Create Market Segments Like a Mural PMM

0:02Hi friends, welcome to Product Marketing Adventures, the only show that takes you beyond theory and into the real execution of product marketing. My name is Elle Grossenbacher, your trusted guide and host of this show. In each episode, I bring in expert product marketers to co-host two segments of this show. First, a case study example of their work, followed by a messaging critique for companies we admire. So if you're a PMM looking for practical guidance and inspiration, you're in the right place. Are you ready? Let's go.

0:41Okay, PMMs, I think most of you are going to agree with this thought. Really great product marketers stand out early on in their careers or early on in their roles by how they act when they first start in whatever new role they are starting in. So let me explain. When a PMM starts in a new job, really great PMMs listen. Okay, they talk to team members and stakeholders, again, early on in that career or role, and they look for problems that keep coming up. Then they figure out where those problems are actually affecting the business. And when they find something important, they jump on it and they collect an early win and boost their reputation all for the better.

1:30So that's exactly what today's guest did. You guys, it is my pleasure to welcome Jeremy Moskowitz to the show. Jeremy has had one of those career paths that I think makes you immediately want to ask about the whole story. His career started in sales, left to become an unpaid intern at Apollo.io, eventually converting to the first product hire, then moved into product marketing at LinkedIn, and then joined Outreach where he worked across product marketing, revenue marketing, and portfolio product marketing. So while at Outreach, Jeremy launched its AI agent platform, which went on to generate roughly$30 million in revenue in its first year.

2:12He was also part of the team behind several of Outreach's zero-to-one launches and helped lead some of its first platform-wide campaigns as the company expanded from primarily serving SDRs into the AE audience. Today, Jeremy is the VP of Marketing at Mural. But here's the interesting part. That's not the role that he originally joined Mural to do. He joined as VP of product marketing. And within his first few months, he spotted a problem he hadn't been hired specifically to solve, built something surprisingly simple to solve it, helped sales win the company's biggest deal of the year, got the CEO using his work with customers, and ultimately saw the initiative become something the entire Salesforce was certified on.

3:02So today we are talking all about how to find the problems that actually matter when you enter a new organization, how to turn an early PMM win into broader business momentum, and why sometimes the best thing you can do with your tried and true PMM playbook is to ignore it. Jeremy, it's amazing to have you on the show. Excited to be here, Elle. Just a couple of NorCal kids talking product marketing. My favorite thing to do. All right, let's dive right in. So for anyone who isn't familiar with Mural, give us a quick overview. What is Mural exactly? All right. So everyone knows what it's like to work on a complicated cross-functional project.

3:44Lots of planning sessions, lots of stakeholders, communications. Everyone agrees to a plan when you're in a meeting, and then you go out in time to execute and it just becomes frustrating. Nothing gets done. People are miscommunicated. Work has to be redone because people had different mental models. Well, Mural is fixing that problem. We've been in the market a long time as a visual collaboration platform, digital canvas. You could use it for anything from sprint planning to UX research, campaign planning. And because we know that everyone has their sessions in Mural, We're using AI to transform that canvas into an organizational brain, something that remembers each of these sessions, remembers the decisions and the next steps that we're aligned on and helping people stay aligned so that there's less rework.

4:35Decisions are clear and teams get to outcome faster. I love that. Yeah, I feel like when I first encountered Mural, it was just this virtual whiteboard. And now it's so much more sophisticated. so it makes me extra eager to share this story today. Okay, so take us back to January, 2026. You joined Mural as the VP of product marketing. And I think the context here matters a lot because Mural had been through some pretty significant transition. So give us the lay of the land when you walked in, what happened to the company and what did you think you were going to do there? Yeah. So the reason I came to Bureau in January of this year is that they were going through a transformation that I had seen outreach go through, where you go through explosive growth, you know, largely supported by having one product that one ICP loves.

5:33During COVID, when there's pressure on remote work, there's, you know, even more demand for that product. Something like a virtual whiteboard to replace all of the meetings people had in person was kind of ripe for that market. Then we saw the market correction that you see in software in the 22s. I guess I'll call that early 20s. It feels like it's weird to say. And there was a transition on the leadership team and marketing was being rebuilt. And I was hired by a new CEO and new CMO who had a mandate to transform Mural. And so it was exciting for me because I'd had great four years of outreach, but I realized that to increase the impact of my product marketing, I had to decrease the size of the organization I was marketing in.

6:18And so I came into Mural, you know, there was one existing product marketer there, but I had, sorry, there were two existing PMMs there and two that I knew I had to hire. And so that context meant that I was coming into an org that had not had a lot of product marketing support recently, but had a lot of demand and appetite for it. Yes, I can picture the exact environment that you're describing. I find those opportunities to be some of the most exciting for a product marketing leader, any marketing leader, for that matter, right? You you look around and you're like, oh my gosh, there's so much here that we can fix.

6:59And it's, it feels a little bit like cheating because you're like, oh, it's going to be so easy for me to get some quick wins because the bar is actually kind of low because there's so much appetite for and demand for your expertise or your team's expertise. And it's helpful that you got there and you already had a little bit of that with your existing PMM, but then you can focus and distribute more obviously with, with yourself on board. And I was extremely fortunate that one of the PMMs on my team, who was kind of the first hire, first mover of the org, had basically from scratch built out the feature release process and the art of like product shipping things, enabling the field, figuring out like consistent channels where we notify and enable customers on them.

7:45If I had not had the luxury of that PMM, Katie, having built that from scratch, that's probably something I would have had my focus on much earlier. Yeah. Shout out to those early PMM builders. OK, so you get there, you look around, you kind of like in rebuild mindset, you know, I guess like walk me through what you thought you were going to initially work on based on what you described. I would think like messaging is going to be what you're going to go through first, right? Because you described this huge transition that the company is going through. So what happened with that? Yeah. So you're right.

8:23I am historically a messaging guy. You talked about the persona campaigns. I'd done an outreach. I walked in thinking that my PMM team was going to be structured that way, that I was going to be kind of running playbooks and very specific, like segment specific campaigns geared to different ICPs who, you know, we're on a spectrum of, we know that there's a fit with them for Mural, or there's some kind of nascent demand that we see that we want to kind of pour gas on or test. And, you know, I also noticed the website and the website does not how I would structure a website historically. And so I came in and said, these are the three things that I have typically done when I come into a new marketing role.

9:11When I've seen marketing leaders come in, they were usually the three things that they focused on. And so I was like, hey, this is what I'm going to prioritize. And we also had somewhat of a compelling event. Our sales kickoff was coming up and it was a good forum to debut. new website, new, and a new first call deck that would kind of have that new, new message associated with Mural. Yeah. So the stars are aligning. You're the messaging guy. You have the opportunity. You've got your tried and true PMM playbooks. So you get to SCO. And for those who don't know, SCO is sales kickoff, annual sales gathering for that year's trainings and all of that good stuff.

9:52So what happened when you got to SCO where you first thought you'd be debuting all these big initiatives? So a couple of things happened. Number one, even before we get to SCO, very early on in my tenure, there was a small reorg and content marketing started reporting to me. I am not historically a content marketer, but my PMM hat, and especially that period where portfolio was on my product marketing title, I work very closely with content and demand gen and kind of just know what that machine should look like. But I had some work to do kind of retaining a content marketer who was in C, making sure that the existing funnel we had didn't break.

10:34And then also hiring for two other open PMM slots that I had. And the first thing that forced me to do was, you know, like reexamine my priorities and reexamine like what's really a burning need. And one thing I noticed early on was that website, which it wasn't how I would message. It was converting pretty well. So it was, you know, any funnel challenges we wanted to correct were not necessarily associated with the website. So I was like, OK, I'm going to shift my attention to elsewhere where, like you said, I have a lot of this pent up demand. I built out that first call deck. I kind of went through, familiarized myself with the existing messaging and basically looked for opportunities to kind of update it for where the market was today, listen to call recordings.

11:23Slackbot has a great integration where whatever your CI tool is, you can integrate it and then you can just start kind of querying it yourself, saving me a lot of time. And I was able to, you know, in kind of much more rapid fashion than I'm used to, get to a first call deck, April Dunford style, you know, use cases and something that I was ready to test with a small pocket of reps kind of as a fast follow to SCO. So I get to sales kickoff and one, it was great. It's the least amount of work I've done for a sales kickoff in my career. All the folks at Outreach listening to this will laugh about, I used to have the nickname Headset Jeremy because I used to be like wearing a headset like a producer and like yanking our execs on and off stage when they had to present.

12:09So I was there just for the vibes. But it was also that moment, I'd been like a little bit below the radar in my first two months on the job and reps kind of discovered who I was and they started tapping me on the shoulder. Oh, we have a big RFP and we need help, you know, answering questions about AI innovation or in this other competitive deal we're in, you know, they ask us about this feature that a competitor doesn't have. Do we have that? And I started recognizing that product roadmap was a problem. And so I dug in, I met with some of these groups at SCO and realized that the roadmap existed, it was in various places.

12:50It was not like one centralized customer roadmap that I was used to. There's a process or tiering related to deals of this size, an SC would present it, that size you'd get a PMM or a product manager, this size execs, etc. This was a pretty clear direct line to that gap in product marketing that had been there. Sales reps were going directly to the product team. When there was a product roadmap request from a customer. Obviously, product managers want to want to add a little bit of friction there so that they can focus on developing the roadmap. But it was kind of creating confusion and some scramble and maybe us showing up to some customer calls without the roadmap that we would want to.

13:32I also saw opportunities with like how to objection handle against some certain features on a competitive roadmap that no PMM had just kind of sat, had the opportunity to sit, think about what our roadmap was in context of that objection and have those kind of quick one to two liners that help with that. So as I was at SCO and I was in those meetings, I was like, okay, there's another problem here that I could take a look at and solve. I have to point something out just as you were talking. What I noticed is that you didn't download a bunch of data, shove it into Clot or some AI tool of choice and have it tell you what you needed to go work on, you sat and listened and you use your, what I guess the kids these days are calling marketing judgment, taste, whatever you want to call it.

14:28I'm just saying your experience and expertise. Yeah. I mean, gosh, is that a differentiator? That's going to make me cry a little bit, but But yeah, no, I mean, it was about just not being rigid. And I certainly would have liked to have updated the website or gone to these sales resources. Like that kind of stuff's about as close as I get to go into the movies these days. But this was a need. And I recognized pretty quickly because there are some late stage deals coming up where they needed help kind of aggregating this for audiences of users. And eventually like a final call with the decision maker where I had to like, I remember sitting down with our AI PMM at sales kickoff and be like, hey, here's a bunch of slides I've found in different places.

15:16Like, is this blessed on the roadmap? Is this blessed on the roadmap? And it was like, yes, that one is, that one is. We're not doing that one anymore. By the way, here's three new other things that aren't on there. And I just kind of like first like hacked together, quote unquote, this initial roadmap that helped us like move the ball forward on these. And, you know, one of those you said at the top of the call, one of those deals we brought our chief product officer in to present it to the decision maker. And it didn't happen immediately, but within two months, it led to us winning the biggest deal of the year so far.

15:52It's pretty incredible. So it started with here, you joined the team, you immediately get some shakeup, you acquire a few other members, you're bringing your tried and true playbooks, you're going to see all these opportunities with, you know, potentially the website, potentially here and there. And then you thought, okay, well, let's do the first call deck. And as you're digging into that, then you start to identify this recurring need within the business of roadmap confusion. sounds super chaotic, which I personally have been in that situation as a product marketer with my sales team and, you know, kind of being the referee between PM and salespeople.

16:30And sometimes it even demands a product manager's time to go into customer meetings, which can be beneficial, but can also be not beneficial. So it's, it can be totally chaotic. And so once you did that and you started to create this, you know, we're calling it the roadmap story, I guess, like, what is that what you actually built? Talk us through a little bit more what what you built. So I think we established the proof of concept for the that first deal. Then within like a week or so, probably like within seven to 10 days after that meeting, our CEO was going on a trip to Europe, visit our big customers, shake hands, roadshow.

17:14And she says, hey, can you build me a thematic roadmap? So looking at what our innovation plan was for the year and kind of bucketing things into like a single slide that showed where we're investing, what our strategy was, and then, you know, kind of like light gates, light timeline associated with that. um so i worked with our chief product officer to deliver that but then like a good uh improv artist i yes anded knowing that there had been this need for kind of slideware associated with individual features on that roadmap i kind of appended that to the end of it i aligned the slides in their different product areas to the themes on the roadmap um and kind of rolled out a a full-fledged roadmap that the CEO could take on tour with her.

18:05And she was presenting it with customers. And I remember getting these five-minute video updates in intervals of Lee Margaret, our CEO. We call her LM in case I say that again, saying like, hey, this is so great. This bucket of the vision is landing. This one isn't as much. I wonder if we called it this or that. And me and my chief product officer were either pushing back on concepts we liked or other ones like, hey, let's try this. And we iterated in real time on the roadmap with customers. And it was really exciting. It helped out a lot in a lot of those meetings there. And then when we came back, I ended up kind of scope creeping myself because I was ready to roll out that first call deck to everyone.

18:53And she came back and said, this thing is working. we need to teach the field how to use it. And so we ended up enabling the entire field on how to use that roadmap. We had different expectations for if you were an SC who is going to be more technical versus a CSM or account manager, and you're working with customers versus an AE who may be working in new business opportunity. So good. I have to comment on how kind of unglamorous some of this was in the beginning. It kind of started with you found a problem and you kind of just kept inserting yourself into that recurring theme of a problem and how it evolved into, and this is kind of the cherry on top.

19:42Yes, it was a roadmap. I'm calling it a roadmap strategy, but it sounds like it evolved into your narrative, like your innovation narrative that you then enabled the field on, which kind of is messaging. It did. And actually, that's a great point, because also we paired it with our CEO's kind of vision talk track for these customers. And that was close to what we had for the first call narrative. But it did create this flywheel where there were elements of the vision that are still like market level that wouldn't be appropriate for a first call deck, but we fed some of that stuff, the stuff that really worked into the next iteration of the first call deck that we enabled sales reps on.

20:31And then we also, and this was a learning from Elena, our chief product officer, the roadmap was a great hook for discovery. And so when I, in my session where I enabled the field on it, I actually spent more time on the situations and based on different personas or contact types that they would encounter in the deal at what elevation they would do, they would do discovery. And I spent maybe more time on that than I did on like the actual feature functionality on the roadmap to the chagrin of like a couple of folks who maybe were expecting that technical deep dive. But I think that was, you know, that was something that our sales leaders had huge appetite for and proved to be really valuable in the end.

21:17This is so good. So like I was going to you actually answered a question I was going to ask you and I was going to ask you about how you kind of scaled this whole thing out, because you mentioned that this started with winning the biggest deal of the year and then you obviously scaled it out and enabled the entire field. But I love even the way that you thought through it in terms of persona and, you know, the different talk tracks and like all the way to discovery, not even to, you know, actual open prospect. Well, and like this, and some of this is feedback from another thing that I did that was a quick win for an org that hadn't had a lot of product marketing with, um, where it could seem game changing was I previewed it for sales leaders before I rolled it out to reps and said like, Hey, this is what we're presenting.

22:06This is the top track. Like, tell me what is your feedback as a, as a sales leader? Like, is this solving the right problems? What guardrails do we need to put up for reps? You know, it didn't get, you know, everyone will try and like wordsmith it when you get it with them. And I mean, you know, depending on who it was, sometimes you accept some of those, but it really gave us the opportunity to do discovery around the process and where, you know, they needed to up-level reps and what problems it could help solve. Wow. Okay. And real quick, from the time you started in January, 2026, when did you enable the field?

22:42Like how many months had it been? That was April that we enabled them on the roadmap. map. That is a extremely fast win. Yeah. For like a brand new. Or actually I take it back May. Sorry. Sorry. Let's take that again. I think anything within the first, anything within the first six months. It was May. It was at that scale, at that scale is pretty huge. So well done. I found a problem to solve and I was, I was fortunate because there have been moments in my career at like outreach or at LinkedIn, where I worked on something that was that project that gets you visibility in some of those situations, you're being voluntold and you kind of recognize that this is your opportunity versus this is one where I'd seen that enough times that I just, I knew that that was going to be my, be the opportunity for it.

23:38So you, you kind of ruthlessly prioritize those opportunities when you see them, like you said, you kind of insert yourself into the problem to make sure that it gets recognized and the rest happens from there. Yeah. Okay. Now, so you actually are helping segue into what I wanted to start to transition into, which is the playbook. But before we dig into the playbook, so possibly the most important part, which you're just bringing up, the most important part of this whole story was actually not the impact to the business, which was impressive in and of itself, but it's actually the impact to your career.

24:16So you joined as VP of product marketing in January, and then you had this huge early win for you and your team. And obviously there were some, there's other events that happened, but this also had an influence on your career change within the company. So it did. So a couple of months ago, I worked with an amazing CMO who decided to lead the business on kind of mutual terms. And when our CEO was looking for a new hire, she came to me and said, I'd like you to step into a VP of marketing role, a broader marketing role instead. I mean, I obviously said, yes, you're going to see me. I'm very awkward self-promoting, which is going to be contradictory to one of my points in the playbook in the future.

25:12But it's been a cool I'm about three months in. It's been it's been a great experience. It's given me opportunity to now extend this this same philosophy to other sides of the business. And I spent a year on the revenue marketing team at Outreach, so I'm flexing some of those demand gen muscles again. But that kind of that that exposure and that visibility and kind of early building credibility with the rest of the C-suite helped me kind of be positioned for that next step. I love this because I feel like for this particular episode, it's really like we're getting two case studies in one. Like on one hand, we're getting the case study on like, you know, how to do this really innovative or like, you know, building your vision narrative through the roadmap and enabling the team.

26:05But then on the other hand, we're getting this like career playbook, which is the one that I want to focus on because I think that that's one that I haven't really covered on this podcast before. And it feels like sometimes the best kept secret to building a positive reputation for yourself early on in any role, whether you're more a lower level or more senior. So let's turn this into a playbook. Let's pretend that you are my career coach. And, you know, I'm a PMM at a different company. Obviously, I'm not assuming to get some like VP of marketing type of promotion, right? There's other events that transpired.

26:42But the playbook that I want to emphasize on is making yourself or making myself be visible and having a big win for my reputation, whether that's me as an individual contributor or like me as a team leader. So if that's my goal, what is step one for this playbook? So step one is for the playbook. Don't be precious about your playbook. If you go in very prescriptive, like just looking to run back what you did at the last one, you might get lucky and it's a business with that same set of problems. But more often than not, you may be trying to move the needle on something where the needle doesn't need to be moved.

27:25And this is something I learned from my days of LinkedIn. You know, first time on the job as a PMM, go meet everyone. I joined LinkedIn. I was at the middle of this highly cross-functional launch, and I was working with product, marketing, sales, CS, data science, engineering, PR. So many stakeholders. Some of them I ended up working more closely with. Some of them I didn't, but I got to get a sense of where there were issues and figure out what were high visibility problems that I should be focusing my attention on. And then, uh, and like do the same everywhere you go. If you do go just meet that, um, uh, meet people, try and form relationships, try and understand, you know, like what's going well, what's not, you know, they say like, um, you know, one's an opinion, two's a pattern, three is, is a trend.

28:21Like you start to see the trends of, of issues that are worth your time. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So not necessarily throw away your playbooks, but don't necessarily run them right away. You've got to go learn the business before you start executing. Or like if we want to, if we want to use the metaphor, it's like know which chapter of your playbook you would start on. Sometimes you're starting at the beginning. Sometimes you're starting. Yeah. Yeah. Great point. Okay. So what's tough to be opportunistic, be opportunistic. If you recognize that there's a problem, everyone agrees it's a problem and no one is taking action on it, be the one to do it.

29:00It might not be in your PMM charter. And yes, I know definition of a PMM. I feel like sometimes PMMs don't even know what a PMM is anymore. It's true, but sometimes it's worth it to go out of your charter if it's going help you get stuff done and help the business get stuff done, it kind of earns you the credibility to be kind of stricter in that charter later on. And, and like really focused on PMM as strategists is like, sometimes you just got to make a couple of decks. And if you make a couple of decks, it'll solve a problem. And, you know, it buys you the credibility to operate the strategically or focus on those other aspects.

29:40Yeah. And then would you also suggest that, and maybe I don't want to reveal too much of your playbook later, but like, if you pick a problem that maybe falls, whether or not it falls outside of product marketing, but like, do you do a kind of like, tell them what you're going to do, do it, and then tell them what you did and tell them again? Like, do you do a lot of that? And is that part of your later playbook? I'm sorry if I just jumped ahead. I can't remember when I said this to you. Yes, I did say that to you in this chapter. Sorry. No, it's all good. It's a good reminder. Like you got to be out.