James Morehead heads up Product management and Marketing at SupportSoft. he's giving this talk in terms of where he works.

So - traditionally, Product Management and Product Marketing are separately organized, although often with the same management. He's advocating having a single marketing organization for all of that. Where he works, the organization is one centrally located and managed group. Responsibilities?

• Customer interaction (supporting sales)
• Outbound - web content, collateral, press/analyst, speaking, etc
• Inbound - market research/planning, roadmap/release planning, pricing, training

Metrics for the merged organization:

• Quarterly MBO process - aligned with corporate objectives and quarterly bonuses
• Pipeline per product
• Release completeness - aligned with engineering, focuses each PM on shepherding reqs to delivery

By combining the two pieces, you get aligned communications. To ensure this, they set up a system of "gates" to ensure that products get to where they need to go - miss a gate, slip a release.

• Market Opportunity
• Use Case Definition
• Functional and Usability Reqs
• Engineering Development Timeline
• Functional Completeness
• Release Readiness
• 6 Month Assessment

These gates have various people who are notified of progress, and who have approval/decline power.

Benefits:

• Credibility with customers as you have one group in charge of all messaging - roadmap and communication
• Reqs tied tightly to customer interaction
• No communication gaps between PM and PMM
• Efficient Staffing Model

Challenges:

• Constantly being stretched between sales, engineering, and corp. marketing
• Hiring is more difficult - staff needs to be articulate and detail oriented
• Both sales and engineering can end up feeling under-served

One caveat: James is not sure that this would scale up to a larger firm (his has 220 or so people). In the summary, he figures that the roles will eventually split to some extent - probably around industry verticals, followed by field marketing.

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