AMA: Stripe Former Marketing Team Lead, Krithika Muthukumar on Solutions and Platform Marketing

When I was at Stripe, we offered upwards of a dozen products on our platform that go way beyond payments processing—from products for incorporation and billing management to fraud prevention and managing corporate spending. To manage the growing complexity, we introduced the concept of Anchor Tenants at Stripe this year. (This term comes from American malls, where there may be a large store that draws customers and traffic for the smaller stores.)For us, those are our core products: Payments (pa ...Read More

While you can have really compelling per-product pitches, the real challenge of selling a platform is getting prospects and customers to buy into a vision that unifying their systems is going to be a force multiplier for their company. The value is that 1 + 1 > 2. In selling a platform, it’s imperative the messaging is above-the-line focused because you’re trying to convince customers about the vision. There may be cases where a platform only has 80% of the features that a combination of poin ...Read More

Solutions can mean very different things for different companies. For example, Salesforce’s Health Cloud is an end-to-end product solution for their healthcare customers—you sign up for Health Cloud, your dashboard says Health Cloud, you’re billed for Health Cloud, etc. There’s also companies that offer bundles, such as Intercom, that provide a discount for using multiple products that work together to help address a job-to-be-done.  Stripe falls more towards the Intercom side of the spectrum. F ...Read More

These terms are used so interchangeably these days—some may argue it’s not even worth separating them out. However, the challenges for each are slightly different and a nuanced approach can change the type of impact PMM and your company can have. Here’s how I think about these: Suite, portfolio: These are companies that offer a set of products that help solve problems in related areas, but aren’t necessarily interoperable or meant to be used together. Examples include the now-defunct iLife (i.e. ...Read More

The only advice I can share is that customer insights (when shared in a clear and actionable way) are very hard to ignore. Survey users, talk to prospects, and bring customer insights to the product teams, even if they aren't solicited.  I thought I'd share a recent example from Stripe: a few months ago, one of my teammates was paired with a product group that was moving very quickly to deliver an MVP to the market. Because they were moving fast, they didn't invite marketing input. Synthesizing ...Read More