AMA: Retool Head of Product Marketing, Kevin Garcia on Market Research

I like to break this down into: product research, messaging research, GTM research. Product research is research you do to inform the product the team builds. This almost always manifests in alpha and beta testing, but it can also be a specific research project you tackle. Messaging research is research you do to inform how you talk about the product. It can be as simple as showing a few customers your landing page to as complex as testing different audiences with messaging options and ad varian ...Read More

I think every PMM benefits from talking to customers. In some cases, it helps polish what you already know. In others—like in my case—you’re marketing to an audience you do not belong to, and talking to customers helps you see the world in a way you normally wouldn’t. I’ll speak to my preferences, but please note that this is specific to someone who markets a technical product to developers without necessarily being one myself. I think it’s important for me to never stop learning how developers ...Read More

Make it jointly owned. Your team will (almost certainly) not grow as fast as sales, success, support, etc. Even talented PMMs struggle to keep these things relevant and useful for every season of the company’s journey. So rather than boil the ocean, make it everyone’s responsibility. If your best competitive and market positioning is in the sales onboarding guide, sales managers and VPs have an incentive to keep it accurate for new hires. Plus new hires can comment on/correct things over time. I ...Read More

I think competitors are important, but developing your own unique perspective of who you are, what makes you different, and who you serve is 10-100x more important. A short-ish anecdote: I used to work at AdRoll, which helps small businesses advertise on Google, Facebook, and everywhere else (e.g. Bing, Forbes, etc). Advertising is one of the most competitive markets ever, with Google and Facebook on an endless conquest for power. And yet, AdRoll was able to reach hundreds of millions of dollars ...Read More

I like Typeform (super simple for users, works for my use case right now) for surveys where I have pointed questions on a research topic, and also work with other teams to run evergreen G2 campaigns and NPS surveys which I think give you an ongoing thread of general feedback. Extracting value depends a lot on what you're working with. For example, a 1-question free text survey that 10 users complete can help you get a TON of qualitative insights but not as much quantitative you can pull from the ...Read More

Most teams are protective of their clients for a reason. Perhaps they're worried about promises made to the client. Maybe they have a really important sales conversation coming up. Maybe the customer just experienced leadership changes and the account team is trying to win the new leader over. In my experience, building context and clear communication are critical to eventually having open access to all customers. Get informed on the customer before making sweeping asks. What can you learn from ...Read More

I think market research (and all research, really) needs to be right-sized to the problem that you’re trying to solve. If you’re doing market research to name a tiny feature, that’s very different from analyzing the market to change your pricing model—so your investment into the research should look different, too! For scrappy research: there’s no greater friend than Google. Seriously! I like aggregators—tools that bring together a lot of insights for you at once—because they help you cut out a ...Read More