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All projects·From: PMM vs Marketing vs Product
MiniAudit· 25 minutes

Whose Job Is This? Auditing a Messy Sprint Board for PMM vs Marketing Ownership

Lenskart

Objective: Given a real 18-item sprint board where every task was dumped into one undifferentiated 'Marketing' list, sort each task into General Marketing, Product Marketing, or Shared ownership using the lesson's dimension framework.

You're the new marketing ops hire at Lenskart. The team's sprint board has 18 tasks tagged only 'Marketing,' so PMM work like battlecards and launch plans keeps losing priority to paid-ads tasks with louder deadlines.

Apply the lesson's ownership dimensions (goal, output, audience) to each task, then flag the 3 tasks that are most commonly misrouted between the two functions.

Before you start

What you'll need

Free path (everything below is enough to finish)

Google Sheets
FreeSort and tag the 18-row sprint board by owner

Free, no account friction, easy to share the tagged board back with the team

The process

2 steps

Step 01 of 02

Sorting tasks by primary owner using the goal/output/audience dimensions

The lesson's side-by-side table splits ownership by primary goal (awareness/demand vs. positioning/conversion), output (ads/content/emails vs. positioning docs/battlecards/launch plans), and audience (broad market vs. specific buyer segments).

Row 4 of the board reads 'Write a comparison one-pager for reps facing our #2 competitor in enterprise deals.' Which two dimensions immediately rule out General Marketing ownership here?

Google Sheets— Import sprint-board-export.csv, add an Owner column, freeze the header row.

Procedure

  1. Import sprint-board-export.csv (18 rows: task name, current tag, one-line description)
  2. Add an Owner column with three allowed values: General Marketing, Product Marketing, Shared
  3. For each row, check output type first (an ad or email defaults to General Marketing; a battlecard or positioning doc defaults to PMM), then confirm against audience
  4. Flag any row where output and audience point to different owners as Shared
Sample output
Row 4: 'Write a comparison one-pager for reps facing our #2 competitor in enterprise deals'
  Output: comparison one-pager -> matches 'battlecards' in PMM output column
  Audience: enterprise reps (internal, specific) -> matches PMM audience column
  Owner: Product Marketing

Healthy

14 of 18 rows resolve cleanly to a single owner using output + audience alone.

Unhealthy

Tagging every customer-facing document as 'Marketing' regardless of whether it's an ad or a sales battlecard, because both involve writing.

What this means

Output type is a faster filter than goal, a battlecard is never a demand-gen asset even when the underlying research also feeds a blog post.

So what do I do about it?

SymptomActionEffort
PMM-owned tasks keep slipping behind paid-ads deadlines on a shared boardSplit the board into two swim lanes by the Owner column before the next sprint planning5 min
YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Step 02 of 02

Distinguishing demand generation from positioning and enablement work

The lesson lists PMM's core surface area as positioning, messaging, launch strategy, sales enablement, competitive intelligence, customer research, and onboarding, explicitly separate from demand generation and paid ads.

3 rows on the board involve customer interviews: one is 'quarterly NPS survey analysis,' one is 'win/loss interviews for Q3 launch,' one is 'interview 5 users for a case-study blog post.' Which is the odd one out?

Google Sheets— Same sprint-board-export.csv, Owner column.

Procedure

  1. Re-read the 3 interview-tagged rows against the lesson's 'customer research' bullet vs. 'content marketing' bullet
  2. Mark 'win/loss interviews for Q3 launch' as Product Marketing (feeds positioning and launch strategy directly)
  3. Mark 'interview 5 users for a case-study blog post' as General Marketing (feeds a content asset, not positioning)
  4. Mark 'quarterly NPS survey analysis' as Shared and note who consumes the output first
Sample output
SHARED (1 row)
  quarterly NPS survey analysis -> PMM reads it for positioning drift, Content reads it for testimonial mining

Healthy

Only genuinely dual-purpose research gets tagged Shared, not every task that mentions 'customer.'

Unhealthy

Tagging all customer-interview tasks as Shared because 'research' sounds cross-functional.

What this means

The test is who acts on the output first, not who touches the raw data.

So what do I do about it?

SymptomActionEffort
Every research task on the board is marked Shared and nobody owns follow-upRequire a single named first-owner on every Shared row before the sprint starts5 min
YouYou can do this yourself, no engineering access required.

Final deliverable

An 18-row sprint board with an Owner column filled in (General Marketing, Product Marketing, or Shared), plus a 3-bullet note on the most commonly misrouted tasks.

See a reference example
Sample output
Warby Parker Q3 sprint board (excerpt)

GENERAL MARKETING
  1. Instagram ad set for new frame colorway
  2. Weekly email nurture for cart abandoners

PRODUCT MARKETING
  3. Battlecard: Zenni price-comparison objection handling
  4. Home Try-On launch messaging for the sales-assist team

SHARED
  5. Quarterly NPS analysis -> PMM reads first for positioning drift

Success criteria

You're done when you can:

  • Correctly separates output-type signals from goal signals when a task is ambiguous
  • Flags the 3 most commonly misrouted tasks with a one-line reason each