AMA: MParticle Vice President of Product Marketing, James Fang on Technical Product Marketing

When I was at Okta, I was part of an extremely effective PMM team. It was structured: Core / Product-line PMMs Technical product marketers Solutions PMMs (own "GTM plays" & business value - e.g. ROI calculator) Core / product-line PMMs were given a broad scope, and in some sense they effectively functioned as "outbound product managers", owning GTM strategy (e.g. should this primarily be positioned as a day1 attach for prospects / new deals vs. upsell to existing customers), pricing and pack ...Read More

Great PMM teams have balance, across the dimensions of positioning & messaging, communication, industry depth, and technical expertise. It's rare to find the "unicorn" PMM that is outstanding accross all 4 dimensions. Most organizations build PMM teams so that they have a mix of expertise in order to get the best coverage accross all dimensions. You want to figure out what your "superpower" is, and continue to hone it. But if technical skills is an area of weakness, it's something that you s ...Read More

For companies targeting developers, it's a good habit to build up a culture of developer empathy. Practical exmaples include: Provide them 101 sessions, enough for them to be dangerous and speak the lingo. What is an API? What is in a JSON payload? What is an SDK - and why does it matter if you support the customer's language or framework vs. your competitor doesn't? What is CI/CD or infrastructure-as-code, and if your product supports Terraform or GitHub Actions, why is that valuable to DevOps ...Read More

Techncial Product Marketers have a higher degree of industry knowledge and technical expertise. In a team, they are specialized in the areas of: Competitive intelligence: owning the maintenance of battlecards, and acts as SMEs when going head-to-head in a late-stage opportunity Technical enablement (SE, Professional Services): may entail building hands-on labs, creating technical content (e.g. reference architectures, demo environment + demo scripts, technical white papers) Running betas / "dogf ...Read More

Technical Product Marketers have a variety of career paths. Should they choose to stay in the PMM org, some more organizations offer management roles for Technical Product Marketing teams, which at some point roll up into broader product marketing leadership roles. Some choose to pick up more of the business / GTM strategy skillset and switch over to a "traditional" PMM. Others move into the SE, or professional services organizations. For code literate technical product marketers, dev advocacy i ...Read More

If technical buyers are critical to the sale, then you have to address their needs. Host accurate technical content. If you're choosing to reserve your primary real estate for your homepage / above-the-fold for your business / non-technical buyer, then create a clear path (discoverable in your nav bar or as soon as they go below the fold) to "click-here if you're a technical persona" such as "Docs", "Developers", or "How are we different?". Some good example of websites that do this are: https:/ ...Read More

The answer is you need both, but targeted to the right audience: business value for the economic buyer and technical value for the user / implementer. In some cases, the buyer AND the user are technical personas (e.g. Github). In other cases, the roles are split. For example, for mParticle, the buyer/champion is the Director / Head of Marketing Technology, but the data engineer is the implementer. In this case, the message to the data engineer is: We make your life simpler. We take care of data ...Read More

The most important thing here is to ensure there is consistency and alignment across the entire company on the GTM motion, and the metrics that matter. While a large number of dev-centric companies deploy a bottoms-up PLG type of motion, it is not the exclusive model. Many also deploy top-down motions for enterprise customers, or use some combination of both. For bottoms-up, the north star metric might actually be active customers, and for top-down it's revenue. Your marketing strategy should th ...Read More