AMA: Fivetran VP of Product Marketing, Catlyn Origitano on Messaging

Most of our PMMs are in Pods - where a PM and PMM focus on a certain area of the business. Each pod shares a North Star Metric - most of which are revenue based and come down from our overall business goals. While of course we aren't 100% responsible for that goal - that is, sales has to sell it! - it helps us stay focused and measure our impact. For folks that don't have a specific revenue goal, primarily because it might be hard to measure or change quarter to quarter, we still have North Star ...Read More

I am a project manager at heart. So I push the team to be the same. We have our roadmaps which we present and then turn into tickets for overall tracking. We also have a monthly reivew on areas of the business - so this let's us check in on how things are going and what is getting done.  For messaging and materials in particular, we do a quarterly review of our materials. We try and make it fun - we listen to different music, everyone picks a song, and we go through and update and verify our mat ...Read More

In-app copy does fit with Product Marketing - and Product! So technically, our PM team owns the in-product experience but PMM has full access to the tool. We have a slack channel for all in-app messaging and anyone who wants to do one posts in there following a format that says the purpose, how long it will run, to whom it will be shown, and a preview. Folks can ask questions, offer suggestions, and then we give the approval to set live. The results of these go into our quarterly retros.  If it ...Read More

We work with our PM team to create a quarterly roadmap. This helps us align with them on the major releases that are happening, discovery work we need to do, and align on key activities to influence growth.  We also then do a big marketing team-wide planning every quarter to ensure that, for example, those big product releases are also on Content & Demand Generation's calendar. We then have a ticketing system where folks can input requests. We review these on a bi-weekly basis to see if some ...Read More

At Fivetran, we actually have a few different Product Marketing teams in order to be able to do both core product messaging as well as more portfolio messaging. At Fivetran, folks find us / use us for particular analytic challenges - like Marketing Analytics, Finance Analytics, Sales Analytics, etc. As a result, we have pods dedicated to each of these areas. The core of the pod is a PMM and a PM - and they are mapped to the data sources associated with each use case (e.g., Marketing Analytics po ...Read More

At Fivetran, product marketing owns it. One of the main reasons is because our buyers and users are very technical folks who are turned off by fluffy marketing. As a result, our messaging must be very straight forward, factual, and concise. So it makes sense for that to originate with our Product Marketing team who knows the Product well and are constantly in communication with customers. We are only now developing more of our brand messaging - and even then Product Marketing is heavily involved ...Read More

We do - but we are also iterating here as we speak! In the past, I have reached out to some customers and folks I know in the industry to sit down and do some quick validation on messaing. For example, when we launched our new website and put up our first billboards, we had a good sense of what we wanted to say but wanted to confirm that the direction we were going would resonate. So we schedulded some quick meetings and got raw feedback on some key phrases. We've done the same with changes to o ...Read More

Ultimately, we make both kinds of information available - or at least we try to! So for example, our website has a lot of high level messaging about our secruity capabilities, for example. But we also have links to our security whitepaper - which most security teams need to read as part of the procurement process. So we try to make it as much as possible a choose your own adventure - that is easy for them to find what they need. If they want to go deep, we don't hide that information and our Doc ...Read More

200%. The way that, when necessary, I defend messaging is with customer feedback and validation. For example, with our website copy and billboard - I got some push back that it wouldn't really resonate. So I scheduled some sessions with customers to get their feedback. With that in hand, it was a lot easier to defend my positioning - since what the others had was just a feeling that it wasn't right, while I had names and quotes about why it was.  But ultimately, I, and the rest of the team, trie ...Read More

At my previous company, Sojern, we had this very problem! We wanted to translate all of our sales decks and materials but every time we tried we found that it took more effort, time, and money than it seemed to be worth - that is, the translations would always come back and be considered poor by the folks who would use them.  So, we did a few things to make revamp our messaging and it had to start at the foundation. I explained to our VP of Sales - garbage in, garbage out.  The first thing we di ...Read More

Generally speaking, the way we've gone about it at Fivetran is with a few key gates. First, we have a messaging doc template that we use. It contains things like business pain points, personas, messaging in 10 words, 25 words, glossary of terms, etc. This is usually developed with the lead PM on the group.  We listen to customer calls or do our own to better understand why customers want the thing we are building or bringing to market. If it is a bigger launch, we've vetted our messaging with an ...Read More