AMA: Calendly Head of Product Marketing, Jeff Hardison on Growth Product Marketing
August 10 @ 10:00AM PST
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Calendly Head of Product Marketing, Jeff Hardison on Growth Product Marketing
Top Questions
How have your product marketing teams traditionally worked with your demand generation / growth marketing team?
At our company, demand gen is a much bigger function than product marketing so they drive all of the campaigns with our input, but I came from an organization where we lead the campaign strategy a bit more since we had more numbers. Anyone have a good solid process they use with their demand gen team?
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
First, I try real hard to let go of my ego and temporarily forget about the past (e.g., how I worked with demand gen in another company). Every company’s marketing department is structured differently, and it’s important to quickly adapt. Then, I try to be human and have a conversation with each......Read More
3691 Views
5 requests
How do you manage launches when the product team has a difficult time sticking to timelines?
This makes launches pretty difficult to manage without creating large lapses in communication.
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
It's very common -- particularly in modern software companies -- for product teams to move timelines based on engineering constraints, customer feedback in the beta-testing process, and more. All product marketers wrestle with this situation. So, realize you're not alone! I recommend explaining ......Read More
564 Views
2 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
Growth can mean different things in different orgs. In some orgs, a growth person owns acquiring new users (with performance marketing or ads, and so forth). In other orgs, growth helps with proposing and testing different growth levers (e.g., an invite-a-friend option in-app, adding signup-for-f......Read More
2262 Views
6 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
Each quarter, our team is generally proposing helping with KPIs around: - acquisition of new users - activating those new users - expanding or upgrading users (using their credit card to buy something more) - retaining those users month over month, and year over year - talking to sales abou......Read More
537 Views
3 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
First off, I love shared KPIs between departments (particularly between product management and product marketing management)! I’m happy you’re thinking this way. Historically, some organizations did measure product marketing qualitatively. Did XYZ department feel supported by PMM? Or even in a ......Read More
835 Views
4 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
I feel fortunate that I’ve led positioning/messaging workshops since I graduated college because I worked for an agency that mandated them for every project we worked on for tech clients. Getting an exec team to agree on a document outlining positioning and messaging isn't the hard part in my o......Read More
741 Views
3 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
This is one of my favorite topics, and I write more extensively about product-led marketing versus sales-led marketing on the Product-Led Growth Collective site: https://www.productled.org/blog/marketers-prepare-product-led-growth The tl;dr, though: In many product-led growth (PLG) companies non......Read More
1825 Views
6 requests
If you have to improve the adoption rate of a SaaS product, where would you start?
Like what are the first things you would check/do?
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
Oh, man, big question! It really depends on the product and company. But if I have to generalize... First, I’d try to get crystal clear on what we mean by adoption rate. Is that net-new free signups? Is that activation of those signups? Let’s say it’s it’s activation of those signups for discuss......Read More
668 Views
5 requests
How would you approach this product marketing interview assignment?
I interviewed earlier this year and did well except for this assignment. I'm hoping to better prepare for similar situations. Here's the quest:
As mentioned, the next part of this process is to complete a brief assignment. The purpose of this assignment is just to see your methodology get some insight into your approach to tasks.
For this assignment, I'd like for you to create a high-level go-to-market plan and strategy for our flagship product our event marketing platform. Our company traditionally has targeted enterprise b2b companies.
I'd like you to come up with high-level messaging, define who the target audience is, and then detail your strategy for informing the market about our event platform and getting more leads. Please identify which channels you would use, and what you would need for this go-to-market launch. Please keep your response under 2 pages
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
I’d have to see your assignment response to make recommendations! And I probably shouldn’t print my recommendations here publicly, as this company probably wants to keep the assignment confidential. Feel free to befriend me on LinkedIn, and I'll take a look at your assignment and give you feedback. ...Read More
1286 Views
2 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
I just say, "I really think this feature idea is really cool!" Just kidding. One of my go-to tactics is compiling customer feedback about a problem or feature idea from several customers. Create a Notion document, outline the problem, and list several quotes from customers about said problem.......Read More
919 Views
3 requests
Jeff Hardison
Calendly Head of Product Marketing • August 10
Because product marketing is such a collaborative function -- we're like diplomats and glue between product-engineering-design, marketing, customer success, and sales (if you have it) -- I try to open up my "empathy reserves" for the various departments I'm going to work with. If it's B2C, I thi......Read More
998 Views
3 requests
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