I can’t believe I’m writing this, but today is the first day of September 🤯

Summer’s over, I’m back from Greece and, just like that, there are only 114 days until Christmas (yes, I’m counting).

2025 is literally around the corner — and by around the corner, I mean 122 days away. Which means it’s time for annual planning.

Product marketing initiatives are notoriously challenging to both measure and prioritize. But, if you’re able to set the right goals and the right KPIs up front, you’ll be set up for success.

Since every organization is different, I asked leaders in the PMM Camp community to share their approaches and frameworks to annual planning.

Here’s three approaches for you to borrow as you think ahead to 2025.

Setting Annual PMM Goals

Jacki Brown

Fractional PMM Leader

I like to start by capturing all of the key goals and milestones on two slides per product area. This helps to give everyone a very concise view and gain alignment on the most important initiatives across the business:

• Slide 1: Business Goals, Organizational Strategies to Achieve Goals, Marketing Strategies to Achieve Goals, Product Launches, Key Releases

• Slide 2: Quarterly Calendar with milestones for product launches, releases, key events, key initiatives (sales enablement, brand, lead gen)

I have the team each create one for their product categories and I create one for the business. Then I pull the largest initiatives from the products into the "master" that included the company priorities.

This was super helpful for people to visualize conflicts across the organization (ie. 4 launches in March?) and how to best manage resources.

👋🏻 Say hi to Jacki on LinkedIn

Melissa Todisco

Sr Director of PMM at AlphaSense

I typically start with the organizational objectives we can impact and map those to outcome metrics we can either own or strongly influence.

Then I identify the workstreams that will support those goals. From there I outline the key results for each workstream, which are more output based. Then every workstream has an owner.

Here’s an example of the output 👇🏻

👋🏻 Say hi to Melissa on LinkedIn

Tamara Grominsky

Creator of PMM Camp

I needed to get in on this question myself as I’m super passionate about setting effective goals for the team.

In my opinion, every PMM team goal needs to ladder up to company-wide initiatives. This is the easiest way to drive impact and influence across the business.

To do this, I map one team objective to each company objective. It’s likely that you’ll focus most of your team’s efforts on select priorities, so some objectives may be larger than others. That’s totally OK. From there, I brainstorm with the team to determine the best KPIs for us to measure our work.

Everything fits on one slide that can be easily shared with my team, with the senior leadership team, and with other stakeholders across the business.

Each of these team objectives then gets their own slide where we can dig deeper into how we will bring that objective to life (ie. what launches, campaigns and projects will go on our roadmap).

I’m curious — do you want me to write a whole edition breaking down my annual planning process in more detail? Hit reply and let me know.

CAMPER ESSENTIALS

🎧 Playlist: Bookmark this Product Marketing Life episode with Julien Sauvage to hear how he’s tackling category creation over at Clari.

🗓️ Events: I’m headed to San Francisco this week to speak at the Product Marketing Summit. Will you be there? Come find me and say hello!

Until next week,