At Kustomer, I ran PMM on one principle: never let leadership be surprised by work they should have seen coming. We called it “build in public,” and it shaped how we ran every launch, every quarter.
When PMM work is invisible until it’s finished, leadership fills the uncertainty with assumptions. Assumptions become opinions. Opinions harden into directives that land in the middle of a launch you’ve been running for six weeks.
What “Build in Public” Actually Means
The goal is visibility at the right moments. Stakeholders feel like participants in the work, with a real-time view into how it’s progressing.
In practice, this looked like three specific choices.
Slack channels for every launch. Every major product launch got its own temporary Slack channel with key stakeholders from across the company. We structured participation using RAPID: the COO held Approve, the PM and sales lead held Recommend. That structure was explicit from day one. People knew their role in the channel, which meant feedback came from the right people at the right stage rather than whoever felt like weighing in.
Weekly updates to the COO tied to OKRs. Every week, my team sent a brief written update covering the top movers and shakers of the week mapped to our OKRs. These connected PMM activity to the outcomes leadership was tracking, rather than listing what we completed. The first email changed how our COO engaged with the team. We went from being a function that delivered finished work to one they felt they understood in motion.
Asana boards shared as live artifacts. Every major launch had an Asana board with the full launch plan, shared with leadership from day one. The working board, shared as a live artifact with no snapshots or PDF summaries. Giving leadership a real-time window into delivery meant the complexity of what we were orchestrating was visible, including all the decisions in progress.
Why PMM Teams Avoid This
Showing unfinished work feels like a credibility risk.
There is a version of professionalism that equates polish with credibility. If you share a draft blog before it’s ready, someone might redline it before you’ve had a chance to land the argument. If you share a launch plan mid-build, you might get questions you can’t answer yet.
The cost of that protective instinct is that leadership can’t see you. And the teams leadership can’t see don’t get budget, headcount, or influence.
The Real Problem Is Timing
The most common failure mode I see in PMM is a timing failure.
Launches underperform because messaging wasn’t pressure-tested with the people who needed to carry it. Sales didn’t have a chance to poke holes in the positioning. CS didn’t know what objections to expect. Leadership saw the finished deck and had no context for the decisions baked into it. By the time anyone had questions, the launch was already in motion.
Every one of those situations came down to communication. The strategy was fine.
Building in public forces you to front-load the alignment that most teams leave to the end. When the Asana board is shared on day one, questions about assets and coverage surface in week one instead of week eight. When sales and CS are in the Slack channel with defined roles, they’re shaping the launch rather than reacting to it. The work is contextualized in real time rather than explained retroactively.
What Changes When You Do This
- Leadership stops auditing you. When they can see the board and the weekly update, they understand what PMM is carrying. The question shifts from “what is PMM working on?” to “how can we help unblock this?”
- PMM gets pulled into decisions earlier. Visibility builds trust, and trust gets you a seat in conversations before commitments are made. That is where the real leverage of a PMM leader lives: shaping what gets launched and how, upstream of execution.
- Your team operates with more clarity. Writing a weekly update tied to OKRs forces you to know what each person is working on and why it matters. If you cannot connect a workstream to an outcome your COO is tracking, it probably should not be on the list.
Where to Start
- Open a launch Slack channel on day one. Define RAPID roles before you add anyone. Drop updates as the work moves.
- Send a five-line weekly update to your COO. Map it to OKRs, cover the week’s top movers, and do it consistently for a month.
- Share your next launch plan in Asana with your head of sales and your head of product. For visibility, full stop.