AMA: Canva Ecosystem Marketing Leader, Indy Sen on Product Marketing KPI's

Great question. When working at a startup, and especially as the first PMM hire, you want to make sure you can add value in quantifiable ways, while not signing up for too much or making yourself vulnerable to scope creep and/or unreasonable expectations. Clarity on what you own and what you can affect is critical to your success. What you own: * Executing successful product launches, complete with delivered bill of goods as stated, and on time. * This includes messaging primitives such as positioning, and messaging hierarchy for your product that are signed off and approved by your leadership. Think of these as essential launch checklist items and measurement is more management by objective--either you have them, or you don't (at your own risk and peril) * This also includes brokering agreement on what's in scope for the launch based on its importance to the business * e.g. delivery of the blog post, landing page, production supervision of hero video/hero images, garnering of customer quotes, enablement of sales etc, on time * Depending on your scope and remit, this can also mean the pricing and packaging elements of the product What you don't own * The last-minute viral video, trend-jacking gambit that came to the CEO in a fever-dream that causes your messaging to shift overnight. If you're tasked with this, you should negotiate more time and resources or run for the hills. * Product launch delays. Unless marketing items are holding things up, technical readiness is up to product and engineering. As a product marketer, however, you should always strive for commercial readiness. * Investor expectations. Hopefully not a spicy take, but that's on your CEO. What you can affect: * How excited the product team is about your message to market. At Google, our formula was "know the user/know the magic/connect the two". * How prepared the sales team feels about pitching your new product or launch moment * How confident your other cross-functional marketing partners are in their ability to execute across their channels successfully, be it web, social, experiential What you can't affect: * Minimum viable product or MVP. That, again, is a product/eng thing. What you can shape however is "minimum viable positioning". * How a customer or prospect will receive the initial pitch. However, in time, you can befriend early customers and run messaging by them. This worked for Marc Benioff in the early days of Salesforce, and is still something he does to this day. * The resourcing/budgeting that the rest of the marketing team has to work with (unless you, as the PMM, hold the purse strings, which is not likely in an early startup scenario)

The best way to think about it is across each funnel stage. 1. Top of funnel: You want to measure and quantify whether your messaging resonates in the marketplace. The best way to measure this is through your PR channels and specifically at the time of a product launch or big initiative to see if your messaging has generated the awareness you wanted it to. At Google, we had this metric called "messaging fidelity," where we counted the number of coverage pieces that quoted our value props and messaging. High fidelity is if they copied and pasted our messaging verbatim in their coverage, or loosely paraphrased it--bonus points if they compared us to the competition in a flattering light. Lower fidelity was if they didn't latch on to what made our launch or initiative different or, worse, if they compared us to the competition in an unfavorable, or middling manner. 2. Middle of funnel: You want to measure the effectiveness of your messaging at the conversion level, via things like web and digital marketing metrics if you can. This makes sense as you're putting yourself out there, most likely across multiple channels and audiences e.g. Did the subject headers in this email perform better than the other one we sent? Did the A/B test on the module placements of the landing page show a customer preference? 3. Bottom of funnel: 1. For PLG led motions, this is measured at the product adoption level, and you'll want to see where your messaging can affect outcomes. At Canva, we have this belief that "words are design". Try to measure what part of your messaging is conducive to your user going through the first-time user experience more smoothly, and how clear language and messaging can grease the skids to a successful user journey. 2. For sales-led motions, this will in all likelihood be measured by your win-rates. At the end of the day, were your sales reps able to convince the prospect that your product was differentiated enough from the competition? Part of this outcome will be tied to your messaging, the other part will also be tied to how good your sales teams is in delivering it. Win-rates can thus be seen as lagging indicators. For leading indicators, test your messaging as early and frequently with sales as you can. If they don't get it, chances are your customers won't.