Get answers from product marketing leaders
Quinn Hubbard
Matterport Head of Global Brand & Product Marketing, Director • May 4
A thorough go to market (GTM) plan can provide incredible clarity for the many, many stakeholders who are involved in a launch. That’s why it’s so important for the GTM plan to be self-serve when you don’t have the luxury of walking your colleagues through it. The goal is to align your core team, plus answer the top questions for anyone else who needs to be looped in. I suggest using these 9 sections as your core elements: 1. Business context, goals and projected impact → why is this launching? 2. Product experience → what is launching? 3. Audience insights, definition and targeting strategy → who is this launching for and what need(s) are we solving? 4. Marketing brief → what are we saying and how? 5. Channel plan → where are we sharing this? 6. Campaign creative → how does it look, feel and sound? 7. Launch timeline → when is it launching and how is it being rolled out? 8. Measurement plan → how will we know what success looks like? 9. Roles & responsibilities → who owns bringing this to life? There are plenty of times when this list expands or contracts, but as long as you are answering why, what, who, where, when and how, you’ll have a solid starting point to create a successful GTM plan.
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David Esber
Twilio Senior Director, Product Marketing • October 27
A deep understanding of the product, target audience, job to be done, and the technical solution is essential for our team to be good PMMs. For any product, even those that are less technical, knowing what the job to be done is and how the product offering does that job is a strong starting point. Every product conversation starts with what I call 20ish questions that generally focus on the following categories: * Job to be done (who, what, why) * Product accessibility (how do they use it, what limitations exist) * Market landscape (how does this address a need, what others solutions exist) * Go-to-market (paid/unpaid, roadmap) From there: * We partner with Product to develop a v1 of messaging * Test with internal stakeholders (account execs, solutions engineers, marketing colleagues) * Test with external stakeholders (analysts, friendly customers, painted-door webinars/3rd party events) * Refine positioning and gain signoff from Product and leadership * Activate through web updates, launches, and sales/internal enablement The level of depth we go depends on the launch size/opportunity size (i.e., a feature may be nested within our broader messaging and positioning, whereas a rebrand of a platform would be more extensive).
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Erica Conti
Asana Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Intuit, PepsiCo, Nielsen, Wakefern Food Corp. • August 9
I create my product launch strategy through a six-step process, which is outlined in my attached template. Over the years, I've found that this process ensures a comprehensive approach to product launches, while still maintaining flexibility to accommodate the specific needs of a launch: 1. Plan: This initial stage focuses on setting the strategy and aligning with key stakeholders. I define the: * Target audience * Primary and secondary goals * Success metrics * Value proposition * Marquee products or features * Naming * Overall channel strategy based on my launch goals and brainstorms with channel partners 2. Kickoff: Here, I engage marketing channel and regional teams to determine specific tactics and creative needs. I discuss the: * Customer journey * Required assets and content * New activations to test * Targeting criteria across channels 3. Execute: During this phase, I partner closely with creative and other marketing channel teams to bring the plan to life. Key considerations include: * Ensuring all channel teams understand my requirements and timing * Adapting messaging for different regions * Localizing assets 4. Preview: This stage involves preparing Revenue teams and engaging analysts. I focus on: * Distribution of enablement materials * Conducting analyst inquiries * Building a plan to drive internal momentum (as PMMs, we need to market both externally and internally!) 5. Finalize: As I approach the launch, I obtain final sign-offs and prepare for global release. Key activities include: * Getting assets approved by Legal * Asset handoff for localization 6. Launch: In the final stage, I make last-minute preparations and plan for post-launch activities: * Setting up communication channels for launch day * Planning team celebrations * Scheduling retros to improve our launch processes * Preparing to share results with leadership at 30, 60, and 90 days
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Alex Wagner Lavian
Origin VP of Marketing | Formerly Uber • November 23
When building a tiered product it's important to define the goals of the entire package and each tier. Once you set goals, you'll want to segment your target audience by tier to map benefits to each level. Each tier should have clear benefits and ideally one “hero benefit” to serve as the hook to get customers to sign up for the offering. While the tiers should feel distinct they should also feel connected so that customers feel motivated to earn/pay more to move to higher tiers. A clear example of this approach is building a good/better/best model where the base benefits get increasingly richer as you move to higher tiers. Once benefits/pricing is set a GTM plan that includes varied tactics and messaging will be key with flexibility to market the entire package + targeted campaigns for each tier.
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Jenna Crane
Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing | Formerly Klaviyo, Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • November 18
Absolutely writing samples! I always ask for those. (As you can tell from my other answers, communication is something I care deeply about!) Case studies, landing pages, pitch decks / other enablement assets, and messaging frameworks can also be great additions to a portfolio. Just make sure you can speak to the process of building those, because it's impossible to know just from looking at them how much was built by the candidate vs. a collaborator. What really makes a candidate stand out, I've found, is a short 'about me' deck. I've seen some great decks that include: * Work samples (including some commentary about the process of developing that work) * Some thoughts about their approach to product marketing * A slide or two about their career and the highlights of their experience * Bonus: Something that tells me a little bit about who they are as a person outside of work (hobbies, things they're passionate about, etc.) Not only is this full of great insight into the candidate, but it's also a great example of how they position themselves. It's essentially a sales enablement asset, which should hopefully translate into how well they can do that for our company and products.
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What companies have product marketing that you really admire, either overall or particular elements?
James Fang
LaunchDarkly Vice President of Product Marketing • December 7
When I was at Okta, I was part of an extremely effective PMM team. It was structured: * Core / Product-line PMMs * Technical product marketers * Solutions PMMs (own "GTM plays" & business value - e.g. ROI calculator) Core / product-line PMMs were given a broad scope, and in some sense they effectively functioned as "outbound product managers", owning GTM strategy (e.g. should this primarily be positioned as a day1 attach for prospects / new deals vs. upsell to existing customers), pricing and packaging, on top of traditional PMM responsibilities of product launches, messaging & positioning, content, enablement. I also think Salesforce does a tremendous job of selling the vision (given their history of pre-launching products and giving PMM the task of marketing vaporware). And they deliver a phenomenal experience at DreamForce - presentations, keynote demo.
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John Kinmonth
Atlassian Head of Product Marketing, Agile + DevOps Growth • October 6
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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Christina Lhi
Square Head Of Product Marketing • September 15
It is always a good idea to factor in some time for research pre-launch to make sure your messaging is resonating with your target customer. In the past, I've done this both via quant surveys (Pros: more data driven confidence levels but Cons: Finding the right prospect audience can be expensive) and qual (Pros: can learn more of the why and insights, Cons: lower levels of confidence). Another useful tactic is to loop in your GTM teams early on to get their thoughts on concepts/messaging. But ultimately, you shouldn't use these as a crutch, you should invest more energy and time up front to build the right strategy and make sure execution is able to ladder back to that strategy.
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Sherrie Nguyen (she/her)
Indeed Director of Product Marketing • July 29
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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Eric Chang
1Password Director, Product Marketing • January 21
I'd recommend making sure to spend enough time on the planning and information gathering phase that is necessary prior to creating messaging. The most common issue I've seen with messaging is PMMs jumping straight into creating a framework before they truly take the time to understand their target audience's pain points, and how the product solves those pain points. As a result, the messaging turns into that individual's view of why they think the product is great. In an ideal world you would be able to find lots of customer research/insights, create a persona, a clear set of problems, establish positioning, understand the product, and then dive into messaging. The reality is you often don't have the time/resources to do all this. In these situations, I recommend you create a simple brief that lays out very clearly your audience pain points, positioning, and key product info. If you have those 3 items the messaging exercise is much more straight forward and they serve as a good reminder of the foundation you're using to build your messaging. Next, make sure to get feedback (ideally from your target audience, but teammates are great as well). Repetitions and practice are important, but getting feedback will help you better understand if messaging is resonating before you push it live. The feedback will help you course correct and deliver more effective in-market messaging, plus it will help you identify how you can improve. From a structured learning perspective, a public speaking or writing class could also be helpful. Effective public speaking requires you to understand an idea and communicate it clearly, which are both helpful and complementary to improving messaging skills. I myself haven't taken a writing class before, but I have known many PMMs (especially those in more content heavy roles) who have and would recommend it.
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