AMA: Amplitude Product Marketing Director, Nikhil Gangaraju on Messaging

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

A few things come to mind Deeper 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 customers become advocates through dedicated platforms and experiences rather than traditional testimonials. This will only continue as more companies seek to grow through loyalty and community led marketing as the expense of a sales led approach

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!

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.

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

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-andrews At the bottom is the "Raw data/research Layer" - This foundation contains intelligence, data, customer insights that are collected, cleaned, and combined to create positioning insights Think of the middle layer as the positioning layer - Here, product marketing teams work together to position products and craft the story that marketing brings to life. This layer transforms the raw data into a strategic narrative. Finally the top layer acts as the messaging layer - Where marketing tactics "erupt" from a single company story that is consistently in various messaging formats across all channels.

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 messaging https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-does-great-product-marketing-look-like-marcus-andrews At 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 storytelling and messaging. The Copy is where marketing tactics "erupt" from a single message that is consistently told across all channels. These channels might include website, content/social, email, sales deck, webinars, and other touch points.

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 and experts that can serve them, you can then start to turn those use cases in solutions and even industry verticals. Start small and aim big :)

I dont know if there are "specific" trends that helped me, however I've always learned from good frameworks. I framework in particular that helped me is the jellyfish framework that distills the true esssence of what a true PMM function looks like in real life. Here is a link: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-does-great-product-marketing-look-like-marcus-andrews