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Platform and Solutions Product Marketing
Platform and Solutions Product Marketing
6 answers
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
Great question. This gets at the heart of managing others, while also is central
to our role as product marketers.
As a manager, it's your responsibility to ensure that the right milestones are
being hit which means that was the right process followed for creating
messaging? Did that product marketer do background research, or run a research
report to inform their positioning? Did they talk to any customers, prospects,
or closed-lost accounts? Did they share the messaging with the right
stakeholders?
These are just some questions that come to mind, and as a manager, you should
defin...more
Head of Product Marketing at Narvar | Formerly Iterable, HubSpot, IBM
Great question. This gets at the heart of managing others, while also is central
to our role as product marketers.
As a manager, it's your responsibility to ensure that the right milestones are
being hit which means that was the right process followed for creating
messaging? Did that product marketer do background research, or run a research
report to inform their positioning? Did they talk to any customers, prospects,
or closed-lost accounts? Did they share the messaging with the right
stakeholders?
These are just some questions that come to mind, and as a manager, you should
define th...more
Head of Product Marketing at Retool
1. Make talking to customers integral to their role. By keeping your team as
connected as possible to the customer, they will develop 1) sharper intuition
and 2) a network of customers they can tap into for feedback on future
projects.
2. Give them space to develop messaging that matters. Clean, clear, concise
messaging is not every PMMs strong skill. You need to let people work through
their messaging, test it in the wild, and hear broad feedback for them to learn
quickly what works best.
3. Create a culture of peer review to scale best practices. Each PMM is going
through different m...more
Head of Product Marketing at Checkr
I ask them a lot of hard questions to understand how they came up with the messaging they did. I want to hear from them what customers they talked to or surveyed, who else they worked with internally to refine the messaging, and I try to poke holes in the benefits they cite to pressure test it. I am also very critical about making sure we are leading with value and that the messaging is extremely clear and consice.
Developer Marketing Lead at Google
The biggest thing I consider is that the messaging created is about the customer
and what they are thinking/feeling/experiencing. Rather than what we are
building and what we are selling.
I've kept a messaging template from a previous org where we focused on market
context, customer pain points, a customer's unmet needs, and how all of those
funnel into your org's differentiated point of view. Your product supports all
of this, and your product tells a story of how your organization (nuance: not
just the product you are crafting messaging for) solves this customer need. So
if you're tellin...more
Senior Director Product Marketing at Fivetran
I am a project manager at heart. So I push the team to be the same. We have our roadmaps which we present and then turn into tickets for overall tracking. We also have a monthly reivew on areas of the business - so this let's us check in on how things are going and what is getting done.
For messaging and materials in particular, we do a quarterly review of our materials. We try and make it fun - we listen to different music, everyone picks a song, and we go through and update and verify our materials. Building in those mechanisms are important so that they actually happen!
Director Product Marketing at SAP
If the marketing machine has been created correctly, this should be fairly
measureable. In a prior role we had an excellent demand generation team who
tracked how different messaging worked over time. We could run little A/B tests
on our dotcom and outreach to see if any messages were particularly effective.
All of this is really nibbling around the edges though. Your product messaging
needs to clearly articulate the problem customers face, and how the product
helps them.
A colleague once said that his rule of thumb is that the solution needs to drive
10X the value to a customer o...more
2 answers
Mentor | Author | Product Marketing Influencer at Inspire. Influence. Impact. | Formerly Lenovo | Dell Boomi | GoodData
Our team, Portfolio Messaging (product, industry and solutions) are part of the
Product organization (I report to the Chief Product Officer) to help build
synergy with Product Management and solutions team. We work closely with
Product, Marketing and Sales to meet business needs. We have the process and
team interlocks across Boomi from Demand Generation, Sales Enablement, Business
Ops, Sales Ops etc.
Here is a good read for the holidays on how to think about where product
marketing would sit. It depends on the company needs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescommunicationscouncil/2019/...more
Director Product Marketing at SAP
This is a really great question and one that will define the role you play in
the organization greatly. I like to say that when the PMM team sits in Product
Management, they become capital P Product, lowercase m marketing managers (PmM).
The focus is heavy on technical capabilities and you're going to spend a less
time with the Marketing team. Often this felt like I was throwing my work "over
the wall" to the marketing team.
When I've sat in Marketing it's reversed. Lowercase p, capital M (pMM) and the
role is much more focused on marketing activities with less time spent on
technical ex...more
2 answers
Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies
The most important thing you should expect from your new manager when you first
join an organization is a detailed onboarding document with a 90-day plan. The
document should provide background information on the company, industries, and
competitors with links to source files and documents. It should also outline the
company’s vision, the annual operating plan for the business and the department
OKRs or goals.
As part of your orientation plan, your boss should identify a list of key
individuals for you to meet with topics to cover in each meeting. The document
should also contain links ...more
Director Product Marketing at SAP
Every time I join a new organization, I ask for the same things:
- List of key contacts in the sales, marketing, and product teams
- Key buyer/user personas
- Existing product materials
- KPIs for the team
From there I construct a 30-60-90 day plan to meet people, learn the products, and craft a strategy for the products that will lead to measurable success.
2 answers
Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies
Product marketing is the process of taking the right product to the right market
with the right narrative to the right audience and at the right time. More
specifically, a product marketer is the voice of the customer, helping
organizations uncover insights that can inform product and marketing plans. The
best way for you to convey the value of PMM is to fight for your customers. A
lot of times, PMMs will face the dilemma of supporting internal goals vs meeting
external customer needs. No matter what, always represent your customer
interests, be their voice internally. It may make you feel ...more
Director Product Marketing at SAP
In smaller organizations, I've found this is much harder. The marketing team,
sales team, and product team might all sit very close to each other. Small
organizations essentially require everyone to have a technical/product expertise
that just doesn't happen in larger orgs. The sales teams will just ask the PM
directly, and the marketing teams will focus on the key messaging for the
product(s) that drive the company.
As the company grows, the roles required within marketing, sales, and product
get more specialized and the spaces between them grow. There might be multiple
products, geogra...more
11 answers
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing at Airtable
Featured In Pragmatic Institute
Everyone’s definition of soft and hard skills differs, but here are the nine
skills that I think are the most important for a product marketer to have. I've
used these skills as a compass to help me grow in my own career and have turned
them into a success guide for my team at Envoy to use:
Soft skills:
* Cross-functional excellence: As a PMM, you have the opportunity to lead
without being a manager of people. A strong product marketer is someone who
takes others along with them, rather than telling people exactly what they
want them to do. They’re able to create strong relation...more
Vice President, Product Marketing at Braze
The number one skill is influencing without authority. More specifically,
influencing authority in a matrixed organization. By design, product marketing
sits at the intersection of a multitude of functions, each with their individual
KPIs. Your job is to balance the needs of your various stakeholders to drive
revenue and adoption for your product(s). If your company has one product, then
this task may be fairly straight forward. If your company has multiple products
or multiple portfolios, then the task becomes exponentially harder.
The most important hard skills are positioning and mess...more
Sr. Director, Head of Product Marketing at DoorDash
Hard skills may vary by company, but I think there are two that are critical:
* Insights. Know the difference between an anecdote and an insight. This is
especially critical when you work on a service at scale. Your best (and
sometimes most challenging) users tend to be the loudest, so make sure that
you're helping the team hear from a diverse array of customer voices. I find
that one of the most important parts of any study is the recruit/target
audience. Spend time getting the team aligned on who you're going to hear
from.
* Analytics. Spend time not just understandin...more
Head of Product Marketing at Nextdoor
Top 3 Soft skills
* Be collaborative: Be open to new ideas, raise your hand to help, lean in to
new areas, and have fun while doing it.
* Build strong relationships: Invest in your cross functional partners, get to
know them personally and professionally, know what is most important to
them.
* Develop a point of view, clearly communicate your point of view, and
influence others with your point of view
Top 3 Hard skills
* Analytical <-> Creative: Navigate this spectrum to be both analytical and
creative in your problem solving, go to markets, and develop recommendati...more
VP of Product Marketing at Observe.AI | Formerly Clari, Vendavo, Amdocs
Strong PMMs are good writers, know their product inside and out, experts of the
competitive landscape, messaging geniuses and storytellers, BFFs with the sales
team, GTM architects and excellent project managers. I like to think about a
good PMM as a:
* A psychologist who can develop a deep understanding of the fears,
aspirations, hopes, and dreams of buyers and target personas.
* An explorer seeking to learn more, discover more, and do more; bringing
curiosity and some risk taking to product messaging and positioning.
* A teacher who can inspire an audience with subject matter k...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Instacart
PMMs are (and need to be) masters at many things but if I had to pick the most
important:
1. (Soft) Cross-functional Collaboration: PMM is a highly cross-functional
role. On any given project, you’ll work with Product, Design, Engineering,
Research, Marketing Channel Experts, Operations, Legal… and the list goes
on. A product campaign can’t get done without many partnerships. So you have
to be great at working across different teams and getting them to share in
your goals.
2. (Hard) Data Driven: Product and business decisions are most times made based
on quanti...more
VP of Marketing at Blueocean.ai
1. Messaging and storytelling: this continues to be the hallmark of a great
PMM. In particular, really leaning in on differentiation and value to the
customer (not speeds and feeds) while also simplifying concepts down in a
memorable way that makes it easy for sales to land, marketing to build copy
and content, and ultimately, the customer to understand. I sometimes joke
that PMMs like ALL the words...but we don't need to use them ALL the time.
Being able to really tell a compelling story that connects with the
customer, and romances the product in the way that ...more
Head of Product Marketing at Prove
One of the main skills I see to success in PMM im Empathy. Empathy in the sense of being able to to put yourself in other people's shoes. You are the customer and market advocate internallt and the product advocate externally, so understanding those different perspectives can help a LOT in any PMM materials you are developing, from slides to demos to websites to campaigns.
Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies
Successful product marketers are both right and left brained. Thus, in addition
to the hard skills, they must possess soft skills to rally teams behind their
ideas.
There are five fundamental soft skills that product marketers must demonstrate:
* Passion
* Adaptability
* Cross-functional leadership
* Prioritization
* Executive presence
I wrote a blog post about these key PMM soft skills here.
For Hard Skills, from my experience the most important skills are:
1. Market Sizing - Total Addressable Market (TAM)
2. Customer Segmentation
3. Narrative Design
4. Go-to-Market Strategy...more
Director, Product Marketing at Gong | Formerly Salesforce, GE
I talked about soft skills in another question, so let's laser focus on the hard
skills needed to succeed in PMM here. Here are 3 hard skills you can focus on
right now:
1. Data-Driven Decision Making: I actually teach a dedicated course on this
topic at Loyola Chicago because I believe in it so much! Data helps with
identifying and speaking to your target audience, defining the value of your
product and ROI, market sizing, predicting buyer behavior, validating success in
the market, and so much more. Even if you don't fancy yourself a "numbers
person" - it is important to get into eno...more
Director Product Marketing at SAP
This is an interesting question. In my experience, the most important soft
skills needed for PMMs are influence management, and public speaking skills.
Influence management would be getting people from outside of your department or
team to work on your project. Good influence management is not just asking
people to help, but making sure they understand the value of the work they're
doing. If someone says they can't help, going to their manager to help with
priorities needs to be done with a soft touch. Being a tyrant to get your
projects done won't get you far in the long term.
Pu...more
5 answers
Sr. Director, Head of Product Marketing at DoorDash
I came from a background in brand and so my natural instincts served me most
well on the outbound side of product marketing. I had my fair share of imposter
syndrom in the early days when I looked at my peers and realized that I'd never
done the traditional inbound work of a PMM.
I spent more time than I should have in those early days being afraid to ask for
fear of not being able to meet the bar. It took building a relationship with a
peer whose work I admired to admit that I was really learning on the fly and to
my surprise, they were too!
We all have strengths and areas where we ...more
Head of Talent Acquisition, Strategy & Operations at Asana
I spent a lot of time in my early career worrying about getting to the next
promotion and how I was progressing versus my peers. Looking back now, this was
all wasted energy. I wish I had been more focused on learning and picking up as
many skills and experiences as possible. I also wish I had been less worried
about making mistakes. I think I would have been able to take more risks and
push myself to try new things that would have ultimately helped me to build more
skills.
I also wish I knew how to prioritize better early in my career. I worked a lot
of late nights and weekends in my earl...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Instacart
One thing I wish I learned earlier is the most powerful product marketing you
can do is always centered on a shared human truth. When I look back on my very
early PMM GTM work, I focused primarily on communicating about the product and
the benefit derived from the features themselves. But the product features,
however innovative, were only half the story. Connecting the Product to the
Customer Need is where the true magic lies. Find the truth we all share (an
experience, an emotion) and connect that to the new experience the product
provides -- that’s where your message takes on real meanin...more
Chief Marketing Officer at Zeplin
There is one key learning: Actively plan & manage your development.
Here is what is involved:
* Know the menu: Since Product Marketing is such a broad discipline, its
important to understand the various functional competenices that comprise it.
This way, you can assess where you have strengths and where you want to
develop. These competenices span target segmentation definition, messaging &
positioning, content development, sales enablement, pricing/packaging, PR/AR
and more, they are quite different and require different skills.
* The market will evolve: There are als...more
Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies
When you're starting out your career as a PMM, it is very important to remember
that your value promise is to customers and not internal stakeholders. I don't
mean to say that internal alignment and buy-in isn't important but it should
never take priority over serving your customers. In my early days, I spend 80%
of my time trying to understand what were the needs of my internal stakeholders
and ensuring I was supporting them fully, leaving little focus on the customer.
The moment I started prioritizing customer needs over internal stakeholder
needs, when I started to champion customers int...more
4 answers
Mentor | Author | Product Marketing Influencer at Inspire. Influence. Impact. | Formerly Lenovo | Dell Boomi | GoodData
When we had one product marketing manager (2015), we had the product knowledge
to articulate business value and simplify technical concepts. With addition of
solution and industry marketing managers, we evolved to product and solution
marketing(2017), and we started to focus on buyer personas and customer pain
points. This led to the evolution of portfolio messaging as the anchor for our
team to help showcase our value and differentiation as compared to product
management or marketing, where we own product, solution, and industry messaging.
Today(2019), I am honored to support a team of 12 ...more
Head of Product Marketing at Checkr
From a process perspective, I'm not sure I'd draw a disctinction between the two. However, portfolio may be a little more complex in that it's multiple products. One thing I've found successful is drawing out a marketecture for how that portfolio of products fits into the broader ecosystem of our technology. You can use it to help you understand how to develop messaging that is distinct from your other products yet tied to the overall product strategy and narrative that's been developed.
Product Marketing Director, AR/VR at Meta | Formerly Mozilla, LeapFrog
As a start-up, there really can't be any daylight between your mission, strategy
and initial product manifestations. That is, your company positioning and your
product positioning are the same. A disciplined, successful company will
continue to invest in new products that pay into the company mission and don't
require major strategy shifts in order to successfully get to market.
Of course, strategies will shift as companies and markets evolve, but innovation
bets should, in my experience, be tethered pretty tightly to the purpose the
company wants to play in the world. And though this so...more
Senior Director Product Marketing at Fivetran
At Fivetran, we actually have a few different Product Marketing teams in order
to be able to do both core product messaging as well as more portfolio
messaging. At Fivetran, folks find us / use us for particular analytic
challenges - like Marketing Analytics, Finance Analytics, Sales Analytics, etc.
As a result, we have pods dedicated to each of these areas. The core of the pod
is a PMM and a PM - and they are mapped to the data sources associated with each
use case (e.g., Marketing Analytics pod owns our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,
etc. data sources). The pods also have other members - a ...more
7 answers
Global Head of PMM and Content Marketing, TIDAL at Square
I don't actually use market research for that, is the short answer. If we
believe that our solution is well suited for a particular vertical, we have the
budget to invest in GTM to capture business in this vertical, and the vertical
is fragmented / doesn't have a real clear winner, we will go for it.
Additionally, you should look at your own customer data and overlay it with your
product. For example, if Square is has developed a number of features that are
suited for Restaurants, we will prioritize this vertical. If after a couple of
months we are not well penetrated here, we have a pr...more
Product and marketing consultant, former industry strategy PMM at Adobe, Founding Team and VP PMM at Livefyre (acquired by Adobe) at Adobe
There are a few questions you need to answer to determine if it's worth
targeting this new vertical:
- Do you have product-market fit? Are you solving a real problem for this
vertical?
- What is the size of the market opportunity for this vertical? How will it grow
over time? (their industry growth and your product growth) How does it compare
to markets you are doing well in?
- How similar is the vertical to existing verticals where you have success?
Would you have to do much to change your value proposition or messaging?
- Are there known competitors targeting this vertical? How do you...more
Vice President Product Marketing at Amplitude
Ensure verticalization aligns well with core competencies, market perception,
ability to deliver and differentiation. If you do not clearly understand the
definition of the target vertical, the trends in that vertical’s consumer or
enterprise user market as well as the size of the opportunity, it will cause
internal and ultimately market confusion that hinders speed and success.
Assuming that you've determined this is an attractive vertical to pursue, here
is a list to consider at the onset of prioritizing verticals and viability of
entrance:
- Current capabilities (such as how capable...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Twilio
When looking to identify target verticals, I always prefer a data driven
approach. I'd work up a detailed analysis exercise and build a vertical based
TAM. I have a go-to bubble chart that I like to develop which is based on the
growth rate of each (CAGR, y axis) vs the revenue opportunity (x axis). It gives
you an easy visual that shows where the optimal use cases/verticals will be - up
and to the right.
Here are some other questions you can ask to focus your efforts:
1. Do we know how much revenue opportunity is out there in the key verticals?
2. What are the top five verticals based...more
Developer Marketing Lead at Google
Market research is a pretty valuable data point in terms of prioritizing
verticals (or any other segmentation slice), but so too is your product
ownership point of view and your internal usage data. So you don't need to lean
on external research, but it can certainly augment your other efforts. I think
there's value in looking at 1p, 2p and 3p input sources in coordination with
each other.
Where we have used external research towards our segmentation processes is when
we do message testing measured across different user groups and then review any
consideration or preference gains we see ac...more
Head of Product Marketing, VR Work Experiences, Oculus at Meta
Instead of a "vertical focus" go forward with a New Audience focus so you can
leverage the 5A GTM framework , and ensure you're thinking through a consumers'
need.
Also, if you focus on a new user, you can also employ the "Job to be done"
framework, which can help narrow what the customer really wants to get done and
how your product can satiate that need. After you establish those jobs (UXR) you
can use market research and even analytics to scale out the size of these jobs
and what could bring in the most users. Always put people first.
Market research, user research and analytics (dat...more
Head of Product Marketing - Security, Integrations, Mobile at Salesforce
Making the assumption here that vertical = industry.
1. Industry definition - which taxonomy are you using. NAICS, SIC, propietary,
DUNS, Clearbit? This is important because there is a lot of nuance hidden in
sub-verticals, so getting your language aligned is key
2. TAM - what is the actual addressable market for your product or portfolio or
launch? This can be based on historical win rates by industry/sub industry
for an existing product, or can be based on focus groups/survey data of your
prospect base (how likely are you to buy X)
3. Product market fit - what are ...more
5 answers
PMO at TikTok
Where to start? Every company has different policies for promotion criteria, but
ultimately it needs to take into account 2 things: merit and business need.
Business need has to come first. It means that there's a larger scope of a role
that needs to be done - more responsibility and complexity within an org / team
- and there's now an opportunity or need for someone to fill that. If that
doesn't exist, promotions shouldn't be happening arbitrarily. I recongize that
especially within startups, individual contributors want to grow and should be
recognized for their efforts, but when merit su...more
Director of Product Marketing at Zenput
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have become a popular way for companies to
clearly define goals and measure progress against them, at the employee, team,
and company level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR
There's lots written about these that you can reference elsewhere, but it's a
really helpful frame work that allows you to measure, quantitatively and
qualitatively, how you're tracking against the "key results" that you've
defined. The common expectation is that you'll hit about 70% of your OKRs - idea
is that you're including stretch goals so missing 20-30% doens't mean you're
perfo...more
VP of Growth at Verifiable
If you're on this forum as a PMM, you know that one of the biggest challenges
for the PMM org is "What the hell do we measure!?" - an age-old conundrum that
PMMs always struggle with. This is especially pronouned in an enterprise B2B
environment vs. a fast-moving B2C environment where immediate usage/feedback may
be available.
To me, the most primary thing I'm looking for is how effective the person is in
relationship/ stakeholder management. In Product Marketing, you have many
constituents across Sales, Product, and customer teams, as well as within
Marketing itself. It's easy to get p...more
Sr. Director, Head of Product Marketing at DoorDash
This varies by company and role, but I generally think about the path to
promotion on the two key vectors: ownership level and degree of autonomy.
Strong performance against OKRs or KPIs is a core underpinning to that. When
considering promotion I start there and then look at how the person has
demonstrated rising levels of ownership and autonomy across the following:
* Strategic Direction: As an associate, I'd expect you to own a feature set
fully and demonstrate the ability to bring insights into the go-to-market
under direction. As you rise in the organization, I'd expect you...more
Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies
The best way for a product marketer to get promoted is by demonstrating the
impact of their work. To do this, I incentivize all my PMMs to befriend data and
tie their deliverables to key business and customer metrics.
To me, the two most important categories of metrics are:
1) Customer insights
a. Number of actionable insights that helped drive product development
b. Number of actionable insights that informed a business strategy/service
2) Customer engagement
a. Product adoption: This is the % of customers that adopted a new service or
product launched by PMM.
b. Customer lifet...more
3 answers
Vice President of Product Marketing at HackerOne
The key is to clearly define roles and responsibilities within your Marketing
organization. For starters, let's start with where Product Marketing fits in.
Product Marketing operates at the center of product, marketing, sales, and
customer success teams.
Under the general marketing umbrella, there are many teams that are dedicated to
the tactical areas of marketing: digital marketing, PR, email marketing, PPC and
paid advertising, social media marketing, etc.
But who creates the overarching strategy on how products are delivered to
market? Product Marketing.
Product Marketing defines the...more
Vice President, Product Marketing at AlertMedia | Formerly TrustRadius, Levelset, Walmart
Every company needs the following building blocks of marketing:
Upper funnel - Content engine (Attract eyeballs), Brand (Build a reputation)
Mid funnel - Demand gen engine (Turn eyeballs to drive demand)
Lower funnel - Product marketing (Help turn qualified prospects into customers)
Beyond the funnel - Customer marketing and advocacy (get the customers to become
voracious users and raving fans — an extension of your marketing)
There will be a lot of connective tissue, partnerships, and dependencies between
the above functions. But every function should define clean KPIs - lead
indi...more
Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies
Product marketing and Marketing are all working towards the same goals: raise
awareness, drive product adoption and drive business conversion to serve
customers and help the company grow.
Marketing has existed since the late 1800's with the invention of the first mail
product catalogue. Tiffany's Blue Book was the first mail-order catalogue in the
United States that really set the standard for product-driven marketing.
For the longest time, the evolution of Marketing has been slow and steady with
very few innovations. However, with the invention of the internet and mobile
phones, marke...more