Karli

Hetherington

Two, mainly. First, defining where Product Marketing ends and Product Management begins, in an organization that's simultaneously trying to mature into a more product-led company, which means the lines are moving under me while I'm trying to draw them. Second, doing this as a team of one inside a mission-driven nonprofit: I'm building launch tiering, evidence/claims discipline, and cross-functional cadences largely from scratch, while also being the only person who can execute on most of it, which makes it hard to protect focus and easy to end up reactive instead of strategic.

I want outside validation and sharper frameworks for the systems I'm already mid-build on, particularly launch process and sales enablement, so I'm not reinventing everything alone through trial and error. I'd also like a repeatable structure I can point to (a real PMM charter) when I'm negotiating scope with Product and Sales leadership, and a peer group who understands the specific loneliness of founding a function rather than joining an established one.

I was hired as ANet's first Director of Product Marketing, standing up the function from zero with no existing playbook or precedent. Since starting, it's become clear just how central this role is to the organization's future: we're shifting from a service-oriented organization to a product-oriented one, and this function sits right in the middle of that transition. That's exactly why I want to build it well, not just fast, and why I want to learn from other solo/founding product marketers, and a mentor who's done this work before, rather than figuring it all out alone.