AMA: Google Head of Marketing, Cybersecurity, Apurva Davé on Platform and Solutions Product Marketing

Think about what matters most to your customer, and then what matters most to your company. * Is your base platform something which your customers will natively interact with and drive value from? * Is it something that a new user in your target accounts will benefit from (eg, developers) ? * Or is your platform something that allows you to accelerate development, so the customer sees more value from the platform faster? Thinking through this will tell you how to build your messaging. While most companies want the platform concept to take center stage, it might not be right for your customer. Or it might appeal to one audience more than another. Or, your platform might really just be like a "feature" that customers only need to know about tangentially.

I think PMM orgs go through phases. When I started in this role we were strictly by product, but our portfolio quickly became too complicated. We moved to more of a segment or sub-portfolio model. At the same time, the rest of the organizations' PMM teams were sub-dividing by objective. In order to match with the rest of that org we had 'ambassadors' to the objective-based teams. Given that PMM stakeholders are typically PM and Sales, I think the best approach is to best align your PMMs with the stakeholder objectives. In most organizations that's by product line or segment.

* Portfolio: a set of products (which may or may not be connected) that solve a particular type of problem or serve a particular user * Platform: a foundational technology that allows you (or others) to build multiple products faster given a set of primitives. * Ecosystem: a set of companies that are connected in some way to solve a customer problem * Suite: a subset of a portfolio, where there is a set of products that have a common look and feel, some integrations, and likely are bundled together to solve a particular problem.

I would argue that, when your product is early (and basic), your messaging and positioning matter more than when you are established. Why? 1. You need to speak to a specific buyer and convince them to care. Your positioning must bring a unique insight (or many!) that bring your buyer/user along on your journey. You must paint a vision for why your basic capabilities will turn into something full featured that solves an incredibly important problem. After all, if you can't communicate it, why would you expect someone else to understand it? 2. Your positioning will guide the creation of everything that you use to communicate the product. Every demo, every web page, every blog must lead back to the few salient points that you've distilled in your messaging. Even a simple feature release should lead back to the 'why' you've laid out in your messaging. 3. Your positioning will serve as a guide for your future development. As your product grows, as you add products, or even acquire companies, you should be able leverage your positioning as a guiding light to ask if you're continuing to be true to your buyer and true to the vision of your company.

I'll focus on the creating great messaging, because frankly that's the most challenging part of the job. Especially given the noise out there with so many products, and so many companies being funded, it's really hard to stand out. I think there are lots of ways to create great messaging, but it all comes from the same place: * Great insight into your customers drive great messaging. That's it. So then the question is, how do you get there? For me it means holistically understanding the environment around your user, and then being able to connect the most differentiated value of your product to their world. That means your product marketers must have a deep understanding of the customer as well as the demands and challenges they face, combined with a deep understanding of your own product, and finally the overall environment (competitors, legacy products, substitutions). When this comes together, messaging must be defensible (it's true) and must be differentiated (you couldn't slap a competitor's name on it and have the market believe it). Finally and most importantly, it must matter. The customer must care about your why's and how's. Over time as a marketing leader you develop a sense if a product message meets these requirements, but the only real proof is testing it with your customer base and proxies for the base. Proxies include product managers, good sales people, and analysts. Use them! And then when you're ready test with willing customers, and then finally with prospects who don't know they are getting the new stuff. Don't be afraid to get the message out there. Finally, I would say that I'm not a huge fan of A/B testing messaging through ads or web pages in the early days. While you may see which one gets more clicks, you won't know why. Having real conversations allows you to ask the follow on questions that give you the insight needed to improve your messaging.