AMA: Calendly Head of Product Marketing, Jeff Hardison on Growth Product Marketing
August 10 @ 10:00AM PT
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👋 Jeff Hardison
Hi, everyone. I'm the former VP of product marketing at Calendly. Also have had product marketing leadership roles at Clearbit, InVision, and HP.
•👋 Based in: Portland, Oregon
• 🧠 Top of mind: Balancing AI use with what humans do well
• 💬 Ask me about: Anything!
• 🍦 Fun fact: I used to compete in Moth-style storytelling events
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
Each quarter, our team is generally proposing helping with KPIs around: - acquisition of new users - activating those new users - expanding or upgrading users (using thei...
715 Views
3 requests
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
Growth can mean different things in different orgs. In some orgs, a growth person owns acquiring new users (with performance marketing or ads, and so forth). In other org...
3074 Views
6 requests
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
First off, I love shared KPIs between departments (particularly between product management and product marketing management)! I’m happy you’re thinking this way. Historic...
1105 Views
4 requests
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
This is one of my favorite topics, and I write more extensively about product-led marketing versus sales-led marketing on the Product-Led Growth Collective site: https://...
2638 Views
6 requests
How has your product marketing team traditionally worked with demand generation / growth marketing?
At our company, demand gen is a much bigger function than product marketing so they drive all of the campaigns with our input, but I came from an organization where we lead the campaign strategy a bit more since we had more numbers. Anyone have a good solid process they use with their demand gen team?
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
First, I try real hard to let go of my ego and temporarily forget about the past (e.g., how I worked with demand gen in another company). Every company’s marketing depart...
4587 Views
5 requests
If you have to improve the adoption rate of a SaaS product, where would you start?
Like what are the first things you would check/do?
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
Oh, man, big question! It really depends on the product and company. But if I have to generalize...First, I’d try to get crystal clear on what we mean by adoption rate. I...
945 Views
5 requests
How would you approach this product marketing interview assignment?
I interviewed earlier this year and did well except for this assignment. I'm hoping to better prepare for similar situations. Here's the quest:
As mentioned, the next part of this process is to complete a brief assignment. The purpose of this assignment is just to see your methodology get some insight into your approach to tasks.
For this assignment, I'd like for you to create a high-level go-to-market plan and strategy for our flagship product our event marketing platform. Our company traditionally has targeted enterprise b2b companies.
I'd like you to come up with high-level messaging, define who the target audience is, and then detail your strategy for informing the market about our event platform and getting more leads. Please identify which channels you would use, and what you would need for this go-to-market launch. Please keep your response under 2 pages
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
I’d have to see your assignment response to make recommendations! And I probably shouldn’t print my recommendations here publicly, as this company probably wants to keep ...
1812 Views
2 requests
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
I feel fortunate that I’ve led positioning/messaging workshops since I graduated college because I worked for an agency that mandated them for every project we worked on ...
1082 Views
3 requests
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
I just say, "I really think this feature idea is really cool!" Just kidding. One of my go-to tactics is compiling customer feedback about a problem or feature idea from ...
1504 Views
3 requests
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
Because product marketing is such a collaborative function -- we're like diplomats and glue between product-engineering-design, marketing, customer success, and sales (if...
1642 Views
3 requests
How do you manage launches when the product team has a difficult time sticking to timelines?
This makes launches pretty difficult to manage without creating large lapses in communication.
Sanity.io VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Calendly, InVision, Clearbit, Amazon (consultant) • 4y
It's very common -- particularly in modern software companies -- for product teams to move timelines based on engineering constraints, customer feedback in the beta-testi...
786 Views
2 requests