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AMA: Airtable Senior Director, Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Christy Roach on Self-Service Product Marketing
November 17 @ 10:00AM PST
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Airtable Senior Director, Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Christy Roach on Self-Service Product Marketing
Top Questions
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
This is a great question! It depends on what the new product/feature is, who the target audience is, and what your goals are for the launch but, more often than not, there is significant opportunity to drive adoption and upgrades within your current base rather than focusing solely on net new use......Read More
1685 Views
1 request
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
There are three main ways that I like to announce features in-product. Please note: I do not recommend you do all three at the same time unless you want your users to find you incredibly annoying. Each has their own time and place, but I find each to be effective in their own way. I've ranked the......Read More
2769 Views
1 request
How do you approach building a land and expand strategy?
Let's say for a product like Slack, how would you leverage marketing, product, sales and CS functions to increase Slack adoption across the company. I read this article on how IBM adopted Slack (https://medium.com/design-ibm/listen-to-the-wild-ducks-how-ibm-adopted-slack-2bcfd3732680) and I was wondering how the product marketing team at Slack would formulate it?
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
I can’t speak for how a team at a company I haven’t worked for but here’s how I’ve seen land and expand work well in the past. The TL;DR is that your land strategy should be very focused on the initial purchase/use of your product and your expand strategy should focus on building on momentum from......Read More
3213 Views
2 requests
How do you best structure and leverage beta releases to assist the product team (with iteration, feedback) and Product Marketing (positioning, messaging, enablement, onboarding)?
How do you collect information from users and disseminate between teams? What does an ideal timeline for a beta look like?
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
The primary goal of a beta should 100% be focused on improving the product and giving valuable customer feedback to your product, design, and engineering teams. The way to make sure it’s impactful for those teams is to get really clear up front in a beta what questions we’re trying to answer. You......Read More
2215 Views
3 requests
What questions do you ask users when trying to improve user onboarding from a product marketing perspective?
I'm a product marketing who has been tasked with helping to improve the onboarding experience from a product marketing point of view (emails, comms, in app messages. I have a list of new users that haven't returned to the platform and I'd love some thoughts, feedback, and insights from previous experience.
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
I truly believe the onboarding experience is the make or break moment for your product, especially for a self-serve user base. You could have the most incredible product in the world, but if it’s a pain to get set up, you’ll lose your customer. To improve the onboarding experience, I’d focus bot......Read More
3684 Views
3 requests
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
Buckle up, I've got a lot of opinions here. I think the first question PMMs should ask themselves is, what unique value do they want to provide to the roadmapping process? Oftentimes, PMMs feel like they should be included in things without having a clear POV as to why. I’ve been guilty of this. ......Read More
3568 Views
5 requests
What is your process for collecting user feedback?
Do you use ever use NPS or any other survey style?
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
In general, my POV is that any feedback is good feedback and that you should look for it wherever you can get it. That said, some channels are better than others. Here are the main ways I look for feedback from self-serve customers: * NPS surveys: The responses to this survey can be invaluable......Read More
2360 Views
5 requests
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
One of the biggest changes is that I find the relationship with the product team to be different in a product-led growth company. It’s a much closer partnership, focused on more than just launch moments but ongoing work, and shared metrics. When it comes specifically to the sales and marketing f......Read More
2622 Views
3 requests
How do you manage people who don't necessarily report into you?
This could be while giving feedback on a piece of work? Or getting them to prioritise the project you're running.
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
You’re right that as PMMs it’s often impossible for us to get our work done without work from another team, often multiple other teams. Part of my advice for doing this well is a critique of the way you’ve worded your question. I don’t see myself, or my team, as “managing” people who don’t report......Read More
1555 Views
3 requests
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
If you’re asking about how self-serve product teams impact my function: I’ve never been at a company where there is a “self-serve product” team. There are some teams that are more focused on the self-serve experience, like a “first experience” team that’s really focused on getting customers up an......Read More
1668 Views
4 requests
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
Having a passionate community of users was one of the things that made me sure that Airtable would be a great company to join. If you see a product that has a huge group of people who are invested in it, love using it, and want to provide whatever feedback they can to make it better, that’s when ......Read More
1569 Views
3 requests
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
This probably won’t come as a huge surprise, but our most used tool for surveys at Airtable is...Airtable. A lot of our customer surveys are done using Airtable Forms, which help us store that feedback directly in Airtable to report on and sync to other important bases, so everyone in the org has......Read More
2132 Views
5 requests
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
Airtable’s product marketing team has a bit of a unique structure in that we don’t have one “Head of Product Marketing”, we have two. Myself (Self-Serve PMM lead) and my counterpart (Enterprise PMM lead) are responsible for the two sides of our business and both report into our CMO. The other thi......Read More
2445 Views
5 requests
What do self-serve product marketers spend their time doing, given that they don't have sales enablement responsibilities?
Where does all that time get repurposed in self-serve PMM? What are some of the big categories of work where you over-invest in self-serve vs. traditional B2B PMM?
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
You’re right that as a self-serve PMM, you’re no longer as focused on sales enablement as many B2B product marketers are. Here are some of the big areas my team is focused on that might be a bit different than a sales enablement focused PMM role. * Acquisition: My team is very focused on how w......Read More
3185 Views
7 requests
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 17
I'm going to admit upfront that I answered this in a previous AMA, so I'll copy and paste that same answer here. A year later, I can truly say that these continue to be the things I think are most important for a PMM to have. Almost all hard PMM skills can be taught, but these soft skills are muc......Read More
2511 Views
2 requests
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