to be ready. Product Marketing is a “connective tissue” discipline, and it only works well when Product, Sales, and Marketing are willing to let someone sit in the middle of that Venn Diagram.
- Identify the gap: Are you struggling with what to build (Product), how to sell (Sales), or who to tell (Marketing)? Your answer shapes the profile you hire.
- The Venn check: Confirm your people are ready to grant a PMM the influence and orchestration authority they need. Sure, they need to earn your trust and respect, but a PMM with no access to The Room is just a very expensive note taker.
- Define the currency: Be honest about what “success” looks like in the short term. Is the immediate need Impact (market results), Influence (internal strategy), or Execution (launching the thing)? Your PMM will make tradeoffs. Help them make the right ones.
Phase 2: The Narrative
The first major PMM accountability for me is The Story. Everything else, from content assets to campaigns, enablement to launches, all flow from this.
- The market narrative: This goes by many names … a Message Source Document (MSD), a Messaging & Positioning Framework (MPF) to name just two (and in the Age of AI, a bunch of JSON and MD files!) … but this is the base that captures the long-form story. Why does this product need to exist now, for these customers, and different to what else is available to them? If you can’t answer that clearly, neither can your buyers.
- The Messaging House: Distill the narrative into value pillars and proof points for each ICP and the personas within. This is where the theory of your story is tested against reality.
- Human fact-check: If you’re using AI to draft any of this (and you definitely should be), remember the “Humans + AI” rule: AI is a vibe engine, not a database. Every technical claim and every stat needs manual verification before it goes anywhere near a customer.
We all see “AI garbage” posted … you can see it, you know what happened … someone with enough knowledge to be dangerous asked the machine to create something, and blindly trusted the output … while your smart audience saw right through that and immediately says “nope” and unfollows. Not the desired outcome.
Phase 3: … 2 … 1 … Launch!
Say it with me … “PMMs are not PMOs” … but they ARE the primary orchestrators of the product launch. There’s a key difference between these acronyms: PMO manages timelines, PMM manages the story and the readiness of the humans who have to tell it.
- Define the motion: Two common and key flows are Product-Led (PLG) or Sales-Led (SLG) … which one are you? Your PMM needs to know which engine they’re fueling before they turn the key.
- Enablement assets: Create the assets … pitch decks, datasheets (side note: are these still a thing anyone actually reads?), demo showcases, and battlecards the business needs to win. This is often where PMMs spend more time than they expect to, and where the “execution tax” shows up fast. It’s also where a good AI workflow, baseline MD’s and SKILL.MD’s will light-speed the execution.
- The feedback loop: Establish how market, sales, and customer feedback and experiences get back to both the Product team (for the widget you built) and the messaging your wrote. If this loop doesn’t exist, your roadmap will drift from reality and your messaging won’t improve. Guarenteed.
Phase 4: PMM 1
When you’re ready to bring someone on, the reporting line matters as much as the resume, often more.
- Reporting structure: Product (technical focus), Marketing (storytelling and scale), or Direct to Founder (strategic generalist who can do both and then hire the specialists)? Each produces a different kind of PMM. I wrote more about this here if you want the longer take.
- The generalist advantage: For a first hire, I recommend you lean toward a generalist. They’ll give you the cross-functional perspective a specialist can’t, and you need that more than depth at this stage.
- Transferable signals: Look for candidates who’ve navigated domain or discipline pivots. That adaptability is table stakes in an early-stage environment, and your first PMM is going to lead a “busy and vibrant work lifestyle” and needing to roam freely across a multitude of tasks :)
Product marketing is genuinely one of the more nuanced disciplines to get right. The impact when it’s working is significant, and the drag when it isn’t is equally real.
Adam