AMA: Okta Product Marketing Lead, Ivan Dwyer on Technical Product Marketing

I’m not allowed to say Stripe. Everyone says Stripe. So I’ll say…. Stripe? I kid, I kid.I’ll always have a soft spot for Heroku – they’ve always stood out to me as a company with a unique brand presence that never compromised on technical value and authenticity. Some of the Product Marketers I looked up to most when first getting into the dev tools/cloud infra space came from Heroku. A newer company I’ve had my eye on that I think is doing a fantastic job in this regard is WorkOS. Simple and cle ...Read More

I’m a huge proponent of Jobs To Be Done, both for building products and for marketing products – in product marketing, though, you don’t necessarily have to be able to do the job of your audience, but you most definitely have to get it. I often joke that I’m just a good enough programmer to know I shouldn’t be one. What this really means (aside from being a really bad joke) is that I can write about *it* and hold a conversation about *it*, so I can be an effective marketer to those who do *it*. ...Read More

I have a fairly extensive persona methodology which I wrote about here (https://www.workinproduct.com/blog/elements-of-a-positioning-system-part-2-customer-personas).Rather than get prescriptive with an explicit example here, I’ll share something I run i nto a lot that I think gets it wrong – bucketing CTOs/CIOs into the same “Technology Executive” persona.There may be some overlap, and it’s tempting to consolidate profiles, but in any modern organization, these jobs are vastly different, and sh ...Read More

Great question, something I think about a lot. I’m a huge proponent of specialization with technical products. I wouldn’t expect every member of our enterprise field organization (which is in the thousands) to be able to carry a highly technical conversation from end-to-end, nor would I want them to! But I am responsible for dev and ops-centric products, so it can't be ignored.What I try to do is zoom out of the customer lifecycle, pinpoint who on the team is having the conversation, and what th ...Read More

Good question – it can depend on a few things. In many companies, you’ll have to wear both hats... I know I sure have.  As Product Marketing teams grow, where it starts to break out into dedicated roles is at the target persona level – your more traditional PMM may focus more on the executive personas/solution marketing/business value route, while your more technical PMM may focus more on the practitioner personas/example use cases/how to guides route. If you're trying to figure out your own pat ...Read More

Great question that's very top of mind! The broader GTM organization will own the growth targets, while the broader Product organization will own the adoption targets. I believe where tech PMM can make the most impact on both sides of the house is with velocity targets. On the GTM side, that's things like sales cycle velocity. On the product side of the house, that's things like onboarding velocity. The content that gets created by tech PMMs should be an accelerator, so the KPIs should match acc ...Read More

I should have a better answer to this than Twitter, but I haven’t actually hired for that role in a long time, so might be out of touch, sorry!One thing I’ll say, and this might be a bit controversial, but I’m personally cautious of high-profile developer evangelists. There is absolutely a ton of value in building a public profile, and the role lends itself to community, but a strong advocate is someone who spends more of their time talking with customers, less time talking with other evangelist ...Read More

Great question… this is easy to over index on either side – too much buzzword bingo or too deep in the weeds.Personally, I like to follow a narrative from top to bottom – anchor to “the what”, hook with “the why”, and win over with “the how”.But each section in that narrative has to be punchy and unique. I’m a Rule of 3 type – bullet points, icons, lists, etc. I get reinforcing key points, but nobody has time to scroll through the same statement over and over again! On each...Personally, I care ...Read More

[Insert “Why not both?” meme] :)The best thing you can do is bring these stories together – when technical value solves business value, you have yourself a winner. (I don’t think I’ve ever encountered the inverse of that, now that I think about it)This manifests itself in a number of ways, but you almost always needs an explicitly budgeted project to attach to. Thinking top down – execs who mandate certain initiatives send managers out looking for technical solutions. When a practitioner tries a ...Read More

Great question, I get in arguments about this all the time! Heh. You ask the question the right way - it’s about balance.Starting with my least favorite topic – SEO! The benefits of SEO isn’t lost on me, but for technical products, authenticity trumps all IMHO. I always cringe when I come across a bland, “what is [tech topic]?” blog post. I would much rather land on a “how to do [tech thing]?” blog post. But the best lesson I ever got in marketing was, “if you don’t cringe just a little, you’re ...Read More