AMA: Okta Former VP of Product Marketing, Scott Schwarzhoff on Messaging
February 6 @ 10:00AM PT
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
First thing, how are you segmenting the market and determining evolving customer needs/priorities? Great news - no product category stays fixed for very long. There’s a...
1410 Views
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
A couple to try out. Here’s a combined messaging source doc that I use every time I start working with one of our portfolio companies. Inherited from Citrix days and th...
5557 Views
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
When I was at Okta, PMM was under the Chief Product Officer, so my peer was our head of product management. We had a ‘triad’ model of one PMM, one PM, and one TMM (tech ...
2268 Views
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
There is a classic fit in / stand out paradox that all companies have. On the one hand, most companies are improving on an existing way of solving a problem, there’s bud...
1862 Views
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
One of the biggest challenges we had in the early days was competing against Microsoft. They are the grand-daddy of identity in that they created Active Directory, which...
1103 Views
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
Ah, a tricky one! There are a few things that you can do, starting with a core team that you trust to participate in the fluidity that is message development. Typically...
1760 Views
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
I don’t think there are a lot of completely new categories created these days. In enterprise software, most new companies are improving on existing ways of solving the s...
1021 Views
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
Certainly when a new product has been defined, you want to get out and get a regular drumbeat of messaging feedback. When there are big new releases on features (eg: aro...
1524 Views
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What do you use or do to get people to buy into your positioning plans and consistently using them?
The product marketers job typically revolves around positioning a product. Sometimes, it can be difficult to align sales, marketing, and product teams around your positioning.
Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
Ah, a tricky one! There are a few things that you can do, starting with a core team that you trust to participate in the fluidity that is message development. Typically...
1300 Views
2 requests
Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
Posted this on another similar question, but on the competitive positioning point specifically, I think there's a 'turn' in the narrative toward the end of the story wher...
6521 Views
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
Lots of ways to do this, but there are 'tactical' and 'strategic' ways to measure success. Tactically, setting up metrics-based feedback loops in the go-to-market is key...
1893 Views
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
I've always been in the product team, so that's the most natural interaction for me. For PM, we'd collaborate on how to position new products. We built a spreadsheet th...
2859 Views
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Unusual Ventures Operating Partner • 6y
There’s basically one big one and that’s focusing too much on product/benefit and not enough on fitting the narrative into how a customer views their world, their priorit...
2919 Views
2 requests