Get answers from product marketing leaders
Mary Sheehan
Adobe Head of Lightroom Product Marketing | Formerly Google, AdRoll • July 12
* Practice some basic questions you will get using the STAR method (The STAR method is a structured manner of responding to a behavioral-based interview question by discussing the specific situation, task, action, and result of the situation you are describing) * Do you have a product marketing philosophy? * What’s the biggest project you’ve led? What worked/ didn’t? * Challenge: If you had $5k to spend in any way you wanted, how would you spend it and why? * Will this be the same type of role you’ve done before or something different? * Have you been promoted in your previous role? * How did you manage success in your last role? * What new skill have you learned lately? (personal or professional) * What metrics are important to manage as a product marketer? * For case studies, here are some common ones I've seen to be prepared for: * Fill out a messaging & positioning doc for a product of their choice. * Create a mini go-to-market strategy for a product they like and present it to the team * Dissect a launch, and to tell you who they think it was positioned to (and why), the highs and lows, and what they would have done differently * Yasmeen Turayhi wrote a great book I'd recommend * I wrote a blog post for hiring managers a while ago where you can see the other side of the coin: https://www.productlaunch.pro/blog/zjinmm6iorhoxmpi7tp5dizallpbdo
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Adrienne Joselow
HubSpot Director of Product Marketing • December 6
We develop personas in three degrees depending on the need: lightweight, qualitative, and quantitative (statistical). Each of these populate a similar framework: demographic details (job title, geo if applicable, age range, etc), responsibilities/needs/jobs to be done, challenges/pain points, Worth mentioning that a companion framework, the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), is often created to establish firmagraphic targeting to complement. Competitive insights are typically not included in our persona frameworks (though I hold space for exceptions here in rare cases - i.e. if credentialing on a certain product is part of a job responsibility). Instead, generally, our competitive insights are cultivated and applied in conjunction with the above. From a Challenger model, we aim to reframe the problem, introduce new/improved impavt as a result, and ultimately reveal value.
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Raman Kalyan
Microsoft Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft 365 Security • December 1
We have different types of product marketing teams: 1. Core product marketing - responsibile for working closely with engineering on influencing the product roadmap and developing the value proposition with associated assets to drive awarness, consideration and adoption of our solutions 2. GTM - responsible for training our field and partners to ensure they understand the value proposition and can clearly articulate it to drive consideration and adoption of our solutions 3. Events - responsible for all first party and third party events where we will be present
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Nisha Goklaney
HubSpot Senior Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, American Express, Sage • November 9
Brilliant question. If developed correctly, your messaging pillars should be evergreen (i.e. should not change on a dime) from campaign to campaign. Ultimately, your messaging pillars bring to life the core value your product/service delivers to customers and hence should be foundational. As you release new product features, think about how they ladder up to your core messaging pillars (aka the value you deliver to customers) and map them as such. Here are some best practices to ensure you get maximum traction from your messaging and that there is consistency across how channel marketers, PR teams, sales etc. use them. 1. Develop a 'How to guide' - In a how to guide, your role is to essentially breakdown and provide guidance to your key stakeholders on how they should be using your messaging - are there direct copy points they can leverage for the website, social, ad copy? Can your PR team directly leverage speaking points or use your messaging pillars? Can your sales team directly use your pitch with a talk track? Break it down for them with instructions, so it’s easy for your stakeholders to use and re-use your messaging. Good messaging is used on an ongoing and consistent basis across 360 channels - to promote customer recall. 2. Roadshow - Showshow your messaging across your sales, customer success, marketing organization - and explain how each team can effectively utilize your messaging. 3. Centralize where you store your messaging - so its easily findable and referencable by all stakeholders. Encourage folks to bookmark it
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I've worked at Series B startups all the way up to F500 companies. The theory behind product launches is the same - you want to align your launch to business goals. But, the HOW (the tactics and resources) and the WHO (the team) behind executing a product launch are really where there are differences. At a F500 company, you've got dedicated teams for naming, brand, sales enablement, web, social, and more. PMMs might focus only on launch messaging at a larger company, and spend a lot of time on stakeholder management and alignment. At a smaller company, you've got fewer stakeholders to get in a room, so you can move very quickly, but PMMs will often end up wearing those hats worn by other teams (e.g. writing email copy, landing page copy, thinking about naming and branding, etc.)
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Christina Dam
Lightspeed Commerce Vice President, Brand & Product Marketing | Formerly Apple, Electronic Arts, Digitas • October 13
Great question and I would be very curious to hear how other companies do this! I mentioned in an earlier question that Square is very collaborative, and that means there is a mix of formal, and informal, ways in which we deliver customer feedback. Formal research / customer feedback studies: * PMM often captures customer feedback through conducting surveys, commissioning external research, listening to calls from Sales or Account Management/Customer Success, analyzing dashboards, or conducting interviews ourselves. * When we conduct these more formal studies, we always produce a Google Doc that summarizes the project objectives, goals and approach, and key findings (in addition to a link to all the raw data & feedback). * PMMs can provide immense value by taking the time to distill the insights into an executive summary, and articulate the prevalence of a specific piece/theme of feedback, and the impact it could have if addressed (e.g. will more customers adopt the product, vs. will it help with engagement or retention, etc). * In order to highlight this added strategic perspective, I haven’t found anything more effective than a well-written doc that the product teams can read and comment on. More informal ways of delivering feedback: * We host regular meetings with our Sales, Account Management and Customer Success representatives where they can surface individual customer stories and feedback directly to both PMs and PMMs. * We also utilize slack channels heavily, where PMMs and other functions can share customer feedback directly with our product managers, as we hear it. While many of these ‘one-off’ stories re-inforce feedback that has already been heard before, they provide additional insight into use cases or nuances that may not have been fully understood before. Top Tools used for delivering customer feedback: 1. Google Docs & Sheets - to summarize customer feedback, which can be translated into spreadsheets that Product Managers can use to further assess and prioritize the requests. 2. Salesforce is used by our Sales/AM teams to log feature requests, with dashboards we can access to pull top requests. 3. Gong - We also utilize Gong to listen to calls from our Sales/AM teams, and will often include links to the recordings in write-ups. And finally, I’ll mention the importance of repetition in delivering customer feedback. A well-written report may be appreciated and digested, but a PMM will gain even more trust as the voice of the customer if they are also referencing those key insights and speaking knowingly about the customer use cases in live discussions, product design reviews, roadmap planning sessions and more.
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Angus Maclaurin
BILL Director of Product Marketing • February 2
Product Marketing plays a critical role in launching products, but it is harder to measure. This question can come up frequently in performance reviews and setting OKRs for the coming year. Product Marketing owns several key areas of product launch - from defining customer needs and key features to launch strategy and target channels. Multiple goals may be binary - Did you do customer research? Did you create a launch plan? The challenge comes when you want to tie these activities to specific revenue results and try to separate what team contributed what percentage. The type of product also has an impact on what gets measured. For some it’s about active usage, or upgrades to premium features, while for others it’s about how many units are moved off the shelf. Product Marketing should help define the baseline goals and track improvements against these metrics as you optimize your marketing and outreach. One of the best options is to create shared goals. Frequently you can see conflicts between sales and marketing when the goals are different. Marketing may reach MQL goals, but sales may complain that the quality of leads were not high enough. The more you can align on the same goal, the more the teams work together to reach your overall revenue and profit goals. Ideally you can get to a point where everyone - from product management to product marketing to sales - are measured on the same target. Then each team can focus on how they can optimize their specific part of the process. In my current role, Product Managers, Product Marketing, and Growth Marketing all have common revenue targets. This enables us to all aim towards the same end goal. We can start with the customer journey and how we can contribute to bottom-line growth. Often it works well to create a prioritized list with all potential tactics back. Then we can easily determine if it’s more important to build a new feature or optimize our email messaging.
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Charlotte Norman
Canva Head Of Product Marketing • May 20
The first 90 days is such an exciting and sometimes overwhelming time in a person's career. The best way to set up for success in 90 days is as follows: Day 1 - 30: Learn, learn, learn The first task I complete (and subsequently ask my newbies to complete) is an end-to-end product audit. The goal of this exercise is for newbies to learn the product and marketing flows inside out, from the perspective of one of our customers (ie. not looking up internal docs of what the flows are meant to be). While on this journey we want our newbies to use their fresh set of eyes to scrutinize the flows for anything which doesn’t make sense, was confusing, is broken or could be optimized. This audit is shared with the product and marketing teams and suggestions are factored into the roadmaps. This task celebrates the person's new and unique perspective on your product and helps them share their ideas with a wide range of stakeholders. For the remainder of the 30 days, become a complete sponge and absorb as much context as you possibly can before your workload starts to creep up on you. The key areas to explore to help build context are: * Identifying and meeting with all your key stakeholders for a listing tour * Diving into key dashboards and reporting * Reviewing the company and your teams' strategic focuses for the year * Immersing yourself in your audience: reading reports, recorded interviews, * user testing, feedback channels, speaking with customers * Understanding the ways of operating and processes of the business * Reviewing all the sales enablement content, sales goals * Reviewing and understand the product roadmap and the current product functionality * Understanding the competitive landscape of your company and product offering Days 30 - 60: Getting some quick wins Once you have all this context you’ll be in a much better position to start executing your workload. Work with your manager to identify your key deliverables for the next 60 dates and a prioritization framework. Identify some quick win projects you can quickly execute to help build your confidence in the new role and build rapport with your colleagues. In many of the roles I’ve started, I’ve often been brought in to help wrangle a large GTM or group of stakeholders from chaos to clarity. If this is the case, evaluate all angles of the GTM from the perspective of each core stakeholder to help formulate an understanding of the project holistically. Spending a decent chunk of time understanding the blockers, challenges, and misalignment from your key stakeholders will help you build relationships with these folks and ultimately help you develop a GTM strategy that brings clarity to the situation. Helping to bring clarity to any project is a surefire way to have a big impact. Days 60 - 90: Executing Based on your project list, this is the timeframe where you might start to see some of your bigger projects come to life and be executed. Now that you have a better understanding of the company and you’ve got some wins on the board, a great way to make an impact is to seek out new opportunities or problems to solve for your team. Be the person that sees opportunity in a problem and proposes a solution or experiment to try and resolve it.
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Quinn Hubbard
Matterport Head of Global Brand & Product Marketing, Director • May 3
This is a great question because, as every PMM knows, each launch holds a surprise hiccup. If you can mitigate as much risk as possible before that time comes, then you’ll be successful in solving those last minute snafus. Assuming your marketing brief and GTM plan are finalized and approved, a successful GTM execution comes down to organization, stakeholder alignment and (the hardest one!) seeing around corners. Here are the riskiest components in each of those categories and how to mitigate that risk: 1. Lack of organization: * Misaligned plans * Losing track of documents and creative files * Overly tight timelines * Rehashing previous conversations How to mitigate: Keep a source of truth document (or spreadsheet, my personal favorite) where you track every single launch component, including status and timeline, meeting notes, resources, channel plans and assets, launch day tick tock and more. 2. Missing stakeholder alignment: * Vague R&R * Lack of resourcing * Unclear expectation-setting How to mitigate: Bring your cross-functional and marketing partners along for the journey by pulling them in at key strategic milestones when you’re creating your plan, then holding regular status meetings up until launch through to a post-mortem. 3. Not seeing around corners: * Lack of familiarity with the deployment tech * Broken user journeys * 11th hour feedback How to mitigate: This one tends to be company-specific, so ask your colleagues about unexpected day-of discoveries on previous launches and then prepare for those specific scenarios. Also, it never hurts to build a buffer into your timeline and have an extra set of eyes on the creative before it goes out the door.
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Liz Gonzalez
Zendesk Director of Product Marketing - Global Enterprise (previously NYSE: ZEN) • August 23
PMM can influence several touchpoints across the enterprise sales motion. PMM’s biggest impact will likely vary widely depending on the business stage. Identifying and anticipating the needs of each person in the buying group and building appropriate content and messaging and aligning that to the sales process will be key. Adding value through the enterprise sales cycle can be done in a number of different ways including managing standardized Request for Proposal (RFP) responses, building a partnership with analyst relations team to help drive analyst outlook, and enabling the sales team with a differentiated story that speaks to large business impacts with solid proof points. I’d recommend analyzing your current sales motion today, what’s the biggest area of impact you find? Is there enough pipeline coverage? What are your conversion and win rates, can they be improved? What objections do your sales teams need to overcome? Is your message resonating in the market?
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