Messaging

Do you use any specific frameworks for your messaging/positioning? If so, which and how does the process look like?

5 answers

Product Marketing Leader at | Formerly Twilio • May 11

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

34 Saves

Nisha Goklaney

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

94 Saves

Julie Brown

Product Marketing & Event Leader, Strategist, & Consultant at 56th Street Productions, LLC | Project Product | Formerly STANLEY Security (Securitas), Conga (Apttus), SAP, Aprimo (Teradata), Salesforce (ExactTarget) • January 13

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

9 Saves

Andy Yen

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

23 Saves

Lawson Abinanti

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

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Product Marketing

What messaging and persona framework do you use and how much of competitive positioning do you cover in Messaging?

15 answers

Rekha Srivatsan

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

95 Saves

Scott Schwarzhoff

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

135 Saves

Daniel Palay

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

58 Saves

Alissa Lydon

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

44 Saves

Sophia (Fox) Le

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

75 Saves

Joe Abbott

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

29 Saves

Vikas Bhagat

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

42 Saves

Sarah Din

VP of Product Marketing at Quickbase • August 13

I honestly customize the framework for each company I work for, but over the year’s I've built my own since I never found anything existing that I really loved. If you want an example, message me and

28 Saves

Frances Liu

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

19 Saves

William Davis

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/

47 Saves

Marina Ben-Zvi

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

20 Saves

Harsha Kalapala

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

8 Saves

Adrienne Joselow

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

12 Saves

Dave Steer

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

22 Saves

Greg Gsell

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

3 Saves

Product Marketing

How important are brand marketing skills for product marketers compared to analytical skills?

There is often a huge emphasis on analytical skills, instead of brand marketing skills, when it comes to product marketing job descriptions.

12 answers

John Gargiulo

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

252 Saves

2 Replies

Feng Hong

Global Product Marketing Manager at TikTok • December 22

For companies of a certain DNA (Bay Area, technology), brand marketing is not a priority compared to being able to measure the performance of your own marketing, with a philosophy of investigating wha

34 Saves

Savita Kini

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

47 Saves

Suyog Deshpande

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

151 Saves

Felix Huang

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

21 Saves

Anthony Kennada

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

101 Saves

Jason Perocho

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

95 Saves

Elain Szu

VP Marketing at Sentry • April 9

You've hit upon one of the reasons why marketing in tech is a neverending challenge (and the fun part IMO). I think the best marketers have both strong analytical skills and grasp how to build long-la

23 Saves

Liz Tassey (she/her)

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

9 Saves

Valerie Angelkos

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

11 Saves

Raman Sharma

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

5 Saves

Jane Reynolds

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

3 Saves

Product Marketing

How would you recommend Product Marketing Managers improve their messaging skills?

10 answers

April Rassa

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

50 Saves

Sarah Lambert

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

53 Saves

Robert McGrath

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

43 Saves

Jenna Crane

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

12 Saves

Frances Liu

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

9 Saves

Alexandra Gutow

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

22 Saves

Julia Szatar

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

17 Saves

Eric Chang

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

20 Saves

Valerie Angelkos

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

8 Saves

Jane Reynolds

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

2 Saves

Product Marketing

How do you ensure your entire sales team gets the messaging?

8 answers

Anjali T. Cameron

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,

32 Saves

Sarah Din

VP of Product Marketing at Quickbase • September 25

Great question! You can easily spend a lot of time on building the perfect messaging framework, but it can be useless if other teams, especially sales, do not understand it or believe in it - so here

93 Saves

Hien Phan

Director of Product Marketing at Amplitude • November 13

Aside from what Anjali is recommending, you will need to understand how your team sells. (e.g. their sales process) You will need to make sure how messaging can play in 1st Call Deck, Battle cards, an

18 Saves

ShiQi Wu

Head of Product Marketing, APAC at TikTok • December 11

This is a tough one. I work mainly on Southeast Asia which is made up of multiple regions and languages. With minimal resourcing, we tend to do a large online training once a week with the intention t

43 Saves

Dana Foster Chery

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

10 Saves

Molly Friederich

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

9 Saves

Tracy Montour

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

2 Saves

Jeff Hardison

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

4 Saves

Product Marketing

Where does in-app copy fit in your org? (Under Product Marketing, Design or other?)

Particularly interested in technical products, but also curious for nontechnical.

12 answers

Mike Flouton

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

11 Saves

James Winter

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

16 Saves

Courtney Craig

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

17 Saves

Judy Abad

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

41 Saves

Kristen Ribero

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

49 Saves

Becky Trevino

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

17 Saves

Joshua Lory

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

7 Saves

Catlyn Origitano

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

5 Saves

Lauren Craigie

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

8 Saves

Victoria Chernova

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

23 Saves

Sonia Moaiery

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

7 Saves

Jeff Hardison

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

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Product Marketing

When coming up with positioning and messaging as part of GTM plan, which key stakeholders/teams (in addition to product and sales) should weigh in?

5 answers

Indy Sen

Hypergrowth Leader and Advisor at | Formerly Google, Salesforce, Box, Mulesoft, WeWork, Matterport • February 3

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.)

40 Saves

Liza Sperling

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

103 Saves

Roopal Shah

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

34 Saves

Alina Fu

Head of Marketing for Viva Goals and Learning (Director) at Microsoft • December 1

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

9 Saves

Candice Sparks

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

3 Saves

Product Marketing

If you were building a PMM team from the ground up, e.g. in a startup, which responsibilities would you want to own vs what would you expect the PM team to manage?

5 answers

Judy Abad

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

97 Saves

Anand Patel

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

37 Saves

Daniel Palay

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

28 Saves

James Huddleston

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

21 Saves

Hema Thanki

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

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Product Marketing

What are the most common messaging mistakes you see product marketing teams making today?

6 answers

Scott Schwarzhoff

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

101 Saves

Francisco M. T. Bram

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

127 Saves

Kevin Garcia

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

130 Saves

Elizabeth Brigham

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

28 Saves

Garth Landers

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

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Lawson Abinanti

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

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Product Marketing

How do you think about pricing and packaging as it relates to competitive positioning?

11 answers

Chris Mills

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

33 Saves

Sarah Lambert

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

49 Saves

Akshay Kerkar

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

14 Saves

Marina Ben-Zvi

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

18 Saves

Ajit Ghuman

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

11 Saves

Grant Shirk

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

15 Saves

Aurelia Solomon

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

17 Saves

Jeffrey Vocell

VP of Product Marketing at | Formerly Narvar, Iterable, HubSpot, IBM • August 4

I think competitive is one aspect of overall pricing and packaging, but it shouldn't solely dictate how you price or package your product. There are exceptions of course, and if your competitor is the

6 Saves

Jesse Lopez

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

13 Saves

Daniel Kish

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

14 Saves

🤘 Dejan Gajsek

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

1 Save