Get answers from product marketing leaders
Apurva Davé
Aembit CMO • May 26
I'll focus on the creating great messaging, because frankly that's the most challenging part of the job. Especially given the noise out there with so many products, and so many companies being funded, it's really hard to stand out. I think there are lots of ways to create great messaging, but it all comes from the same place: * Great insight into your customers drive great messaging. That's it. So then the question is, how do you get there? For me it means holistically understanding the environment around your user, and then being able to connect the most differentiated value of your product to their world. That means your product marketers must have a deep understanding of the customer as well as the demands and challenges they face, combined with a deep understanding of your own product, and finally the overall environment (competitors, legacy products, substitutions). When this comes together, messaging must be defensible (it's true) and must be differentiated (you couldn't slap a competitor's name on it and have the market believe it). Finally and most importantly, it must matter. The customer must care about your why's and how's. Over time as a marketing leader you develop a sense if a product message meets these requirements, but the only real proof is testing it with your customer base and proxies for the base. Proxies include product managers, good sales people, and analysts. Use them! And then when you're ready test with willing customers, and then finally with prospects who don't know they are getting the new stuff. Don't be afraid to get the message out there. Finally, I would say that I'm not a huge fan of A/B testing messaging through ads or web pages in the early days. While you may see which one gets more clicks, you won't know why. Having real conversations allows you to ask the follow on questions that give you the insight needed to improve your messaging.
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Kevin Zentmeyer
Jobber Senior Director, Product Marketing • April 27
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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Ashley Faus
Atlassian Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio • May 25
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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Priya Kotak
Figma Product Marketing • February 24
I’m a big advocate of getting messaging in front of customers and potential customers directly. Here are a few ways I’ve done that recently: * Test messaging in product betas: At Figma we often launch features to a subset of customers in beta before making them generally available. I like to use this as an opportunity to test some messaging ideas. Not only can you test messaging in recruitment comms and onboarding decks you can join feedback calls to hear use cases and benefits in the customers’ own words * Test landing pages with target audience: When we launched FigJam we created 3 versions of our landing page, each leaning into slightly different messaging, and partnered with our research team to test them with customers in our target audience. We had them react to each page as well as answer various questions to gauge which messaging was easiest to understand and most compelling. I feel comfortable knowing messaging won’t be 100% perfect at launch and that it will evolve as we learn how users actually use the feature/product. If you’re already sending surveys and talking to customers you’re on the right track — from there you can iterate post launch. Here are some things you can do to learn whether you need to tweak your messaging: * Review performance: Look at metrics for your landing page, blog post, etc. How are they performing compared to benchmarks? Are you seeing the traffic and conversions you expected? If not, this might be a sign that the product messaging isn’t resonating — a good next step would be talking to some customers and your Sales team. * Learn from Sales: Check-in with your Sales team to learn from their experience. How has the messaging and pitch for the new product been landing? Are they using the materials you created or have they changed them? Joining or listening to calls is a great way to understand this first hand. You can also look through data in your CRM to learn who’s buying so you know whether your messaging is targeting the right personas
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Mary Sheehan
Adobe Head of Lightroom Product Marketing | Formerly Google, AdRoll • July 13
* Building a strong foundation of product marketing skills to become a "full stack" product marketer has been key for me. Understand how to manage product positioning, messaging, how to launch a product, and all the different aspects that go into building a successful product offering. * Raising my hand for projects where I felt uncomfortable and needed experience - like pricing , researching competitive offerings, and creating customer journey maps - has been an invaluable experience. * Learning how to work cross-functionally with product managers, UX designers, and developers / engineers to deliver a successful product launch was also important for me to grow. * Regularly attending webinars, seminars or conferences related to the field of product marketing kept me up-to-date on the industry. * Taking risks - sometimes that means going to a growth area of your business or jumping to a smaller company. When I moved from Google to AdRoll (then a 500 person company) - that's when I got my first management opportunity and managed an entire product marketing team. * Making sure to set realistic expectations - both for yourself and your teammates, has also been important. You can't build a product overnight yet as a Head of Product Marketing you want to be able to push and inspire the team while being realistic about what resources are available. * Finally, it's really important to build relationships with people both inside and outside of the company is important in order to be able to share
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Jason Oakley
Klue Senior Director of Product Marketing • January 6
1. Sales win rate, more specifically competitive win rate Make sure that you're reps are populating a "primary competitor" field in your CRM so you can track this effectively. You'll then be able to track win rates over time and show how your efforts to enable your team with competitive content is driving you win rates up. 2. Influenced deals Is your PMM team responsible for things like customer references, creating custom content (ie. decks or leave behinds), or generally brought in to help on strategic deals? If so, add a special field to Opportunities in your CRM so you can mark when you've "influenced" a deal. This will give you an additional way to show how your work, especially ad-hoc requests, are influencing revenue. 3. Sales confidence Distribute a quarterly survey to the sales team asking them to rank their confidence in the ways you support them. Some ideas are: 1) competitive enablement 2) collateral and 3) product positioning and messaging. 4. New product revenue If you're launching a new product or service offering, track revenue during the first 30-60-90 days since this is largely a result of your GTM launch. A bonus tip that's less of a measurable metric: any time someone praises your team, like a sales rep, department leader, customer, etc. grab a screenshot of that shit and save it all somewhere. It can never hurt to have social proof that your team is killing it.
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John Hurley
Notion Head of Product Marketing • December 16
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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Ali Jayson
Matterport VP Marketing • June 24
Nothing beats sitting with a customer and actually listening to them. I can't reinforce enough the importance of this. As companies grow, its easy to lean on reports / reporting to tell you "what the customer thinks & feels". But there is so much nuance in how people communicate -- and as humans, we're all naturally atuned to these signals. So as a baseline, I encourage all my teams to participate in live listening sessions, focus groups, sales pitches, etc at least 1x every quarter to keep their ear to the ground and stay close to the customer. Of course, the above doesn't scale and we all have lots of things we need to do with our time. So I'm very interested in a few types of data to inform qual & quant: * Platforms like Suzy & Feedback Loop have been incredbily valuable tools for my team & product management teams that I've worked with recently. Suzy's Dynamic segmentation tool not only lets you complete a segmentation exercise, refresh it regularaly, and then gives you a mechanism to get feedback from those segments within 48 hours. It saves my team and my product teams tons of time, and ensures that our products & external communications are user-insight driven and optimized throughout the entire process of getting ready to go to market. I like to think of these platforms as Qualitative at Scale. * For Quantitative, I've used a lot of survey platforms but I have to say my favorite quantitative mechanism is actual behavioral data. Product Analytics, Web Engagement, Media Engagement, Customer Support Inquiries, etc. Humans don't always do what they say / think, and I think actual behavioral data is the best to assess what customers are actually most intrguied by or interested in. I require my teams to be keeping their ears close to these sources to pick up important themes. When you're listening and watching across these different platforms, PMMs can usually start picking up on important themes to pass back either to product or creative teams to improve the end to end customer experience.
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Victoria Chernova
OpenAI Product Marketing • September 22
A full stack PMM requires the perfect mix of “left brain / right brain.” But there’s a reason why “whole brain” isn’t as popular of a cliché. I believe that anyone can build on their existing skills to succeed as a full stack PMM—whether that’s a data-driven person developing their creative/storytelling muscle or vice versa. In general, the most successful PMMs I’ve seen exhibit these 4 traits; they’re: * Evidence-based: They use quantitative and qualitative insights from the market, competitors, and customers to inform their GTM strategy, segmentation, positioning, and product recommendations. * Customer-centric: They have a deep understanding of customer and market needs, ensuring customer empathy in all their work. * Unifying: PMM uniquely sits between product, sales/CS, and marketing, driving collaboration between teams with product expertise at their core. * Storytellers: Given their deep understanding of their target audience, pains, and product solutions, they can craft compelling narratives that serve as blueprints for other teams creating messaging and assets.
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Greg Gsell
Attentive VP, Product Marketing • March 24
Competitive positioning and messaging have to be one and the same. When you look at your decks and positioning, you need to do the gut check of "can my competitors say this" and if yes, change your messaging. You need to build competitive differentiation from the first impression through the entire sales cycle and at renewal.
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