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

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 ...Read More

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 user2.) Know the magic3.) Connect the twoIt 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 th ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 be ...Read More

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 abou ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 h ...Read More

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, ...Read More