Get answers from product marketing leaders
Kevin Zentmeyer
Jobber Senior Director, Product Marketing • April 26
One tactical way to get better at interviews is practice using the following method: 1) Search Glassdoor for product marketing interview questions. 2) Google "product marketing interview questions. 3) Copy paste all of them into one document. 4) Scan the document for any questions that you could answer in your sleep and delete them. 5) De-duplicated the remaining questions. 6) Write answers for each of those questions. 7) For repetitions, you can either re-read your answers to these questions or delete your answers and write fresh ones to take yourself through the thought process with a fresh pass at it. This method takes a long time, but getting better at most things requires a significant time investment in deliberate practice. So if you want to get better, this will help.
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Quinn Hubbard
Matterport Head of Global Brand & Product Marketing, Director • May 3
As much as I would love to share a one-size-fits-all KPIs, I’ve found that no two launches are the same. Even if you’re launching a product again in a new market, you’ve probably learned something from the first launch that will lead you to optimize your approach the next time. Instead, I break it down into these four categories and choose the most important metric from each category: * Business metrics: How will this launch help the business to meet its goals? Is it revenue, subscriptions, marketplace balance, users? * Product metrics: What action(s) do we want our target audience to take? For example, trial, adoption, retention, increased usage. * Channel metrics: Based on the way that the campaign is set up, what’s the most important way that our audience can engage with the marketing campaign? Do we want them to watch the video, click on the push notification, read the blog, ask a question or something else entirely? * Top of funnel metrics: What do you want your audience to know, think or feel based on the launch? These are your awareness, perception and sentiment metrics. It takes a lot of discipline to pick only the most important metrics and stay laser-focused on those. But I’ve found that when I’m able to do it, it gives the team a clearer mission and strengthens the impact.
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Ashley Faus
Atlassian Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio • May 24
I recommend a tiering system for product vs. feature launches. The tiers include criteria about the impact of the feature that's launching (or series of capabilities, in the case of a full product launch), and the activities associated with each tier. For example: Tier 1: Impact: All customers, market-level, significant company revenue Activities: Press, social media (product and brand handles, personal handles), newsletters, blog (executive byline), Community series, website update, event keynote, multiple demos, paid promotion (ads, boosting social media, sponsored content, etc.), in-product notifications and/or navigation updates Tier 4: Impact: small sub-set of users, minimal revenue, limited/no market Activities: limited social media, single Community post, limited newsletter promotion The key is how much awareness and attention you want to drive to the new feature or product. If this is creating a new category and/or a new capability, you want to use pull all the marketing levers. You can also grab free templates: https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/templates/product-launch https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/templates/go-to-market
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Kristen Brophy
ThredUP SVP, Marketing | Formerly Uber, Square, 1stdibs • March 24
It's hard to pick a favorite because most of my interviews look different from candidate to candidate. Often, my questions are focused on deeply understanding their past experience and asking for relevant examples that demonstrate the skills and compentencies that will be unqiue to the role and business need. Or, we unpack a case study together. I also go beyond the resume when I'm interviewing. One question that I typically ask is where the candidates want to learn and grow. The best answers to those also demonstrate steps they've taken recently and proactively to grow in a specific area.
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Mike Greenberg
SurveyMonkey Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Apple • January 4
This is probably one of the toughest problems we face as marketers. A lot of times, teams will look at a combination of leading quantitative indicators (clicks, conversions, time spent, etc.) and qualitative signals (from buyer interviews, listening to sales calls, etc.), to take a best guess at what’s working and what’s not. There are lots of problems with this. It’s tough to isolate messaging as the primary driver of these results, and assign quantifiable measures that will clearly indicate improvement if you make changes. Qual feedback takes a lot of time to gather, especially if you want to validate your messaging across a number of buyer personas. A/B testing can help, but you and your GTM team need to be pretty careful not to change anything else (including upper-funnel stuff like ad copy and targeting) that might impact results, which can be paralyzing. Worst of all, while you’re doing all of this, you’re already in-market: the train has left the station and you’re losing opportunity if you’re not sure your message is connecting. Instead, my recommendation is to validate your messaging before you go to market. (I won’t do too much self-promotion here, but it just so happens we make a Message Testing solution at Momentive, and it’s one of the products we leverage the most internally.) With a message testing solution, you can get a number of messages in front of your target audience — we tend to target a broad array of business buyers — and get real data on which messages resonate across a attributes like overall appeal, uniqueness, and, importantly, desire to learn more (as well as segmentation across buyers if you like). This is the kind of thing that, a few years ago, you’d probably need to engage a research agency to run, but modern survey-based tools like ours have purpose-built methodologies built-in, and you can get a clear signal on your key messages in just a day or two. We ran one of these recently to test new headline messaging for our Momentive homepage and it paid off in spades. It validated a messaging direction with our target buyers that was different than what internal leadership was advocating for — so we had some data to bring to the table justifying our positioning (see another of my AMA responses on gaining XF alignment on positioning). If we hadn’t tested, there was a strong risk of going to market with a losing message on one of our most important properties. Instead, we were able to go live on Day 1 with a message that we already know will resonate. In fact, two of our test messages performed strongly, so we were able to run an in-market A/B test to find a winner without really risking any traffic to a poor performer. tl;dr: I recommend using a survey-based solution to test your messaging before you go to market. You’ll get quantifiable information about what works and what doesn’t, aid internal buy-in, and gain a lot of launch day confidence. You will influence other performance KPIs driven by the GTM team, but PMM’s biggest responsibility is ensuring you have messaging that resonates with target buyers.
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Nate Franklin
Hex Head of Product Marketing • January 26
I see those as different skills sets and usually different teams but I don't think there are strict lines in between them. Product Marketers should own the story, the core positioning and messaging, the surrounding context / thought leadership and GTM strategy. Ideally there are counterparts in integrated marketing, campaigns or growth marketing to help make that come to life. But I think there's also what is ideal on paper and what is practical in real life. More often then not those integrated brand / campaign teams are swamped and not only serving the needs of product marketing. As a result, PMMs will more often then not need to stretch into what it specific assets and content needs to be created - whether that's videos, ebooks, blog posts, etc. And quite frankly, your partners in marketing will thank you if you come to them with ideas and they you can brainstorm the best path forward. When I am hiring PMMs the core positioning and messaging skills matter the most, but I also want to know that they can stretch to think and how should this be brough to market.
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Apurva Davé
Aembit CMO • May 25
Think about what matters most to your customer, and then what matters most to your company. * Is your base platform something which your customers will natively interact with and drive value from? * Is it something that a new user in your target accounts will benefit from (eg, developers) ? * Or is your platform something that allows you to accelerate development, so the customer sees more value from the platform faster? Thinking through this will tell you how to build your messaging. While most companies want the platform concept to take center stage, it might not be right for your customer. Or it might appeal to one audience more than another. Or, your platform might really just be like a "feature" that customers only need to know about tangentially.
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John Hurley
Notion Head of Product Marketing • December 15
PMM is hard (and awesome) because we are a hub, not a spoke that often controls the final outputs. We’re not growth marketers, or demand gen manager, or brand marketers. However we do influence, inform, manifest, and/or articulate growth strategies and campaigns. Product marketing needs other growth teams to commit and execute. Same goes for traditional demand gen and campaigns – we have a bit more influence there and ability to define demand programs and contribute content, but still heavy reliance on others for execution (campaigns team, ops, etc.). We don’t own channels or many of the teams required for execution. Our role and responsibility are to develop (and coalesce) a GTM (and specifically marketing) plan to propose to cross-functional teams, surface the requirements/dependencies/roles, and coordinate and monitor the cross-functional workstreams. That GTM marketing strategy– along with positioning/messaging, enablement, launches, and research input into product strategy – are our core roles and responsibilities. Product Marketing can bring together all the growth/demand investments into a single view (ex. a Campaign Brief), come to the table with recommendations, and aide in the orchestration of various teams efforts (expose leverage points or conflicts). We can create messaging and content that supports the campaign. But we can not also be the sole execution side (not our expertise, not our area of ownership – literally don't own the distribution channels). This is part of what makes Product Marketing so hard. We’d love to work with Growth to help them refine their programs and tactics, and contribute to areas like messaging (ex. copy for an in-app test, or keywords and copy for SEO/SEM programs).
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Erica Conti
Asana Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, PepsiCo, Nielsen, Wakefern Food Corp. • August 8
My framework for analyzing customer feedback after a launch involves implementing multiple voice of customer channels, then analyzing the data to inform our product priorities and launch strategy. Here's an overview of my process: 1. Build dedicated voice of customer channels: * Set up dedicated Slack channels for the Revenue teams to share customer questions and feedback * Monitor community forum discussions * Track comments across social media channels * Collect questions raised at events like webinars 2. Analyze and extract themes: * Utilize AI tools to analyze and categorize the feedback 3. Share insights with marketing channel and Product teams: * Share insights to inform product roadmap decisions and post-launch activities
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Madeline Ng
Google Global Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform • April 26
In my personal ideal launch world, PMM would develop the core messaging, positioning, and Bill of Materials that would then be handed to Sales Enablement to transform into compelling trainings. PMM may end up guest starring in some trainings as presenters, and Sales Enablement would be a critical feedback mechanism to fine-tune the launch assets. This would allow each organization to demonstrate their expertise and skills - PMM with placing the launch most advantageously for the business, Enablement with their capacity to educate and engage the salesforce to be most successful in their sale. That said, I recognize that the ideal world is not easy to attain based upon your own organization's resources. In some organizations, where "PMM ends and Sales Enablement begins" may be all within one person who is switching up their tasks as their jobs cover both domains. In others, it may require a heavier lift from one team or another. I would say the most important thing is to have clear lines of communication around roles and responsibilities, a collaborative mindset, and lots of public thanks for everyone who is involved in making any kind of enablement happen.
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