AMA: Adobe Sr Director of Product Marketing, Creative Cloud, Katharine Gregorio on Establishing Product Marketing

The biggest mistakes I see product marketers make are: Not talking to customers enough - If you're not talking to a few customers every week (or month if you're at a bigger company) you're missing out. From message testing to hidden opportunities for workflow improvement to whatever else you're looking into after ~5 conversations you will likely start to see a pattern. Not using the product and its competitors - It's hard to develop empathy for your customer if you don't use the product or if th ...Read More

Pursue a lot of different ways to collect user feedback that are both quantitative and qualitative. Conduct feedback on a schedule - win/loss analysis monthly, weekly NPS roundups, quarterly CAB sessions Conduct feedback ad hoc - seek to understand a certain dynamic or segment through a one off quant survey Cultivate your own personal user board of prospects and customers who will tell you the truth (not just what they think you may want to hear which is one issue I sometimes see with CABs) to g ...Read More

At its core product marketing is reaching the right customer with the right message proposition at the right time to get someone to consider, try, buy or renew your product. How you do this for B2B and B2C often differs across the messaging, channels and tactics used to reach your goals. Why? Let's break it down. B2C product marketing targets individual consumers who typically make decisions based on personal preferences, emotions, and immediate desires or needs. Marketing strategies therefore t ...Read More

There are a few things I do before I accept a new PMM role and a few things I do within my first 30 days. Before I accept Talk to customers - either by asking the company for references or working my network to find users Read what people are saying about the space and the company - how competitive is the company, what is their positioning and how differentiated is it Ask the people on the PMM team and others that I'd be working with what the biggest challenges and opportunities are My first 30 ...Read More

This is a really hard question to answer because PMM differs at every company and also in many ways PMM is the most valuable and least understood function in tech. I've seen Venn diagrams that show that PMM serves as an interface between product and sales, organizational charts that have PMM in product, marketing, and even once design. Across the three startups where I stood up PMM as a function, talking to friends at other companies and now at Adobe, I have learned that the best way to lead and ...Read More

Storytelling is a way to structure content. Successful storytelling structures content that engages an audience across a journey or via an experience that creates a feeling that remains with the audience well after the journey or experience is over. Think of the last book great book you read. Can you remember what it was about? Maybe. Can you remember how it made you feel. Probably. The interesting thing I really came to realize during Covid is that storytelling isn't just for external audiences ...Read More

The answer is this depends. If you're the first hire, go do the best job you can do against the goals you have - finding pmf, growing top line, driving awareness of the product in the market, etc. Then as the company matures and you have a better sense of who the ICP is and how to reach them let the GTM strategy dictate how you hire and build out your team. For PLG you'll want to think about the role community and social plays for example while for enterprise you'll want to explore whether you n ...Read More

The answer to this question is so contextual. What product(s) does your company have? Who are they for and how do you reach them? Who already is in place in the company and what skills do they possess? And then of course all of this changes as a company grows. My advice is to sit down and look at the goals for GTM. From there look at the strategy that is needed to deliver on these goals and the capabilities required to achieve the tactics that support the strategy. Through this you can define th ...Read More