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Stephen Baloglu
Adobe Director of Product Marketing • March 29
Great question and glad to see people taking a customer-led approach to product launches. There are a few strategies I recommend here and they fall into 4 areas. 1. Review the foundational research and insights that already exist - What you’re launching was built based on deep customer research and …ensure you’re clear on the insights that drove what you’re bringing to market in the first place. If gaps are identified, now is the time to identify and close them. It’s better late than never on the foundational pieces. 2. Dig into early customer feedback - Talk to beta customers - what do they love, what’s missing, are they actually using the product with frequency and intensity? You’re a great product marketer, so you already have some customers on speed dial (OK…does anyone remember speed dial???) But you get the idea. Talk to customers! 3. Qualitative and quantitative research with prospects/target audience - To develop great messaging, positioning and marketing plan, you need to know what work the marketing actually needs to do to convert your target audience. What are the perceptions, motivations, barriers, media sources, and buying process for your audience? All in the context of your new product. The keys to this research are to target a representative group of your audience, do the qual first to guide what you’re measuring in the quant, and leverage product prototypes for stimuli, so feedback is richer. And remember, focus groups and individual interviews are not perfect…I find they can identify big reactions - but are not likely to inform how people will behave in the wild. 4. Market and competitive research - Do your diligence on what’s happening in the market. What else is your target audience exposed to? How will you create a breakthrough message? Big markets with lots of $$$ tend to be crowded and highly competitive, your goal may not be differentiation, but going to market with distinctiveness.
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Claire Drumond
Atlassian Sr. Director, Head of Product Marketing, Jira and Jira suite • August 16
My PMM team is built like a funnel. Our focus is to land new customers, which we only count when those customers start to pay. Therefore, the job of my PMM team ranges from raising awareness of our brand to getting new customers to upgrade to our paid editions. I have three groups focused on the following parts of the funnel: * Buyer Journey: This team focuses on connecting our marketing efforts at the top of the funnel through to the product. This team is goaled on Day1-6 Daily Active Instances to ensure high-quality sign-ups come into our funnel and they are happy when they get there. The teams' activities include running marketing paid campaigns, SEO, website optimizations, messaging & onboarding. * Core product: This team focuses on keeping our customers informed of new product releases, updating our core product messaging, and partnering closely with our product counterparts on product & GTM strategy. * Monetization & Expansion: This team is focused on driving our upsell motions within the product experience, driving customers from free to paid licenses, and cross-sell driving users to try and use other products and apps in our ecosystem. It's important to note that my team is primarily focused on SMB self-serve motions.
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Jesse Lopez
Dandy Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Brex, Klaviyo, Square, Intuit, PepsiCo, Heineken, Mondelez • March 23
Start any GTM strategy by anchoring on the four critical components of any go-to-market initiative. 1. What: What software or offering are you selling? What problems does it help solve? What makes your product unique vs. alternatives? 2. Who: Who is your ideal customer profile, and why? What are their pain points, and how does your product help them solve them? Why should these customers choose your product over alternatives? 3. Where: Where do customers learn about products in your category? What channels are most effective at each stage of the buying journey based on historical data or competitive offerings? 4. How: How do customers typically buy products in your product category? What factors and/or criteria help drive their buying journey? How can you help educate customers on your product along the journey? Net-net: There is no magic formula to starting a GTM strategy, but rather a set of questions you should continually use to guide your GTM decisions. Rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach, I encourage you to craft a GTM strategy with your x-functional partners (Sales, Product, Marketing) that anchors on the what, who, where, and how aspects of your GTM iniatitive.
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Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann
SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing | Formerly SurveyMonkey, Nielsen • December 6
It's been a while since we've had an integrated marketing function at SurveyMonkey, but here's how I'd envision this working: Product marketing owns: - Buyer persona research, development, and enablement - Product messaging/positioning - Go-to-market strategy (e.g. by persona, industry) - Product/feature launches - Bottom-of-the-funnel product content/collateral - Competitive intelligence - Analyst relations Customer marketing owns: - Customer advocacy: customer stories, customer participation in thought leadership, review site management, communities, advisory boards - Customer marketing: scaled customer onboarding & engagement programs, cross-sell and up-sell customer campaigns - could include email nurtures, customer webinars, etc. Brand marketing owns: - Brand messaging and narrative, as well as brand guidelines - The visual manifestation of the brand (logo, colors, fonts, imagery/animation style, iconography, etc.) - Content strategy, and Top-of-the-funnel thought leadership content - Creative production for full-funnel campaigns (ads, - Brand health measurement & tracking Once the company scales to where there is a) a full portfolio of products and/or brands and b) there is significant investment in full-funnel campaigns across those products/brands, then integrated marketing becomes a necessary function. Integrated marketing owns: - Full-funnel marketing strategy & execution management for large-scale campaigns (these could be brand campaigns or Tier 1 launches).
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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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Ben Rawnsley-Johnson
Censia VP of Marketing • November 7
For new products especially, pricing and packaging should inform, and be informed by the broader GTM strategy (it's why I'm so bullish about the role PMMs play in contributing to P&P decisions). For example: * Our GTM strategy answers "Who is the market, persona?" * how do they prefer to buy? (PLG vs. direct sales), * How long is the deal cycle? * How senior is the economic buyer? * and how formalized is the procurement process? * Does the customer need implementation services, integrations or infrastructure effort to realize value? * The answers to these questions help you determine the minimum viable, and likely deal sizes required to sustainably generate margin using these channels. The more boundary conditions like this you can apply to your pricing strategy, the faster you will arrive at a high-confidence hypothesis you can test in the market. Another example: * The GTM strategy will outline the likely TAM/SAM/SOM, but for Pricing and packaging, you need to be crystal clear on the FIRST segment. * Honestly, unless you work at Amazon, if you're launching a new product alongside existing product lines, the reality is that your beachhead market will almost entirely comprise existing customers. This means you're going to align to existing pricing and packaging principles that you've already trained your customers on - e.g. if your company always offers a free tier, holding back high-value features in up-sell editions, you should apply that same approach here to reduce the impediment to buy.
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Chad Kimner
Meta Product Marketing Director, AR/VR | Formerly Mozilla, LeapFrog • November 16
I'm going to take this question in a slightly different direction and make a pitch for collaborating with Product (and many other teams) on a comprehensive "Understand Synthesis" as the basis for annual planning/roadmapping. This can be a transformative way for teams to generate better shared understanding and align on market research priorities for the next planning cycle. How it works: 1\ As a kick-off to annual planning, align with Product and other key stakeholders on the biggest questions you need to answer in order to be successful in the coming year-plus. 2\ Scour existing research to figure out what data and insights you can already bring to bear on those questions. In many cases, you might find that you can generate a decent answer to one of your fundamental questions without doing any new research! 3\ Where there are major disputes about existing data and/or gaps in understanding, create a research roadmap to generate new insights that should answer the big questions. Aligning with Product on the research roadmap and more important generating a shared POV on key questions - perhaps without having to invest any more time in answer them - can turbo-charge the roadmapping and annual planning process.
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Rekha Srivatsan
Salesforce Vice President Product Marketing • April 19
I'm a huge fan of shorter, concise resumes. If you can articulate your journey and experience on one page, it will help me to process your resume well. Some red flags I've observed: * Typos/grammatical errors on resumes - Attention to detail is a core skill for a PMM, so it is a big turn-off for me if your resume has these errors. * Lack of customer narrative - Customer conversations are integral to a PMM role, so if it's not mentioned in during the interview that's a red flag for me. * Run-on sentences - As a PMM, you are expected to have clear, concise communication -- verbal and written. * Too much fluff - When stating your experience, be real and practical. Don't exaggerate it too much or make it super jargon-y that its difficult to follow.
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John Kinmonth
Atlassian Head of Product Marketing, Agile + DevOps Growth • October 5
Love this question. This will differ at every org, but for me the gold standard is win/loss ratio and booked revenue associated with a sales play, along with qualitative/sentiment data on whether it's resonating with customers (pitch recordings, feedback from sales, etc). These are not always easy to gather (and the first two might be outside of your official PMM remit), but they will really point your enablement efforts toward ROI. Other traditional measurements are more internal adoption- or checkbox-focused (passing a certification, attending a training, downloading or using an asset), but it can be harder to glean whether your enablement efforts are effective from those measures.
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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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