AMA: Airtable Senior Director, Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Christy Roach on Self-Service Product Marketing
November 17 @ 10:00AM PST
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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 18
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 questions and beta objectives need to be defined, documented, and agreed upon before the beta begins. I have sometimes seen products go into beta because teams felt like they “should” or that it was a required step and, at the end of the beta, they left with no real answers because there was no real strategy for the beta period. PMM can help in driving that clarity, targeting the right users for the beta, and making sure the communication with beta testers and with internal teams happens at the right cadence. If you’re lucky, like I’ve been in many of the companies I’ve worked for, you’ll have a stellar user experience research team who can lead this work or, at the very least, partner with you on it. In terms of making sure betas are impactful for PMM, the same principles apply. What questions do you have that you’re hoping to answer? Where are you least clear in your GTM plan? What would help you run a better launch and ongoing engagement efforts? Figure out what you want to know from beta users and make sure it's reflected in the overall beta strategy so the time is impactful for everyone involved. From there, here is some tactical advice on running betas: * Participants: Be very clear upfront about the level of engagement expected from beta participants and get agreement that they’re onboard. Think about offering some incentive for the beta customer to ensure they give you what you need, it can be as small as some company swag or as large as a few free months of service in exchange for their feedback. Be careful to not keep adding folks into the beta just because a sales person wants them to get added or because they complained about not being included on Twitter. If a customer doesn’t fit your target persona for the feature, they shouldn’t be in the beta. * Communication with beta participants: I’ve seen researchers set up Slack channels with beta participants that internal stakeholders have access to so beta testers can give their feedback in real time as they experience the product. It’s also important to talk live, usually via video call, with your participants at key points in their journey with the product ofr feature (ex: right when they get access, when a significant change happens, once you think you solved a problem they have etc)so you can get more in depth feedback. * Communication internally: You can invite everyone to your feedback channel so they can see it live, but you should also have some cadence of summarizing findings. If you’re running a three month beta, think about a monthly update. If it’s a six week beta, maybe bi-weekly updates are best. If it’s a short, month-long beta, a weekly update will be the right cadence. Keep your updates clear and to the point, then link out to the full findings for those that want all the intel. * Timing: I can’t give you advice on this until I know the product you’re testing. I think it depends on how much is left to build in the product when you go into beta, as well as how long it’ll take a customer to see value from the product. I will say that I have not seen a beta shorter than six weeks be very impactful for business learning and iteration. Good luck!
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3 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 18
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 NPS feedback customers are great candidates to reach out to for 1:1 conversations to get further feedback and learn where you can improve. * Customer surveys: Got a specific question about how your customers feel? Wonder what your most important features are in your customers’ eyes? Wondering how they’d feel about a potential change your team is considering? Send a survey! I love surveying customers and encourage you to set aside some budget to offer an incentive to fill it out to increase response rate. A $20 Amazon gift card is my go-to for small surveys. For larger initiatives I give away five $100 Amazon gift cards to keep the budget from ballooning. * Community and social engagement: I feel extremely lucky to have so many active members in the Airtable Community that we can lean on for thoughts, ideas, and feedback. Often, just reading the discussion in the community is enough to give me the insight I need but, if I’ve got a specific question, posting it in the community is a great way to get insight from our most engaged users. The same goes with the customers who engage with Airtable on our social channels, they’re often willing to provide quick feedback when asked. * User interviews and user experience research: Airtable has an extremely broad user base, so when I really need to get insight from a specific group of users, I’ll look to our user experience research team as partners to find a few key folks in our target audience and get them set up in more formal research sessions.
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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 18
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 the product marketing org and that work will get quickly deprioritized if something more pressing to their role comes up. The work for a PMM is to create those shared goals and that shared ownership up front, so that the entire team involved is motivated by and committed to the work. You do this by understanding how your partner teams measure success, what matters to them, the pressures they have on their role, and the metrics they’re responsible for. Then you figure out how the project you're proposing can also help them reach their goals and impact their focus areas. Sometimes that means the scope of the project may need to expand slightly to make it impactful for all parties, but if you’re willing to do this up front, the entire project usually runs more smoothly. Sometimes, that’s not the case and you really are asking a partner team to take on additional work that won't necessarily help them in their own roles. In that situation, you need to make clear upfront what’s needed, get buy in that they’re willing to commit to the deadline, and usually offer something in return in exchange for their help If you’re always the one asking for favors and never helping out other teams, you’ll find that people’s willingness to work with you will dry up pretty quickly. In terms of how you manage this tactically once you’ve gone about work I mapped out above, the most important thing is having a shared source of truth for your work (unsurprisingly, we use Airtable for this), having the right level of check-ins schedules so you’re staying in sync, and being clear about roles and responsibilities so everyone knows what's expected of them.
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Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 18
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 not define themselves as a "self-serve team" since the first experience touches all customers. In general, the product teams I’ve worked with at companies that have a self-serve and sales assisted motion are often most focused on creating a simple, clear product where the majority of features optimize for the self-serve experience. Also there’s a huge emphasis on product usage metrics rather than ARR per product line or feature. If you’re asking about how a self-serve product itself impacts my function: Having a self-serve product means that the metrics I use to gauge success are much more closely tied to product usage than they are at predominantly sales-assisted company with a traditional demandgen motion. My team owns specific product engagement metrics and our focus is less on bringing in leads and ARR from closed won accounts, but instead on how quickly and effectively we can move someone through a self-serve funnel from signup -> adoption -> monetized customer -> expansion. When I’ve worked on and led PMM teams focused on a sales-assisted product, our success was measured by some product metrics, but also by sales team readiness, satisfaction with the enablement materials created and a lot of internal feedback. I loved how much feedback our team got in this setup, but one drawback was that my team did not ‘own’ metrics the way my self-serve PMM team does now. In a self-serve product environment I find that it’s much easier to show success, since you’re tied specifically to metrics, it creates a much closer partnership and relationship between product and PMM teams, and it makes you accountable for the entire self-serve customer journey, not just acquisition.
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Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 18
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 leverage the community to get a pulse on what these customers are thinking about, the product suggestions they have, and where they are blocked by or frustrated with our product. Our team hops in to answer questions and give guidance, but we really see our community as a place for our customers and advocates to interact with one another, find inspiration, and connect. What's incredible is that a lot of our Community's success has happened due to customers, rather than internal efforts. That said, we have a huge business opportunity with the Airtable Community to leverage the positive feedback in our acquisition efforts, to use the helpful tips and tricks provided in the Community to help new customers get onboarded, and to partner more closely with Airtable specialists and experts as they look to create business opportunities for themselves in training and onboarding new Airtable customers. Solutions partners and developers who build on the Airtable Platform will be hugely important in our Community efforts and we’ll want to be sure we create special programs and incentives for them as they spread the word about Airtable and bring in new business. We’d also love to parlay our online Community efforts into in person events and meetups when the time is right and this global pandemic is over (hopefully soon!) so we can create real, personal connections with our advocates.
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Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 18
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. Extracting qualitative and quantitative insights is really about creating a good survey. Often, we want to hear as much data and feedback from customers as possible, and there’s a temptation to structure your survey with a lot of open ended, free response questions to get all those good nuggets of intel. The thing you have to be careful about is that it’s extremely difficult to synthesize that qualitative info when you’re getting hundreds or thousands of responses to your survey. Here are a few ways I've gone about creating an impactful survey: * Marrying quantitative and qualitative questions: Give respondents a multiple choice or true or false question, but then give them the option to add more detail or information if they’d like. That way, you get the clean quantitative data, but also leave room for any qualitative insights a respondent feels like providing. * Keep qualitative feedback snappy: Reading paragraphs of text from survey respondents makes it hard to pull out key learnings. I like to keep qualitative insights in a survey short and sweet. For example, if I’m trying to understand how a customer explains/positions our product, I’d ask the question “How would you explain Airtable to a friend or colleague who doesn’t use the product in one sentence?” rather than asking “What do you think our product is for and what value do you get out of it?”. One will give you meaningful, short answers and the other might get you long-winded paragraphs. * Make sure you’re not skewing responses in your question wording: This is a big one that's taken me a long time to learn. Many of the surveys I sent early in my career were poorly worded and incredibly skewed. A survey should be objective, not guide a user to the “right” answer. Make sure your questions are clearly worded, concise, and free of any bias or language that might influence the respondent’s answer. PMMS are good at many things, but we're not experts in survey design so I'd highly recommend leaning on a partner team, like user experience research, to check your work and give suggestions here.
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Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 18
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 - which was one of the things that was most attractive to me when I was interviewing. Because PMM is so new, the structure we have today will probably look wildly different than the structure we’ll have next year. The self-serve PMM team is a scrappy 2 people right now (myself included) with three additional open headcount. I’m actively hiring and would love to have some great PMMs join my team, so if you’re reading this and interested in helping us build out PMM please reach out :) Our Enterprise/Platform PMM team is a team of 4 folks with two open headcount as well. So all told, our PMM organization should have 11 people (with 2 leads included) by end of year. Who knows what it will look like in 2021. It'll depend on the needs of the business but I can pretty much guarantee it will continue to grow. Each person’s role is focused on a specific focus area (ex: we have a PMM full time focused on activation, another PMM focused full time on our platform) and their role is tied to specific product usage, ARR, or internal metrics to gauge success. A PMM's sucess at Airtable is determined by the metrics they're responsible for, the impact of the programs, processes, and initiatives they run, the feedback they recieve from their cross-functional partners, and their skill at core PMM competencies like messaging and positioning.
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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 18
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 targeting users, but PMM should have a role in making sure we have the right message and consideration content for these users. This takes the form of messaging for paid ads and paid landing pages, as well as creating landing pages, explainer videos, and more for website visitors to consider pre-signup. We measure the success of this work by website conversion and successfully activated signups. * Activation and user education: Rather than enabling a sales team to sell the product, we focus a lot of our time on enabling our customers to use our product. This takes the form of in product communication, guides and onboarding content, best practices and tips, email drip campaigns, and more. We’ve got a great user education team at Airtable who serve as key partners in this effort and we measure success here by product usage in the weeks after signup. * Conversion and expansion: One of the things I love most about self-serve PMM is how close you get to be to monetization and revenue. A lot of time is spent looking at our pricing and packaging, running programs to increase conversion, and ensuring that customers are growing and succeeding in their use of the product. This is the type of strategy work that gets me most excited and where I focus a lot of my energy. * Internal team enablement: Turns out, you still do enablement in a self-serve PMM role, it just looks a little different. My team should have a very close line to our customer support team and spend time thinking through the types of questions that may come in through our community, support, and social channels and drafting responses that answer questions and ensure customers get what they need to use the product successfully. It’s less work on pitch decks and more work on FAQ docs and incoming pings asking how we should respond to a question we got asked on Twitter, but it’s still an incredibly important form of enablement.
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7 requests
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 18
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, especially if your customer is a small team. A land strategy is focused on getting the first foothold in a company. For us at Airtable, our “land” happens with the first use case that you decide to use Airtable to help you manage (ex: content calendars). When I was at Envoy, our focus was landing in our first product line, Visitors, and expanding from there. Tactically, the things you need for the “land” portion of land and expand is a strong acquisition strategy, an onboarding process that is as easy and frictionless as possible, and, as much as you can, messaging and information that tells the user up front that there is more to your product for the customer to discover so you can seed expansion from the get-go. For the expand strategy, the key is to make it easy for your product to spread. You can do this via a sharing and collaboration model, like Airtable, where you invite more team members to join you in the tool, via a feature-gating model where you incentivize customers to upgrade to higher tier plans for access to more advanced features, or via multi-product where you try to get your current customers of one product to start using another of your available products. There are two major ways expand happens: * Natural, easy growth within one team or company: The goal here is to make it so the user doesn’t even really think about expansion. Make it easy in your product to add more teammates, or to quickly try a new feature for a period of time that’s on a higher tier plan. You want the customer to expand because they’re seeing increasing value from the product, and all the communication you send via email or in product upsells are focused on the value and what someone can do with the product, rather than a hard upsell. * Viral growth and consolidation: At larger companies, you often have ‘pockets’ of usage of a tool across teams or locations. Usually, these teams have signed up for your product independently of one another without knowledge that anyone from their company is using the product. Once that growth becomes large enough, a sales team can come in and chat with a decision maker (often IT) to consolidate the use of the tool and give administrators more control over usage.
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Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 18
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 and impact our current base. You can usually run about 2-3 true Tier 1 launches a year when you're at the size Airtable is today. Tier 2 will definitely impact existing customers and may bring in some subset of new customers. We probably run two Tier 2 launches a quarter, so 8/year at Airtable. Tier 3 will mostly impact existing users and the change will not be significant. The bulk of product updates are usually Tier 3 launches. Tier 2 and Tier 3 launches have the current customer as the primary audience, and that means that our marketing work will be focused on messaging and programs for those users. But, even in a Tier 1 launch that’s primarily focused on bringing in new users rather than existing users, your existing users will be impacted and will care, so every launch should have a focus on current customers and communication to help them continue to succeed and expand with the product.
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Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 18
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, tool tips, or updates right when they can and should use it. This means that instead of blasting the news right when someone logs in, you think through where you might give the user a bit of a nudge to use or try something new and empower them to take action right away. The pro of this type of announcement is that it seems less marketing-y and more helpful. The drawback is that it’s not seen by as many users since it only shows up when a user goes through that specific product flow. * In product empty states: Not to play favorites, but this is my favorite type of in product marketing. The empty state refers to the first time a user encounters a feature, or the state of the product or feature before any data/information is added to it. For example, the first time you click on Airtable Apps, you see an empty state that gives a hint at it’s value and why you should use it. These empty states give you much more real estate than a modal or tool tip and often you can help the user not just understand that there’s a new feature, but really help them understand the benefit of said feature and why they should use it. The most effective way I’ve seen empty states used has been with in product videos that explain the value of the feature and gets in a bit of user education before the customer dives in. Keep these videos short (under 1:30) and you should see your conversion rate from those empty states spike! * Announcement modals: These are the most ‘in your face’ of all announcements and should be used most sparingly, but they’re often the most effective. These are announcements that pop up for a user as soon as they login to your product, letting them know that you’ve launched something big, new, and impactful. That modal should be short, sweet, and easy to dismiss so you’re not interrupting a user’s workflow too heavily. CTAs on those modals can push a user to start a trial/use the feature or link out to a blog post or landing page that explains more about what’s new.
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Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 18
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 product usage than on lead volume. The role isn’t necessarily “defined” differently, but our focus areas are different, the scope of our roles reflect those differences, and we’re often more fluid in our work based on what’s needed from us in the org than a more traditional sales and marketing funnel.
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Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 18
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 today without your involvement, what input is already being given, and how successful the roadmap is in its current state before you come in with opinions. If you’ve done this and you spot gaps in the current process, my recommendation would be to show how you can assist in this process, rather than just asking to be included. Planning takes up a huge amount of time and it can be an uphill climb to get something finalized, which means that there’s often a certain level of concern that comes up when more people are added to an existing planning process. I often joke with my counterparts across marketing, product, and sales that I will be in a near constant planning cycle for the rest of my career. So, rather than asking for an invite without showing why we should be included, it’s always worked well for me to do a little sleuthing and proactively provide something to the team in advance of the roadmapping process. For example, if you know that the roadmapping process happens one month before the start of the quarter, you can plan to share intel and insight with the product team a few days before that process. I’d recommend focusing on how you can provide intel that doesn’t exist today, rather than trying to sway existing processes. For example, if your sales, success, and support teams are already giving product input to the team, there’s no need for you to pile on there. Instead, maybe there’s a gap in sharing the feedback you’re receiving in the community and on social channels since those customers might not be represented in the feedback the product team is receiving. Spend a few hours synthesizing the feedback and insights and offering up suggestions in a 2-3 page doc, and you’ve successfully added new, helpful, relevant intel to the process. Additionally, one thing that is often missing from roadmapping processes is competitive and market intelligence. Can you put together an overview of where we are losing to competitors based on lost deals, feedback on third party review sites, and head to head feature comparisons to help give your product team insight on some opportunities to win against key competitors? Or can you provide some market trends that are impacting your target market and a recommendation for how the product team might be able to respond? The key with these suggestions is to not be too prescriptive with how the problem should get solved, but more to map out the opportunities, provide the insight and recommendations, and start the conversation. Timing is important here. If you provide that intelligence at the right time, right before roadmapping sessions happen, it becomes a helpful input to the process and can help guide decision making. If you provide it too late in the process, the information you share might be helpful but it’s also going to feel like a potential roadblock or hurdle to getting the roadmap finalized. Once you provide this input and the roadmapping process is complete, follow up with your product counterparts to see how the intel you provided helped, what was incorporated, and what additional intel might be helpful for future roadmapping sessions. Now that you’ve shown your value, you should have more opportunity to open the door for your continued involvement in the roadmapping process.
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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 18
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 person succeed and the other fail. Is it a difference in motivation? Skill level? Use case? Once you’ve got your group of users, here are some questions I’d think about asking: * What were you looking to use <product name> to accomplish? For a horizontal product like Airtable, people’s use cases vary wildly. Having this intel helps you spot common problems across user groups * How important is a tool like <product name> to your current workflow? This helps you get at people’s motivations and intent. If this is something they need in their role or something they’re just trying on for size. Another great question to ask here is ‘What happens if you don’t get a tool like set up?’ so you can gauge impact. * Where did you run into problems or roadblocks in getting set up with <product name>? In this question, I find it helpful to guide users through the steps of your onboarding process as they likely won’t remember themselves. This gives you insight into whether there’s a common drop off point in onboarding. * What help or resources would you have liked to see as part of your onboarding process? Rather than trying to use instincts to make updates, keep it simple and just ask folks for what would have been helpful to them. Some of the best suggestions I've ever gotten have come from this question. * (For inactive users) What are you using now to manage your process? If they are not successfully using your tool, it will be helpful to get insight into what they're using instead. Did they go to a competitor? If so, can you look at their onboarding process and get inspiration? Did they go back to not using a tool at all for this? At Airtable, people often continue using spreadsheets, so we focus on how to make the transition from spreadsheets to Airtable easier knowing that’s a sticking point for folks. You might get some similar insight to help people move from whatever their manual process is to your product. * (For successfully onboarded users) How long did it take for you to start seeing value out of the product? Sometimes products are complicated and it’s going to be difficult to get up and running. If you can get insight into how long it takes for someone to see value, you can understand how to help coach other users to that promised land and can potentially find opportunities to speed up that time to value Another suggestion I’d make is to focus on more than just surveys. Having a few conversations with users can be much more valuable than hundreds of survey responses. Sometimes we over-index on data and quantitative insights when really what we need are a few qualitative pearls of wisdom. Get folks into user research sessions and have them sign up for and get set up with the product while they’re on a video call with you. Have them talk through their thoughts, questions, and experience as they do it and I promise you’ll get a ton of insight into what it’s like to get up and running with your product.
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Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing • November 18
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: As a PMM, you have the opportunity to lead without being a manager of people. A strong product marketer is someone who takes others along with them, rather than telling people exactly what they want them to do. They’re able to create strong relationships across the company, with product managers, engineers, designers, marketers, support folks, and more. They’re natural connectors who know who to go to in an organization to get things done and can influence cross-functional stakeholders to support and prioritize projects. Executive presence and clear communication: As you get more senior, you'll spend more and more time presenting plans, public speaking, and communicating with executives in the company. The stronger you are at presenting and public speaking, the easier this will be for you. Executive presence also means knowing how best to leverage an executive’s skills to get feedback that will help your project, manage their expectations, and ensure they feel like they’re in the loop about work that matters to them. A pitch in, get-it-done attitude: Being a PMM can be unglamorous at times. Sure, you get to run the big launches, but what people don’t see are the hours you spend writing support macros to ensure the team has what they need to answer incoming tickets, the amount of times a day you have to field seemingly random requests that don’t always fall neatly into your scope of work, and how often you get looped into last-minute, urgent projects that you didn’t plan for. PMMs that can approach this type of work ready to pitch in and help are often those that are seen as the most dependable and trustworthy, which helps them create strong relationships across the company. In my career, I've always made sure I'm never above doing the grunt work that's needed to get something across the finish line. While I don’t do it every day, I’m happy to roll up my sleeves to take a screenshot for a help article or write a macro if it means the team will be more successful and I reward members of my team that have the same attitude.
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