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Nikhil Gangaraju

AMA: Amplitude Product Marketing Director, Nikhil Gangaraju on Messaging

February 27, 2025 @ 9:00AM PT

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  1. How do you build messaging for an audience that has historically used a competitor's product? Is this any different in solution marketing?

    Nikhil Gangaraju
    Nikhil Gangaraju

    Amplitude Product Marketing Director • 1y

    Competitive marketing is an art!

    there are more structured ways to do this including:

    -Competitive Battlecards
    -Competitive landing pages
    -Competitive datasheets

    However what really makes competitive messaging work is getting the positioning right. This means defining the competition on your own terms around the context that best favors you, and use that to build the right narrative. Everything else is secondary.

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  2. What are your favourite brands who have their product marketing right? On similar lines, who are the best PMM leaders in this space you admire?

    Nikhil Gangaraju
    Nikhil Gangaraju

    Amplitude Product Marketing Director • 1y

    Some brands that I currently look up to for inspiration around product marketing are

    Spotify: User year in review
    Airbnb: Launch announcements
    OpenAI: Launch Announcements
    Apple: Product Launches
    Figma: Content/Demos
    Rivian: Brand/Community Marketing
    Clay: Community Marketing
    Notion: Product and Content Marketing


    In terms of PMM leaders, i would say eveyone on the Sharebird list of active contributors!

    5,894 Views
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  3. How do you think about the difference between messaging and copy?

    Nikhil Gangaraju
    Nikhil Gangaraju

    Amplitude Product Marketing Director • 1y

    Copy is just a representation of different form factors where your messaging or story lives. This approach is best represented by the concept of "Jellyfish Product Marketing," i.e a layered approach to building a cohesive product story and messaginghttps://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-does-great-product-marketing-look-like-marcus-andrewsAt the center of the jellyfish is "The Story," which is built upon "Positioning" - showing how the strategic positioning serves as the core that informs all story ...Read More

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  4. What is the most popular trend in product marketing that has helped you succeed?

    I'd like to know what most recent way of doing business, dealing with people, developing and innovating ideas has been the most helpful to you and your career in the last 5 years? (i.e Leveraging AI, Collaboration, PMM tools etc.)

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  5. What is your advice for honing messaging skills?

    Nikhil Gangaraju
    Nikhil Gangaraju

    Amplitude Product Marketing Director • 1y

    Read a lot of diverse literature and get really good at story telling :) it also helps to be passionate about the products that you sell. Messaging is ultimately more art than science but you can definitely build a good process for ideation that suits your approach. Again the Jellyfish framework can help a lot here

    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-does-great-product-marketing-look-like-marcus-andrews

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  6. What if any changes do you see product marketing facing over the next 2 years. A lot of industries and disciplines have seen disruption with the pandemic, what disruptions do you see facing product marketing?

    Nikhil Gangaraju
    Nikhil Gangaraju

    Amplitude Product Marketing Director • 1y

    A few things come to mindDeeper integration of AI into marketing processes - This is already happening today and will only accelerate for example here are my workflows as a PMM using AI. I use Perplexity to inform Market research & Sizing, Market-product fit,  Competitive intel & explore technical concepts Claude to help me test/iterate on Messaging, demo scripts, enablement outlines, launch activation concepts Another big area for PMMs is the growth of community-driven marketing, where ...Read More

    1,902 Views
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  7. Can you explain the difference yet relatedness between messaging and positioning to me like I’m a 5yr old?

    Nikhil Gangaraju
    Nikhil Gangaraju

    Amplitude Product Marketing Director • 1y

    I think the jelly fish approach articulated here does a great job of articulating the nuances b/w messaging and positioning: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-does-great-product-marketing-look-like-marcus-andrewsAt the bottom is the "Raw data/research Layer" - This foundation contains intelligence, data, customer insights that are collected, cleaned, and combined to create positioning insightsThink of the middle layer as the positioning layer - Here, product marketing teams work together to po ...Read More

    1,261 Views
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  8. How are product and brand marketing similar? Different? Or are they really the same thing?!

    Nikhil Gangaraju
    Nikhil Gangaraju

    Amplitude Product Marketing Director • 1y

    They are different.

    Brand marketing aligns to the purpose of the company's existence and helps to create the narrative around the company that people associate with. Product Marketing helps to successfully shepard the company's products to market and to successfully commercialize them. Often times these two roles need to work together to truly reflect the brand and the product

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  9. As a Platform Solutions company, what is the best way to segment and deliver messaging for our product lines individually and as a platform?

    IE. Umbrella company with 3 SaaS products underneath, all can be plug and play in same dashboard. We need help defining messaging using terms such as solution, product, tools, features, etc.

    Nikhil Gangaraju
    Nikhil Gangaraju

    Amplitude Product Marketing Director • 1y

    The challenge with horizontal platform companies is that the use cases are almost infinte and so you need to focus. Start by discovery and user research, who are the people that use your platform, personify them, understand their challenges, why they use your product and the use cases that represent the work they do. From there you can start to articulate your personas, and their respective use cases. One your use cases are mature enough i.e there are specialized product features, integrations a ...Read More

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