Working cross-functionally to establish product marketing OKRs | Rebecca Geraghty, VP of Product Marketing at Publicis Media
Episode
21 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Productivity, Leadership
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Agile Goal Architecture: Structure product marketing goals as large epics — broad, overarching objectives — then break them into weekly deliverable subtasks. This mirrors agile product development and allows teams to maintain strategic direction while staying responsive to shifting priorities, avoiding the rigidity of fixed annual plans that no longer reflect how technology and SaaS markets move.
- ✓Pausing Goals Is a Strategy: When priorities shift, formally pausing an in-progress goal preserves the work already invested rather than abandoning it. Geraghty frames this as a feature, not a failure — the groundwork remains available to resume later, allowing the team to redirect focus toward what matters most in the current moment without losing prior momentum.
- ✓Cross-Functional PMM Scope: Product marketing at Publicis Media interfaces with product, support, program operations, scrum masters, and end users simultaneously. To manage this, Geraghty anchors every project by returning to one question: what problem are we solving? This single filter cuts through ambiguity and keeps cross-functional work aligned regardless of how many teams are involved.
- ✓Team Empowerment Through Knowledge Centers: Rather than delegating top-down, Geraghty builds each team member into a knowledge center — someone who understands their products, users, market, and internal processes deeply enough to co-set priorities. As members ramp up, the goal shifts from receiving direction to meeting leadership in the middle to define goals collaboratively.
- ✓Messaging Effectiveness Test: Effective messaging passes a real-time resonance check with the audience. If the listener shows confusion or disengagement, the message has failed regardless of its sophistication or effort invested. The target signal is visible comprehension — a nod, a spark of recognition — confirming the message clearly communicates the problem being solved and the action available.
What It Covers
Rebecca Geraghty, VP of Product Marketing at Publicis Media, shares how she built a five-person product marketing team from scratch and established cross-functional OKRs using agile frameworks, flexible goal-setting, and collaborative priority-setting that empowers each team member to co-own their objectives.
Key Questions Answered
- •Agile Goal Architecture: Structure product marketing goals as large epics — broad, overarching objectives — then break them into weekly deliverable subtasks. This mirrors agile product development and allows teams to maintain strategic direction while staying responsive to shifting priorities, avoiding the rigidity of fixed annual plans that no longer reflect how technology and SaaS markets move.
- •Pausing Goals Is a Strategy: When priorities shift, formally pausing an in-progress goal preserves the work already invested rather than abandoning it. Geraghty frames this as a feature, not a failure — the groundwork remains available to resume later, allowing the team to redirect focus toward what matters most in the current moment without losing prior momentum.
- •Cross-Functional PMM Scope: Product marketing at Publicis Media interfaces with product, support, program operations, scrum masters, and end users simultaneously. To manage this, Geraghty anchors every project by returning to one question: what problem are we solving? This single filter cuts through ambiguity and keeps cross-functional work aligned regardless of how many teams are involved.
- •Team Empowerment Through Knowledge Centers: Rather than delegating top-down, Geraghty builds each team member into a knowledge center — someone who understands their products, users, market, and internal processes deeply enough to co-set priorities. As members ramp up, the goal shifts from receiving direction to meeting leadership in the middle to define goals collaboratively.
- •Messaging Effectiveness Test: Effective messaging passes a real-time resonance check with the audience. If the listener shows confusion or disengagement, the message has failed regardless of its sophistication or effort invested. The target signal is visible comprehension — a nod, a spark of recognition — confirming the message clearly communicates the problem being solved and the action available.
Notable Moment
Geraghty describes an early career moment at Canon where she questioned whether she was doing marketing at all — spending time on item codes and physically arranging product boxes. That identity crisis predated PMA's existence, and her first conference there was the first time she encountered others asking the same questions.
Episode Transcript
Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Product Marketing Insider podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Chapman, and I'm the senior copywriter here at Product Marketing Alliance. I'm continuing to wind back the clock to the Product Marketing Summit in San Francisco, where where I welcome product marketers to the podcast stage for compelling industry discussions. And in this episode, I'm thrilled to share my chat with Rebecca Geraghty, VP of product marketing at Publicis Media. Rebecca is a marketing and communications professional for b two b technologies and an active writer and contributor to the product marketing field. Her recent inclusion in the top 100 product marketing influencers list for 2022, Rebecca has experience marketing both hardware and software solutions at the likes of Canon, Publicis, and early stage start ups. She's worked across a range of industries, as well as SaaS, augmented reality, AI, and has even experienced working with advanced aerospace technology products. During our chat, Rebecca shared her insights on how product marketers can work cross functionally to establish product marketing OKRs. Okay. So, delighted to be joined here at the Product Marketing Summit by Rebecca Geraghty. So Rebecca is the VP of Product Marketing at Publicis Media. Rebecca, so good to finally meet you after all this time. So good to finally meet you too, Laurence. And like I was saying, you're actually taller than I expected, so it's fun to get to discover the real person. I know we've kind of been friends over Slack and Zoom for years now. Slack and Zoom. Yeah. Seeing outside, like, the little box is, it's quite strange. But, how are you? Everything good? Everything is good. And the biggest thing I've been excited to tell you is I took my first trip to The UK since the pandemic back in July Yeah. And I actually went to Manchester. You went to Manchester? I did. Did you did you like it? Oh my gosh. It's the best. I I have a bunch of family there, so I was kinda practicing my accent to give it to you. So do you wanna hear it? I go. Well, we went to Manchester for the fourth of July weekend. And the funny thing was everywhere I went, I was looking at the Union Jack and took photos to face to post to Facebook. That's fantastic. You know what? 10 out of 10. 10 out of 10. Really? I'd say it's even better than mine, Rebecca. Even better than mine. Even better than mine. But well, I was in Tealoch. Right? I was in, Wilmslow. Oh, fantastic. Lovely. Really. Very, very nice. Oh, I'm glad you had a nice time. So, just to start off here, please can you just tell us a little about about your role at Publicist Media? Sure. Well, I lead a product marketing team of five people and we're at a really exciting moment as a team because, I was asked to go from being an individual contributor last …
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