AMA: Airtable Senior Director, Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Christy Roach on Self-Service Product Marketing

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 to me. We’re partnering with them. We should have shared goals, a shared vision for what we’re trying to accomplish, and equal motivation to get it done. If we don’t, that team is just doing a favor for ...Read More

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 thing to note is that product marketing is a fairly nascent function at Airtable. The company has seen really impressive growth and success over the last few years with only a few dedicated marketing folks ...Read More

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 these from least disruptive to the user to most disruptive to the user below:  Contextual announcements: One of the most seamless ways to help customers discover new features is to include the announcements ...Read More

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 start a beta because you have open items that need to be figured out before you’re ready to launch a product, and you hope that a group of hand selected users can help you figure those things out. Those ...Read More

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 funnel, I’d say the big difference is that we’re less focused on traditional demandgen work and we have a much heavier hand in monetization than we do in a sales-assisted business. Our work is tied more to ...Read More

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 both on the folks who did not succeed with using your product and have gone inactive as well as those that did successfully get up and running with your product. What you want to understand is what makes one ...Read More

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 the existing product and making clear that expanding the use of your products will provide exponential value for your customers. With a “land” strategy, the big goal is to start small/manageable, especi ...Read More

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 we can help prospective customers understand the value of Airtable, what it can do for them, and why they should use it. We get a ton of website traffic, and our performance marketing team does a great job ta ...Read More

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. It's natural to hear hear about something that feels related to your work and wonder why you’re not there. In this situation, you need to be clear about what goes into the product roadmapping process tod ...Read More

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 users.We decide how much focus we put on new versus existing users in our launch activity by the “tier” of the launch. Tier 1 launches are large, net new products or features that will bring in new customer ...Read More

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 much more valuable to me because they come from the PMM themselves. I can model the behavior, but each individual is responsible for whether or not they exhibit these traits.  Cross-functional excellence: A ...Read More

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 access to valuable customer feedback. I won’t make this just an Airtable product pitch, so I'll share that I’ve also used SurveyMonkey and GetFeedback and both have worked well for my survey needs. Extr ...Read More

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 for product feedback, general customer sentiment, and areas of friction or confusion. I use the positive responses to identify customers we can ask to give us a positive review on sites like G2. Negative NP ...Read More

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 you know you’re onto something special. The Airtable Community is made up of our most active and engaged users from very small solopreneurs to employees at large enterprise companies. Right now, we lever ...Read More

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 and running with the product. That team is, of course, going to optimize for the self-serve customer that doesn’t have a customer success or sales person there to help them get up and running, but they wil ...Read More