AMA: Matterport Former VP Product Marketing and Platform, Indy Sen on Messaging

Give them the right frameworks, brand/voice guidelines and templates, and get out of their way :) A good product marketing hire will be a strong communicator and naturally curious. That's actually an asset when it comes to developing messaging as it prompts them to ask the right questions and even apply a beginner's mind to your messaging.

No doubt, the ROI of a billboard is hard to measure. But when it comes to brand marketing, you need to be crisp around the metrics. In marketing you'll either need to solve for awareness, demand generation, or both. Brand typically deals with awareness and that's not a straight $ to $ metric. At Google, we conducted brand surveys for G Suite (now Google Workspace) roughly every 9 months. There we measured aided and unaided awareness as well as qualitative measures around how closely we compared around specific features sets and value statements against competitive products. Results were taken from a fairly large representative sample we kept track of longitudinally. So while deeply qualitative, the progression from survey to survey yielded essential insights to the greater team, including blind spots, and even got the fire in the belly going with PMs and Sales. Finally, I wouldn't discount the effect of brand "love" as a measure. Branding is by definition a long game--it's the series of associations you're creating between your customers and your products and company. So it's not just billboards, or swag or back covers of the Economist. Done right, it's integral to the customer experience. Think about what Salesforce does with Dreamforce, their annual customer event. It's not just a readout of new product announcements but a total industry event, the Cloud Mecca if you will. People will come up to you and tell you how much they love Salesforce. You can't put a price on that. Think about other brands like Nike who've played the long game, despite many controversies. It takes investment, protection, transparency and consistency. Now think about Robinhood and what happened in the past week. They failed at maintaining all four of those tenets, with deletrious results.

Done right, product marketing should be the company's messaging API . How effective you are in disseminating it and helping everyone sing from the sames songsheet is a direct reflection of how targeted and focused your messaging documents are. One of my favorite messaging artifacts is Geoffrey Moore's positioning framework. It's so popular in fact that it's even on GitHub because it's essentially source code for positioning. It reads as follows: For (target customers) Who must (solve a specific problem) Our product is a new (new product category) That provides (key breakthrough benefit vs. current way of doing things – which solves dilemma) Unlike (competitor in new category) We have (whole product most relevant for you) Whether it's been at Google, WeWork or even my current role at Matterport, this is the framework that has paid dividends. It's a strategic exercise. It forces stakeholders to boil down their inputs into a sentence that they have to agree on. But once you have that, you're off to the races as you can then feed that positioning statement into other messaging documents and derivatives like a one slide positioning messaging framework. To the first part of your question, I don't see why you couldn't have a version of that positioning statement for a particular persona or vertical. At WeWork we built out a few of these positioning artifacts in the midst of experiencing hypergrowth, but the one we did for enterprise buyers for example had an immediate impact into the updating of our homepage messaging at a critical time for the company. For achieving buy in, see my answer to one of the questions above.

Looks like this question got the most upvotes so let me start with it and try and give as much context as I can. At Google we had the following heuristic for marketing which was: 1.) Know the user 2.) Know the magic 3.) Connect the two It informed our marketing overall, but especially our positioning and messaging. You asked about both and I would actually separate the two. For positioning it's always a good idea to start with the product and engineering teams. They are typically the closest to the vision of the product--who it's for/what it does/how does it do it i.e. the "magic". I often use the metaphor that if the product is a movie, PM and Eng will typically cook up the plot, while it's product marketing's job to deliver the narrative. Sales is also a good stakeholder for positioning. They'll help you narrow down the "user" details, especially in enterprise where they spend more time with customers than anyone else in the organization. So it really behooves you to spend as much time with sales as you can. Done right, product marketing is sale's best friend. So at big companies, prod, eng and sales are typically good places to start for positioning while at smaller companies, like startups, you may want to involve the founder and leadership team early as they have most of the datapoints. But I'd keep the stakeholder list pretty tight overall when it comes to positioning otherwise you'll tend to swirl and it's really important to nail positioning first, because messaging is the by product. Per the Google heuristic above, positioning covers the user and the magic. Connecting the two is where messaging comes in, and that's where you should open up the aperture when it comes to stakeholder management IMO. This is where Demand Gen, Field, AR, PR or even support stakeholders comes in. The reason is simple. As the product marketer, people will and should treat you as the SME when it comes to the product positioning but will likely want to help shape what messaging looks like at the last mile, whether that's on the web, email copy, print ads, events and activations, or when talking to the press and analysts. After all, they own those channels, are directly responsible for their performance and know what typically plays well and performs--or not. The worst thing you can do is go against the grain and be precious about a turn of phrase or a cool tagline. At Salesforce, we had a campaign where with partners where we thought we could riff of the expression "being on cloud nine". Well that worked well in NORAM, but didn't make sense in other markets where the expression was meaningless when translated. So when it comes to positoning, be ruthless and direct about who has input as you don't want to swirl on that or compromise. But for messaging, take the inputs, and to paraphrase Bruce Lee "be like water". While you shouldn't let the substance change, you want your message to resonate. 

Involve them early, and involve them often. People often construe a tension between brand and product marketing when in fact they're often part of the same team. To paraphrase Jay-Z to Nas during one of their epic rap beefs: Brand can come up with hot lines, Product Marketing will come up with a hot song, except that here everyone wins. Brand is one of the many outlets where your messaging can sing, but it has to start with a common understanding of what your product does and why it's different, which is the purview of Product Marketing. WRT to PR, they're your absolute co-pilot on launches at that last mile. Give them the positioning, the customers stories, etc and a good pr person will work wonders. They can also be your co-pilot for the launch announcement or blog, so again involve them early and deeply. It goes back to trusting them to figure out how your news and information will play with specific media outlets and building that trust on a common understanding of what your product does, and in the case of PR, specifically what it doesn't.

Positioning is the precursor to messaging. If you don't know who your product is for, what it's good for and how it's different from other products in its space, then it will be very hard to come up with viable messaging. Put another way, positioning is the primitive, typically expressed as an internal statement (see question above re: Geoffrey Moore's framework), whereas messaging is a set of derivative assets, typically copy and value statements that help suit the needs of different channels and media (web, print, social, video, on-site activations, etc)

The best way to rapidly test whether your messaging is working as intended is to deliver it to your sales reps or other collaborators and see whether it helps them or not. Ideallly, you'd equip a few of them with a beta of your new pitch deck, or messaging artifacts and either get their gut reaction right then and there, or have them pilot it on a few conversations. Of course, if we're talking about digital channels than quick a/b tests via tools like Optimizely on the web, or tweaks you make to your assets like newsletters and nurtures that you test will also give you a sense of how your messaging performed. At Matterport we recently refactored our product page for Matterport for the iPhone. We had a strong start when we launched the page at the time of the product announcement, but then traffic slowly started dwindling there. When we refactored it we found that the primary driver for people coming back and staying on the page was the addition of customer use cases. Another example of where customer stories are literally the best messaging you can come up with. The best way to tell that your messaging didn't resonate is that reps end up going back to their own content or ignore the deck and assets you created. I've often seen companies where sales just putting their own messaging together because product marketing didn't meet their needs. See my answer above on how to keep sales in the loop during messaging development. 

It really depends on your release cycles and the nature of how your product will evolve. Ideally you'll want to know enough about your product vision so that positioning and messaging scales with new feature development. Think of them both as a scaffolding in that sense, so that when you're ready to add another feature/product element, it will feel like a natural progression and extension, vs a radical change in product direction. When Apple announced the iPhone back in 2007, they very quickly hinted at the SDK/APIs to build applications. Within the next year, they announced the App Store with even greater fanfare. Now I doubt they had all the elements worked out regarding the look and feel of the App Store back when they announced the iPhone, but they certainly paved the way for it so that it didn't come as a surprise. My rule of thumb: be deliberate but incremental. 

I think the pandemic has been a reset moment for us all, in more ways than one. For Product Marketing, it's put a renewed onus on equipping your teams with messaging that resonates and also make the case that your product is not a nice to have, but a need to have. We've gone through similar cycles before and you can pattern match. During the '08 recession Salesforce first took a hit like almost every other software company, but becuase the cloud had the unique distinction of helping business better affect their IT spend (Cap Ex to Op Ex) salesforce did better than all of its rivals. Disruption is inevitable. But suffering is optional. You just have to determine what the best way is to convey that your product is made for this moment. 

Well that makes me feel old, but great question. I'd say time, a lower risk profile, and access to everything. Time is a non-renewable resource, and you'll want to protect it with everything you got. But the one thing you have going for you when you're at the beginning of your career is you can experiment, industry-hop. Invest in that time to learn. But do be clear about your learning goals. When it comes to a career you should never waste time in a field, function or industry you don't care about or where you're not progressing. Lower risk profile -- before I had kids, I'd pour myself into work. Maybe too much, but that's also because I could afford to. I could also take bigger risks, not having to worry about the roof above our heads or their upbringing. That calculus gets a little trickier once you have a family where not only are you bounded by time but also by the energy you have to give across both work and life. That doesn't mean you can't excel, but you have to be judicious in your choices and really figure how to best set yourself up for success, both at work and at life. Access to everything -- There's a bounty of information out there right now and all the means to act on it. When I began my career 20 years ago there were a lot more BTEs to finding good jobs (LinkedIn didn't exist), networking and learning about industries or even starting a business (no Shopify, no Stripe, no AWS). People still ended up having great careeers though... it was just harder. Talent was evenly distributed but opportunity wasn't. The internet, the cloud and even this pandemic have changed all of that. You don't have to be in "Silicon Valley" to have a Silicon Valley job.