AMA: Canva Ecosystem Marketing Leader, Indy Sen on Platform Product Marketing

My recommendation in those instances is to start by developing a messaging hierarchy across your overarching offering story and expand it from there. As tempting as it is to rattle off features and benefits across your platform offerings and cater to every use case, having those all ladder up to a consistent core message is always beneficial. Why? Because that will be your true north. The reason why our API is built this way is because it ties back to our desire to do x for y. Ah, you want to kn ...Read More

Two things need to happen when you make that shift from a sales enablement perspective. You need to change your narrative from a product to platform narrative You may need to up-level your sales team and heuristics by bringing on people who are comfortable making the jump to solution selling vs. product selling Product marketing can run with 1.) but you'll need a strong cross-functional handshake with sales and leadership to make two happen. You won't be successful without both. Let's get to the ...Read More

Great question, and always exciting to be at a juncture where you're considering expanding your GTM to address specific verticals and opportunities. Getting a vertical right is not always easy, but when you have the right structure and offerings, the work across other opportunities is very repeatable.There are several ways to think about this from a marketing approach: Picking the vertical: Spinning up a vertical marketing strategy within marketing is a big bet because you have to orchestrate a ...Read More

Think of your PMM team as an interface to the organizations they serve. Your org structure can vary from company to company, but I've often said that messaging, if done right, should be like an API across your organization. Same goes with your PMM organization. The more you can optimize for information flow between team members, the more "performant" your API will be. So when thinking about platform solutions PMMs vs product-focused PMMs I go back to the classic vertical vs horizontal services s ...Read More

What a great question, and having seen this shift happen at a few companies, I don't think it was necessarily just a messaging effort that caused the mindset to shift. To be sure, there was a combination of go-to-marketing strategy and storytelling we needed to bring to the table, but it was above all the output from our ecosystem that really kicked off the flywheel: from the insane business potential coming out of our ISV partner ecosystem at Salesforce, to the innovation fueled by our develope ...Read More