AMA: Calendly Head of Product Marketing, Jeff Hardison on Growth Product Marketing

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 for tech clients.  Getting an exec team to agree on a document outlining positioning and messaging isn't the hard part in my opinion. The difficult part is to get the messaging to stick once you put it out in the world: on a homepage, in a blog post, an ad, a slide deck for sales, etc. When positioning and messaging is put to us ...Read More

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 orgs, growth helps with proposing and testing different growth levers (e.g., an invite-a-friend option in-app, adding signup-for-free CTAs to collaboration opportunities such as an email a Calendly meeting invitee receives). Sometimes, growth owns the lifecycle marketing from signup to first-time user experience in app to emails an ...Read More

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 department is structured differently, and it’s important to quickly adapt. Then, I try to be human and have a conversation with each demand gen person, asking how can we help them achieve their goals. Sign up for some activities to help them with some shared KPIs. Once you get some shared wins, other departments tend to start trusting ...Read More

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. Is that net-new free signups? Is that activation of those signups? Let’s say it’s it’s activation of those signups for discussion purposes. The second thing I recommend is sign up for free (if you're PLG) for your company’s product using a burner email and record your screen going through the first-time user experience. What scre ...Read More

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://www.productled.org/blog/marketers-prepare-product-led-growth The tl;dr, though: In many product-led growth (PLG) companies non-salespeople (e.g., product managers, designers, engineers, founders, etc.) helping to create the actual product have the initial greatest influence on what product marketing does. In many PLG companies, ...Read More

First off, I love shared KPIs between departments (particularly between product management and product marketing management)! I’m happy you’re thinking this way. Historically, some organizations did measure product marketing qualitatively. Did XYZ department feel supported by PMM? Or even in a “binary” fashion. Did product marketing launch the product? Did they train sales? Did they help conduct research? Yes or no? Increasingly, though, companies are measuring product marketing more quantitativ ...Read More

It's very common -- particularly in modern software companies -- for product teams to move timelines based on engineering constraints, customer feedback in the beta-testing process, and more. All product marketers wrestle with this situation. So, realize you're not alone! I recommend explaining what's in it for the product-engineering-design team. Do they want much-anticipated recognition for and usage of the product they've toiled for so many months on? Then, let's set a date. Do they want a lo ...Read More

Because product marketing is such a collaborative function -- we're like diplomats and glue between product-engineering-design, marketing, customer success, and sales (if you have it) -- I try to open up my "empathy reserves" for the various departments I'm going to work with. If it's B2C, I think about product-engineering-design, customer support (dealing with thousands of tickets), and my friends in marketing. If it's B2B, I think about all of the above plus the sales team (which is likely a n ...Read More