I've written about this in detail on my blog here, so I'll summarize my thoughts
below! Messaging and positioning work is never complete, so always treat your
positioning doc as a living document that
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Messaging
5 answers
Director of Product Marketing at HubSpot | Formerly Intuit, American Express, Sage • November 10
I have used several different messaging frameworks, but one that we are
leveraging quite a lot these days is the Jobs to be done framework, accompanied
by durable, evergreen messages that are centered
Great question! I am a HUGE fan of templates and frameworks. I create templates
and then modify them for each company so it better suits the needs of the
business. I've written a couple of articles on
Global Partner Marketing Director at ServiceNow • January 17
The frameworks that I use for positioning and messaging have changed over time,
as I've advanced in my marketing career in enterprise tech. Earlier in my career
(when I was in product marketing), we w
Co-Founder at Messages That Matter • March 24
I use and teach a positioning framework that was developed by my partner while
he was at Microsoft. We have evolved and enhanced it over time, and I have
taught the framework to more than 1,000 market
15 answers
Vice President Product Marketing at Salesforce • February 6
I like the positioning doc to address your audience need, how do you stand out /
differentiated, what do you provide and white space. For example, if you have
customer need, you can easily come up wit
Operating Partner at Unusual Ventures • February 7
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 where existing solutions can't sol
Head Of Product Marketing at 3Gtms • March 3
My views on competitive positioning are largely stolen from Andy Raskin. Rather
than repeat that which I've "adopted" from his writing, I'd suggest looking them
up (LinkedIn great place to find a lot
Head of Marketing at LEVEE | Formerly Mezmo, Sauce Labs • April 27
At its most basic, messaging is about answering 3 key prompts: What is the
problem facing the market today? What solution (generally) will help solve this
problem? What does your product do to help
Product Marketing at Glassdoor • June 4
Once you are clear on the value proposition of a product/feature and/or a
positioning statement for the company or product, you are ready to pull together
a messaging framework that your cross-functio
Head of Product Marketing at Ramp | Formerly Zendesk, ThoughtSpot, Oracle • June 23
Competitive research is a critical step before you even start your messaging and
positioning exercise — I see it as an input rather than an output. I have a few
favorite messaging frameworks and usua
Director, Head of Product Marketing at Webflow • July 14
I use a pretty simple framework for messaging - namely, the messaging house. I
typically focus on the following sections of the house (top to bottom): Brand
prop, product description, customer context
Head of Marketing at Instawork • September 2
I borrow from the typical ones mentioned on Sharebird (the box one? mind's
failing me here) and modify them based on what I'm messaging. Re: competitive
positioning, I break it down by 3 segments at
Vice President of Product Marketing at Workato • September 28
There are a few different messaging and persona frameworks I have used for
different purposes. Here are a few of my favorites. Positioning Statement -
this is typically the foundation of any product/
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Productboard • December 15
There are a lot of great frameworks out there and they all have common elements.
I recommend reviewing a few and customizing to what’s relevant and actionable
for your company. I like to include: our
Vice President Product Marketing at AlertMedia | Formerly TrustRadius, Levelset, Walmart • July 7
I dont think we should ever mention competitors directly in our messaging. Sure,
you can address it directly in response if a prospect brings them up. But
proactively naming competitors puts you in a
Director of Product Marketing at HubSpot • December 7
We develop personas in three degrees depending on the need: lightweight,
qualitative, and quantitative (statistical). Each of these populate a similar
framework: demographic details (job title, geo if
Vice President of Product Marketing at GitLab • January 31
My team and I use a Message House framework that covers the following elements:
Solution/Product Naming Tagline Positioning Statement Short and Long
Descriptions For the Positioning Strategy, we use
VP, Product Marketing at Attentive • March 24
Competitive positioning and messaging have to be one and the same. When you look
at your decks and positioning, you need to do the gut check of "can my
competitors say this" and if yes, change your me
There is often a huge emphasis on analytical skills, instead of brand marketing skills, when it comes to product marketing job descriptions.
12 answers
Head of Global Product Marketing at Airbnb • December 1
It's funny, I've been working on a deck looking at exactly this question.
It's fascinating how much it varies from company to company. We're moving to a
place where the distinctions between product ma
Director of Product Management, Speech and Video AI at Cisco • January 20
Just a feedback on the last comment, as I reacquaint myself to the "new" bay
area. I have noticed more emphasis on demand gen skills amongst many startups.
If there are stakeholders in the company alr
Sr. Director | Head Of Product & Partner Marketing at Samsara • November 20
First, you can not decouple analytical skills from brand marketing skills. They
are not mutually exclusive. You are right that there is more emphasis on
analytical skills in job description for produc
Senior User Acquisition Manager at Hopper | Formerly Skillz, Telus Health, • January 3
100% agree with Suyog. Nothing we do exists in a vacuum and all of the
positioning and messaging we bring to market should be looked at from a brand
lens to ensure consistency. Ultimately, the consume
CEO at AudiencePlus • January 29
I definitely appreciate this tension -- and in a perfect world you find the
right mix of both on the team. Analytical skills will benefit our understanding
of market sizing and opportunity, pricing an
Vice President, Product Marketing at Braze • March 11
Analytical skills tend to be the preferred skill set of a product marketer
because they are "running the business". Product Marketers own a product's P&L
and must have the business acumen to drive
VP of Marketing at Blueocean.ai • July 9
Brand is more than just a logo or color palette or tag line. Brand is the
combination of customer touchpoints that create meaning and belonging for that
customer...Brand attracts the customer in the f
VP of Product Marketing at Howl | Formerly Google • May 25
Understanding how Brand Marketing works is critical to succeed in Product
Marketing as these two teams work closely together to bring any Marketing and
Product work to life. Brand Marketing thinks ab
Vice President, Product Marketing at DigitalOcean • February 7
In my opinion, a big part of Product Marketing is storytelling - connecting the
customers' and prospects' desires and pain points to the capabilities of your
products and solutions. Brand Marketing
Director of Product Marketing at OkCupid • March 23
It depends on the role. As Head of Product Marketing at OkCupid, I rely on data
and analytics to drive product decisions. But ultimately, my priority is
ensuring that our product lives up to our brand
10 answers
Product Marketing at Cohere | Formerly Adobe, Box, Google • September 29
Messaging is the ability to communicate pains and solutions for a specific
persona using the written word. PMM writing is unique because it’s all about
distilling a message down to it’s essence and pa
Head of Product Marketing at Symphony Talent • October 20
I would suggest practicing by creating your own messaging frameworks for some of
your favorite products or companies be they B2C or B2B. This should help you to
start to think through the different pr
Vice President Global Marketing at CalypsoAI • May 12
Research, and come with a growth mindset! Look and listen to what competitors in
your market are doing. How does their messaging make you feel, how does it
relate to your own organisation's. Why do cu
Head of Product Marketing at Klaviyo | Formerly Drift, Dropbox, Upwork • July 16
Practice, practice, practice! Get as many reps in as you can, and have a
marketer you admire give you very candid feedback. Bonus points if you can do a
working session with someone who’s skilled in m
Head of Marketing at Instawork • September 1
As others have mentioned, practice. It's hard to find the extra time, so here
are some ideas: Try different frameworks to refresh on basics Find reasons to
tag-team a refresh. I've used it as part of
Director of Product Marketing at Snowflake • November 5
2 pieces of advice here: 1) Take a look at the messaging from other companies
(even outside of your market or industry). Who is really nailing it and what do
you like about it? And who are the players
Director of Product Marketing & Lifecycle Marketing at Loom • December 3
This is mostly just practice, start writing, and keep writing. However, some
specific things you could do include: Actively consume other marketing content.
For example subscribe to your favorite bra
Director, Product Marketing at 1Password • January 21
I'd recommend making sure to spend enough time on the planning and information
gathering phase that is necessary prior to creating messaging. The most common
issue I've seen with messaging is PMMs jum
VP of Product Marketing at Howl | Formerly Google • May 24
Messaging for me is both an art and a science. I've seen very good narrative
building frameworks and courses around that can you help you nail basic concepts
(e.g how to structure a well written value
Director of Product Marketing at OkCupid • March 23
Messaging is so important, not only when conveying new features, updates, and
opportunities to your customers, but also when getting internal buy-in and
gathering resources for a go-to-market plan. St
8 answers
Head of Marketing at Landed • May 8
This continues to be an evolving process but we leverage a few things: Lead time
- sharing the info early so the sales team can disseminate it via the right
channels with enough notice (for example,
Vice President, Marketing at Samsara • February 8
This largely depends on the size and distribution of your sales team. On one
end, if you have a small, locally based sales team then this is managable and
usually lower effort than what you'd need to
Director of Product Marketing at Sanity.io | Formerly Twilio, SendGrid • May 25
Repetition is so important; it's about embodying the messaging in everything PMM
produces, and as you enable on different assets, tying it back to the strategy.
Show examples of how key points can com
Head of Product Marketing at HiredScore • July 29
My favorite approach to ensuring the sales team gets messaging is two-fold: Work
with sales leadership: Get alignment from sales leadership early and often. If
they are bought into the messaging and
Head of Product Marketing at Calendly • March 22
One of the things I think many PMMs struggle with is realizing that different
styles of messaging resonate with different people. Investors like to hear one
thing, prospects another, influencers somet
Particularly interested in technical products, but also curious for nontechnical.
12 answers
VP, Product at Barracuda Networks • August 3
IME this should sit in engineering, but it's generally not a bad idea for the
copy writer to solicit PMM feedback. PMM needs to be hyper focused on strategic
tasks. This is a good example of a tactica
VP of Marketing at Spekit • August 15
If your company has the resources, I would advocate for there to be an in-app
copy writer that sits under design. By putting them with design, they will have
the shortest path to where the product is
Senior Team Lead, Retail Product Marketing at Shopify • August 18
We like keeping this with the PMM or a Product Manager/Owner, as the person
writing this copy needs to be super familiar with the product and user
experience. They need to be power users, IMO. Occasio
Global Director, Business Strategy and Comms at TripActions • September 20
It depends on how big your company is! At large companies, there’s often a
Content Strategy or Product Writing person or team that sits under Design. The
PMM should ensure the in-product copy aligns
Senior Director of Corporate Marketing at Handshake • October 30
For my company, it's currently shared between product, product marketing and
design, but that's mostly a factor of being a startup and in the process of
building out each of those functions. I think a
Executive Vice President Products at Snow Software | Formerly Rackspace, Dell • March 2
In-app copy typically falls under Product Marketing. If it is something you do
not own today, my advice would be to work with the Design/PM team who is
currently owning this to understand how you can
Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market at VMware | Formerly Accenture, United States Air Force • March 29
In my opinion, PMM has a better vantage of customer needs and command of
customer voice to produce best in app copy, product naming nomenclature and
in-product guidance. This responsibility can be sha
Senior Director of Product Marketing at Fivetran • April 14
In-app copy does fit with Product Marketing - and Product! So technically, our
PM team owns the in-product experience but PMM has full access to the tool. We
have a slack channel for all in-app messag
Head of Product Marketing at Cortex • April 28
A few answers here, based on use case! Naming inside the product (like
features, tabs, or experiences) would be handled by PMM during the launch
process. PM is likely to have ideated an internally-r
Director, Product Marketing at Gong • June 10
This is always a gray area :) At Gong, most UX copy is owned by the product
writing team, except for naming "Tier 1" products. Together with that team, we
established a list of criteria that qualifie
Vice President, Product Marketing at Clearbit | Formerly Glassdoor, Prophet, Kraft • October 19
The copy in the product itself is owned by our Product Design team. However, we
have a Customer Engagement / Customer Lifecycle Marketing team that owns copy
for in-app messages like tooltips, banners
Head of Product Marketing at Calendly • March 22
In quickly growing companies, I've found there are a few "hot potatoes" that get
passed around as the quarters pass by and employees come and go. One of those
jobs that get shared is in-app copy (or t
5 answers
Looks like this question got the most upvotes so let me start with it and try
and give as much context as I can. At Google we had the following heuristic for
marketing which was: 1.) Know the user2.)
Head Of Product Marketing at Upwork • February 17
Getting feedback from stakeholders is valuable to capture insights and feedback
from customer-facing teams and to foster healthy internal partnerships. That
said, positioning and messaging by consensu
Head (VP) of Global Enablement at Benchling • March 10
In addition to product sales, I typically like to vet things out with SEs - they
are the ones demonstrating the products and weave stories as they do so - so
having them alinged in the key benefits, m
Customer Success or Customer Marketing teams are your secret weapon when
thinking about Positioning & Messaging frameworks and GTM strategy. Retention is
a key metric for the business, so who bett
Director of Product Marketing at Attentive • March 17
Any client-facing teams I believe should provide feedback on your
messaging/positioning. For example, your client strategy/customer success teams
get a ton of feedback from your customers who are actu
5 answers
Global Director, Business Strategy and Comms at TripActions • September 20
This is something I have experience doing since I was one of the first
monetization product marketers at Instagram and the first product marketer at
Slack. I'll say that it was different at both compa
Director of Product Marketing at Appcues • January 9
One of the things I have noticed during my time at various companies is that PMs
may not get the opportunity to interact and engage with customers as much as
they like. Too many times, they are very d
Head Of Product Marketing at 3Gtms • March 3
Philosophically, I think it comes down to the "what" (both), the "why" (PMM) and
the "how" (PM). The interesting part is the ways in which the "how" and the
"why" inform each's take on the "what" when
Head of Marketing at Skedulo • December 17
I believe PMM should own how we articulate the value of our products or
solutions to the market. That would include enabling internal teams with clear
messaging and positioning and owning how we take
Product Marketing @ Twilio Segment at Twilio | Formerly Amazon • March 15
The approach will typically vary depending if the startup is pre or post PMF.
Pre-PMF you need to be pretty open to a broad set of workstreams falling under
PMM. It will also depend if you have a wide
6 answers
Operating Partner at Unusual Ventures • February 7
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 priorities, and setting the table for
Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies • February 14
I love this question. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen inexperienced and
experienced product marketers (including me) commit a variety of messaging
capital “sins”.Here is my list of the top 3 m
Head of Product Marketing at Retool • April 17
Messaging is hard to get right. At its best, messaging is a clear and simple
distillation of who you are, what you do, and why it matters. But in my
experience, there are a few common themes that lead
Director, The Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Davidson College • April 29
Not leading with empathy – shouting about what your product is/does without
putting it in the context of the users’/buyers’ actual problems and stating what
business value/impact your product/solutio
Director of Global Product Marketing at Theta Lake • March 1
It's not uncommon to see a blurring of capabilities and benefits. With
companies that are very product focused and have an(often justified) zeal for
their offering's capabilities, I have seen featur
Co-Founder at Messages That Matter • March 15
Here are some of the common messaging mistakes I've encountered working with
clients and monitoring the positioning strategies of companies in all the major
B2B software markets: •Failure to differen
11 answers
Vice President Product Marketing / GTM at Wrike • April 10
It depends on the competitive dynamics in your market. Are you the market leader
or a new emerging alternative? What are the important buying factors in your
market and with your buyers? Is price a
Head of Product Marketing at Symphony Talent • October 20
A truly successful pricing and packaging exercise can't be completed in a vacuum
which means competitive positioning must be included in the discussion. The main
reason is that you don't want to creat
Head of Product Marketing, Platform & Commerce at Atlassian • August 5
Your pricing inherently reflects the value of your products, and since
competitive comparisons will inevitably come up in deals, you have to translate
all your competitive research and market understa
Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Productboard • December 15
Positioning (which by definition is competitive positioning since it carves out
a place in the market where you are the clear winner) is your strategy. It
defines who you're for and how you'll win. A
Director of Product Management - Pricing & Packaging, CXP at Twilio | Formerly Narvar, Medallia, Helpshift, Feedzai, Reputation.com • February 25
The truth is most pricing problems aren't pricing problems. In fact, they are
rarely pricing problems. They are just the causal impact of poorly understood
and/or communicated positioning of a product
Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Meraki at Cisco Meraki | Formerly Tellme Networks, Microsoft, Box, Vera, Scout RFP, and Sisu Data, to name a few. • April 14
Pricing and packaging are positioning. They're the most concrete way you are
defining the value and TCO of your solution relative to the pain a customer is
feeling. But it's important to remember that
Senior Director of Product Marketing at Drift • May 4
They go hand in hand. You need to keep a pulse on your competitors pricing &
packaging so that you can adjust or create promos/spiffs to support your sales
team when needed. That said, you don't b
Product Marketing Lead - Spend Management at Brex | Formerly Klaviyo, Square, Intuit, PepsiCo, Heineken, Mondelez • October 26
Your pricing and packaging are components of your competitive positioning - the
way you group features or the value metric you use to charge a SaaS fee helps
frame your offering to your target audienc
Director of Pricing & Packaging Strategy at Gong • November 11
Really depends where you stack up in the competitive ranking. Let's say there
are three products: Mercedes, Toyota, Pontiac. The price reflects the package.
That's why Mercedes are $50k and Toyotas
Co-founder of Grow+Scale at Grow + Scale • March 8
Pricing will be one of the elements of how your brand is perceived. Priced low
- you might be thought of as an early-stage startup who doesn't have
product/market fit yet or isn't confident in their