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AMA: dbt Labs Former Director of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Developer Product Marketing
September 14 @ 10:00AM PST
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Dbt Labs Former Director of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Developer Product Marketing
Top Questions
How does sales enablement change when your company is b2d (business to developer) vs traditional enterprise?
What should I do differently? Developers do not want to be sold to.
Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
It depends a bit on how your sales team is organized today. But in any event, your product value pillars should always translate to both individual and company-wide gain, so your core message is always consistent, even if the language changes a bit to accomodate the audience. You might consider a......Read More
355 Views
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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.
Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
Same! In my case, I was also dealing with phased launches--bits of the solution released every few weeks. And I understand why–when you're working with a developer audience there's less appetite for a big splashy release, and more interest in a phased roll-out of a given feature or product just t......Read More
371 Views
1 request
Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
I start with personas. I develop a thesis about core personas based on sales and customer success feedback, and then conduct user interviews to validate or invalidate those ideas. That's probably the most important bit–my job isn't to just synthesize learnings from within our business, it's to co......Read More
533 Views
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
Your documentation needs to be extremely thorough (technical), and your resources need to leave no uncertainty in how or why to use new products and features, but your topline message doesn't necessarily need to be "technical"-- at least not how I think of the word, which is detailed and revealin......Read More
320 Views
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
* Don't gatekeep access to hands-on learning * While the org-wide value story is important, developer product marketing should focus a little more on "why now, why me" Ensure there are materials that help people ramp quickly and easily. * Ensure packaging and pricing reflects an ability ......Read More
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
This is also why I think a great Dev PMM doesn't really need any PMM experience. Look to solutions architects, pre-sales engineers, or just developers in your space. It's much easier to learn PMM frameworks than it is to learn a new domain, and gain the respect you need to tap into the best insights...Read More
331 Views
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
A great question. I should caveat by saying that if your organization has a seperate DevRel or DevEx team that reports into product isntead of marketing, I don't expect them to share the same methods of measuring community engagement and uplift. For marketing targets, I would look at new feature ......Read More
332 Views
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
Great question. We actually have a third unit – Developer Experience. I'm sure it differs at other organizations, but at dbt Labs... Developer Relations is focused on growing the community (measured by Slack members and weekly active projects in the open source product), building lasting relati......Read More
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
Get crystal clear on the developer persona, and establish a framework for regularly updating it. I don't think there's any better use of your time than talking to folks 1:1 and using the way they frame value to write your own messaging framworks. I would also take the time to clearly establish ......Read More
314 Views
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How do you perform extensive competitive product research?
I've been tasked with it but I'm missing the mark. This research is for the CEO and Product/Engineering teams who want to know how our tech stacks up in the market. Do you have any tips?
Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
We all miss the mark here. I'm not even sure I would trust a PMM that says they don't struggle with this! You can stack the deck though, to show that you're exploring every possible avenue: 1. Consider a competitive monitoring solution like Crayon. I've used them in the past and even if they ca......Read More
414 Views
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Our company targets both business customers and developers building apps on top of our platform. I’m a non-technical PMM and the first marketing hire in the company. As our marketing team grows, when should we bring a DevRel into the team?
Our business model is product-led-growth. How should we prioritize bringing in a DevRel vs. other critical functions like content and demand generation as we grow our team and want to do it efficiently?
Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
If your company is focused on community building, then I think now is the right time to bring that resource aboard. If you mean Dev PMM or Dev Ex (folks a little more focused on creating resources), you can build this capability internally before dropping someone in: Ask other technical folks at......Read More
342 Views
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Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing • September 14
I'm sure it's different for everyone but here's roughly what it might look like if you have a paid product you want developers to convert to: Classic funnel: Website, search, or paid ad > Content/event/sales engagement that shows intent > purchase > expansion/upsell Developer journey: Free tria......Read More
980 Views
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