Get answers from product marketing leaders
Nisha Goklaney
HubSpot Senior Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, American Express, Sage • November 9
There are a host of good training options out there: 1. Sharebird - a great place to start. Here you can get real industry expertise and resources from folks in the field 2. Podcasts - Women in Product Marketing by Mary Sheehan (Sharebird Podcast), Product Marketing Insider are a couple of my favorites. 3. Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It" by April Dunford. 4. Another best practice I like to follow is actually spending time on other brand sites (example B2B sites like- Gong, Airtable, Monday.com, Snowflake, Zendesk, Drift, Quickbooks.com etc.) to understand how they position their products, how they showcase their value prop, jobs to be done etc. 5. PMM Alliance - They have a comprehensive set of courses, content and how to guides that I have found extremely useful 6. Also, Linkedin is a great resource. There are some incredible marketers and product marketers that focus on covering messaging, positioning, super worthwhile to follow.
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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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Jon Rooney
Unity Vice President Product Marketing | Formerly Splunk, New Relic, Microsoft, Oracle • August 23
For new senior PMM hires (like Sr. Director/Director team leads), I think of 30-60-90 plans to follow a basic flow: assess (30 days), design (60 days), run (90 days). During the "assess" phase, a senior PMM has to listen, observe and learn as much as possible: meet the team and figure out the current state of how basic stuff (sales decks, product launches, campaign content/strategy, analyst relations) gets done. Learn the product cold, not just the demos but how to actually use it. Watch how teams (whether PMMs or PMs or Sales Engineers) demo the product - how consistent are those? How do customers react? How does our demo pitch compare to competitors? Same thing with sales pitches - how many homegrown/Frankenstein pitch decks are floating around? What seems to land and what doesn't? How are reps - particularly in a fast growing environments when new reps are joining all the time - getting enabled on the product? How are they grabbing assets when they need them? Go through the same onboarding as a new sales rep. And, once you have a little bit of grounding, do ridealongs with reps - even if it's just Zoom calls. Attend a QBR or two if you can. Watch demos/keynotes/etc from competitors to help you understand the landscape - how differentiated is everyone? Could you infer your company's positioning from the space left over from how competitors position or is the landscape pretty murky. Finally, understand the current marketing machine and how it works. How does content end up on the website and how/why does it change? What's the demand gen hand-off with sales and how is marketing being measured? Why do we invest indo certain events, how do they get executed and what do we hope to get out of them? Who defines campain themes? Who reviews and has to approve copy/content/press releases/analyst presentations? How are launches planned and executed? For the "design" phase, map out how PMM works with sales, product and the rest of marketing and lay out what should stay the same and what needs to change. Engage with all relevant stakeholders on what you think needs to change and why (particularly, how these changes will make their lives easier and help them meet their goals). This is the hardest part, no doubt, but if everything was operating perfectly they probably wouldn't have needed to bring you on in the first place. Ladder up these changes to the top level GTM goals (revenue growth, product usage/activation, net customer retention) and explain how these changes will help meet those goals. Then map it all out with everyone, making sure it's all as simple and straightforward as possible so that everyone will be ready ready to implement these changes. Finally, during the "run" phase, put it all in practice with a growth mindset of measure and iterate. Go in with the assumption that you didn't get everything right so be ready to tweak things - whether it's as simple as adding another reviewer for web copy updates or as major as who should be an analyst spokesperson for a major launch. Cover your own responsibilites but also stay close to team doing new things in new ways so you can both support them and get firsthand feedback on what's working and what's not. Synthesize that feedback, adjust and run again. Of course, in the midst of all of this in your first 90 days you'll have tasks and firedrills flying at you from all over the place - it's critical that you juggle both and don't lose sight of methodical assess-design-run work or else you'll end up as a reactive "short-order cook" rather than as a strategic partner to the other functions. This is an awful place for PMM to land and it doesn't really help the business or your team. Don't let that happen.
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I agree with this statement. Sometimes when I look at PMM resumes that say something like “Increased sales pipeline by 30%” or “Increased product adoption by 15%”, I’m often skeptical because how much credit can a PMM really take? Did you write all the content? Did you do all the work on campaigns, ads, paid performance, SEO, SEM, digital, video, webinars, and webpages? PMMs operate through influence, not authority. We’re the strategic center of marketing—defining the strategy, personas, messaging, and execution. That being said, let’s at least start with the stuff we can take credit for: * Personas - How well are the personas defined and how well does the marketing and sales org understand these personas? What research has been conducted? Which documents can we point to? * Messaging - Good messaging is highly subjective but the key here is ensuring all messaging has been vetted by sales, customers, and internal experts. Is the messaging easily consumed by other stakeholders like content marketers? * Sales enablement - If you’re B2B, PMMs are directly responsible for enabling the field on the market, competition, product positioning, messaging, pitches, and demos. Of course, this is all influenced pipeline but is the foundation there? If it’s not, you’ve got work to do. * Campaign strategy - PMMs should be shaping and directing the themes of campaigns throughout the year and educating the marketing org on why a certain kind of campaign is needed. Campaign runners are responsible for driving those campaigns in market. * Product launches - PMMs are often the quarterback for launches. How many launches can be accomplished per year? How organized are these launches? Are they reaching their target audience? Was the launch able to drive the expected amount of product adoption? * Analyst briefings & thought leadership - Just keeping analysts informed and up-to-date is critically important for the business. Spearheading a Gartner MQ is a ton of work. Did you develop thought leadership themes with the comms team? * Events - Supporting user conferences, tradeshows, and keynotes. How many field events did you support? There's a lot I missed. Some of the above can be measured quantitatively but most are qualitative. If you take a step back, I would say a PMM can tie themselves to the holistic movement of core KPIs quarter-over-quarter. If you’re doing your job right, you should be able to claim influence on sign-ups, activation, pipeline, and close rates QoQ.
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Jodi Innerfield
Salesforce Senior Director, Product Marketing Launch Strategy & Emerging Products • January 12
First--well done for having a post-mortem! It's really easy to just get caught up in the next thing that comes along, but post-mortems are super important! This is your time to reflect on the launch planning, the launch itself, and whatever happens next. Launch Planning Reflection - Get feedback from stakeholders involved in the planning. Did everyone have what they need to do their jobs? Was there adequate time to get everything done? Were the right people involved from the beginning or at the right time? This information should inform changes in your bill of materials or launch planning steps for the next launch. Launch Results - Since you want a post-mortem to happen relatively soon after the launch, you probably don't have too many KPIs to measure. But you can reflect on how launch day went--did everything go as planned? What happened that was unexpected you could better plan for next time? Were your launch-day KPIs hit? Next Steps - Post-mortems may help you identify what needs to happen next. For example, are you getting a specific question from sales or customers that you weren't prepared for? Maybe update your resources and FAQs to address questions that you didn't anticipate. What post-launch activities come next that are either on track or need to be adapted based on launch day? Sending out an anonymous survey ahead of the post-mortem ensures everyone gets their thoughts heard. Ask two questions: 1. What went well? 2. What should we do differently? Then, group answers by theme and by stage listed above. Use the actual post-mortem meeting to share the results and have people elaborate
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Erica Conti
Asana Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, PepsiCo, Nielsen, Wakefern Food Corp. • August 8
A product launch I worked on in 2022 didn't go as expected due to rapidly changing market conditions. We initially developed aspirational messaging, but realized it wouldn't resonate in this new environment where "doing more with less" was very top of mind for our target audience. We quickly needed to pivot our messaging across channels without delaying the launch. This experience taught me two lessons that still influence my product launches today: 1. Stay acutely aware of market dynamics: * Continuously monitor market trends * Keep a pulse on competitive activities * Regularly reassess your target customers' mindsets 2. Maintain flexibility and agility: * Be prepared to pivot if necessary * Have contingency plans in place * Prioritize launch timing over perfection For me, this experience reinforced the importance of balancing long-term planning with short-term responsiveness. It's crucial to have a solid launch strategy, but equally important to remain nimble and ready to adjust when the market shifts unexpectedly.
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Victoria Chernova
OpenAI Product Marketing • December 7
The first step is creating a tiering system so you can prioritize features & products being released. Variables could be based on customer impact (good and bad—think change management), business priorities, revenue potential, brand/awareness potential, etc. For Tier 1 & 2 products, we’ve built out a workback schedule in Asana with dates. Typically this process starts 3-4 months before the agreed upon launch date. I would think through your workback schedule for a few key deliverables owned by PMM, and then each deliverable by channel. Key PMM deliverables are: 1. GTM strategy; 2. Customer journey & bill of materials (or assets); 3. Positioning You need these to do anything else. Use your GTM strategy deck for roadshows with cross-functional partners to drive alignment. Use your draft customer journey in brainstorm sessions with channel and content owners to build out your bill of materials and get their buy-in. And your positioning serves as the blueprint for all the materials created for your launch.
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Priya Kotak
Figma Product Marketing • February 23
A common pitfall when trying to improve feature/product adoption is to jump straight into tactics. This often results in emails and in-product messaging that doesn’t have the intended impact, and annoys users. I like to start by better understanding the users that have adopted a feature/product. Ideally, I can look at product usage data in addition to talking to users. I want to know who they are, how often they’re using the feature, what they use it for, and what they like/dislike about it. In addition to understanding the users that have adopted a product/feature, I find it helpful to talk to users that have not adopted. In my experience, this has largely been qualitative — via sending out a survey and talking to users directly. When reaching out to these users, I focus on understanding on whether they know about the feature or not, and if they do, why they haven’t tried it yet. Is there a workaround they prefer? Another product where they’re doing this activity instead? Lagging adoption can be the result of many things (e.g. poor discoverability, lack of product-market fit) — taking a step back to first understand the root cause allows you to tackle the right problem and be targeted in who you reach out to. Example: Recently at Figma, we launched a new product, FigJam, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how to drive adoption. When we first launched in beta, we wanted to better understand adoption from our existing user base, so we surveyed active users and users that had abandoned after trying it. One learning we had was around templates —active users loved and relied on these, while abandoned users identified these as a feature gap. We realized our problem was discoverability, and took action by prioritizing changes to the product UI and creating a template-focused re-engagement campaign.
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Sherrie Nguyen (she/her)
Indeed Director of Product Marketing • July 28
Great question! You actually squeezed 3 topics in here, which are all inter-related and important to buyer journey maps. In my experience, I start with segmenting my audience (total addressable market by country, company, vertical/industry, etc), identifying personas within my target audience (buyer/user), mapping the journeys for each persona, and then testing which content formats/channels work best. This means if I'm selling to Enterprises vs. mid-sized companies, IT vs. Finance buyers, I should understand the different journeys, budgets, and decision making processes and plan my content accordingly. Be choosy about where to focus! I would test and measure content starting from the top of the funnel for awareness (paid ads, SEO, partnerships, brand campaigns, podcast, etc.) - is your brand a consideration for your category? Move to the middle to drive consideration (web, case studies, white papers, demos, etc.) - is there preference for your brand vs. competitors or alternative offerings? And finally, bottom of the funnel to close the purchase (talk to sales, referrals, trial, etc.) - are you the right choice to meet their needs? Content at each of these stages has a different intent and measurement for success. The more specifically your content addresses a specific buyer's problem with the right level of information, the more likely you are to convert them to the next stage! From a research perspective, I've found a few research frameworks to be helpful for journey maps: jobs to be done, diary/desk studies, and 1:1 interviews. That's why getting the right person from the beginning is important, and meet with as many as you can until trends become apparent. Best of luck!
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Bonnie Chiurazzi
Glassdoor Director of Market Insights • September 27
1. Persona frameworks are unique to the organizations and teams who use them. But there are a few core elements that will add some structural integrity to your personas. 1. Context and Market - How do you define the market that this persona is pulled from? Do you need to be able to size the perona’s incidence in the marketplace? 2. Name - Choose a name that is memorable and conveys whatever it is that makes this persona unique and/or valuable. Some folks like to give their persona a name like “Steve” or maybe “Steller Steve.” This is more of a stylistic thing, but I prefer more descriptive names to help stakeholders remember the most important traits of the segment. Also, make sure you pick a name you’re comfortable saying over and over in meetings! 3. Value - Identify how you will assign value to each persona. Is it an attitude they have? A behavior they exhibit? An action they take? 4. Who - Who are they (demographics, job title, hobbies, home life, etc.)? 5. What - What are they trying to accomplish in your marketplace and why? 6. Where - Where do they currently go to meet their needs? How does your brand show up compared to competitors? 7. When - What triggers them to action within your marketplace? 8. Why - Why do they have these specific needs in the marketplace? What is it that makes them unique? Presumably, this a big part of the reason you decided to create the persona, so dedicate extra time to this. 9. Pain points - What isn’t working for them? What could be better? 10. Their journey - Put it all together. What triggers them to action? What’s their desired outcome? What actually happens? 2. Sophia’s Pro Tip: Do the work to align on semantics early on. Align on a definition of a “persona” and what will be included in the profile. Make sure to revisit how your organization has used personas in the past and leverage existing frameworks and information. If you deviate from the existing frameworks or if you’re adding a new persona while others are still being leverage, make sure you’re ready to speak to the value your new methodology will add. 3. Bonnie’s pro tip: Map out your persona profile before you conduct your research. Then map your questionnaire or discussion to the profile to ensure you’re asking all the right questions to completely fill out the profile. 4. Patti’s pro tip: Check your personas for unconscious bias and make sure to include a diverse set of voice in the research that leads up to persona development.
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