Technical Product Marketing

Background: Worked as a Community Manager and Product Marketer for an open source database software company DataStax; we sold a proprietary version of the open source database Apache Cassandra, target

Sales enablement changes when your company is "business to developer" to point at a different stage in the funnel: the charismatic, knowledgeable developer who probably already has a solution.   When

Selling to developers can be difficult, often because they have a ton of say over the decision but not explicitly the budget, but marketing to developers is simpler than people think. Quickly and conc

I love this question, <3 Developers! The fundamentals of sales enablement dont change, it's more the way you communicate the needs of your audience to your sales team that changes. If we unpack dev

Great question, something I think about a lot. I’m a huge proponent of specialization with technical products. I wouldn’t expect every member of our enterprise field organization (which is in the thou

When selling to developers your enablement activities are likely to take on a different focus so that the team understands how to engage in a discussion and build a community while keeping their sales

I love this question. First, I would say to save your company's BDR/SDRs time and avoid trying to set up calls with developers. You'll avoid a lot of frustration on both ends. Gating content content

This is a classical problem for many developer-first companies. Without mentioning names, many have successfully figured out the working model with both strong developer engagement alongside a thrivin

B2d follows a whole different motion. A developer is not eager to talk to Sales (and they don't want to be sold to). Developers want to try out the product themselves, tinker with it, and only if they

It depends a bit on how your sales team is organized today. But in any event, your product value pillars should always translate to both individual and company-wide gain, so your core message is alway

I'd say the mindset shift in B2D is that it's no longer "sales enablement", but just "enablement". And that should be a shared goal across your organization, whether it's the marketing team, sales tea

Your sales team needs a higher level of technical proficiency when you're a B2D company. It's important to hire sales reps that can form their own mental model of how your product works and integrates

For companies targeting developers, it's a good habit to build up a culture of developer empathy. Practical exmaples include: Provide them 101 sessions, enough for them to be dangerous and speak the

Salesforce is my #1 in B2B. just overall content is amazing. very customer oriented

Intercom does a great job

+1 for Intercom. Also Buffer and Autopilot. All focus on training their target customer to be better in their job.

I also love Intercom. I took their Jobs to Be Done methodology and made a value prop project out of it! https://www.intercom.com/books/jobs-to-be-doneI also think stripe has a great website for their

Apple is the gold standard in my book. They have a strong point of view and aesthetic, and every product has a story, launch, and campaign behind it. Square has emulated this model as well, and their

May be I am baised, but in the large Global 500 space, infrastructure -- I would say my experience at Cisco was the best. For me thats kind of the benchmark now - both in terms of strategy and executi

Spotify comes to mind with product marketing I really admire.  The particular element of their product marketing I most admire is their ability to elevate listening to music and podcasts on the go, t

The early work Twilio did to quickly convey what the service did and who it's for then get developers to dig into the product and have an a-ha moment with a couple of lines of code was pretty great. A

I’m not allowed to say Stripe. Everyone says Stripe. So I’ll say…. Stripe? I kid, I kid.I’ll always have a soft spot for Heroku – they’ve always stood out to me as a company with a unique brand presen

Yes! Here are a few examples, mostly B2B SaaS. Asana: I love how they take, what is a horizontal app, and position it to address specific use cases by function & persona. Whether the target user

When I was at Okta, I was part of an extremely effective PMM team. It was structured: Core / Product-line PMMs Technical product marketers Solutions PMMs (own "GTM plays" & business value - e.g.

If buyers are complaining you should listen. The art of messaging is not to be flashy or buzzy or trendy, it's to know your target audience and speak in their language. If you've heard some negative f

Great question… this is easy to over index on either side – too much buzzword bingo or too deep in the weeds.Personally, I like to follow a narrative from top to bottom – anchor to “the what”, hook wi

If technical buyers are critical to the sale, then you have to address their needs. Host accurate technical content. If you're choosing to reserve your primary real estate for your homepage / above-t

I don't believe that any technical skills are required in product marketing. However there are a few caveats to that blanket statement. You should be as technically proficient as your target custome

I’m a huge proponent of Jobs To Be Done, both for building products and for marketing products – in product marketing, though, you don’t necessarily have to be able to do the job of your audience, but

As a product marketer, you should strive to have the same degree of functional understanding and empathy as a product manager and the same ability to contextualy step through/use the product as any te

Great PMM teams have balance, across the dimensions of positioning & messaging, communication, industry depth, and technical expertise. It's rare to find the "unicorn" PMM that is outstanding accr

I've been fortunate enough to work with some amazing Technical Product Marketers, and I've found two extremely strong backgrounds are technical pre & post sales (SE, services, etc) and practioner,

Technical Product Marketers have a variety of career paths. Should they choose to stay in the PMM org, some more organizations offer management roles for Technical Product Marketing teams, which at so

If by technical value, you mean “what does this thing actually do?” - a lot. Most technical categories are super crowded (and if they’re not crowded, they’re nascent and not well-understood), so being

This is all dependent on the personas you're trying to target. In my opinion, your positioning should not change, but you should have messaging specific to your buyer and/or user personas, or those wh

[Insert “Why not both?” meme] :)The best thing you can do is bring these stories together – when technical value solves business value, you have yourself a winner. (I don’t think I’ve ever encountered

If you get to know who you're talking to, it's a lot easier to know what to say. That's a core tenet of messaging and being a good conversationalist in general. Your first step with a question like th

The answer is you need both, but targeted to the right audience: business value for the economic buyer and technical value for the user / implementer. In some cases, the buyer AND the user are technic

Great question that's very top of mind! The broader GTM organization will own the growth targets, while the broader Product organization will own the adoption targets. I believe where tech PMM can ma

This should be aligned with the key responsibilities of the role (see previous answer), but here are some sample KPIs: Improvement in head-to-head win rate against a key competitor: typically for opp

Good question – it can depend on a few things. In many companies, you’ll have to wear both hats... I know I sure have.  As Product Marketing teams grow, where it starts to break out into dedicated ro

Techncial Product Marketers have a higher degree of industry knowledge and technical expertise. In a team, they are specialized in the areas of: Competitive intelligence: owning the maintenance of ba

Great question, I get in arguments about this all the time! Heh. You ask the question the right way - it’s about balance.Starting with my least favorite topic – SEO! The benefits of SEO isn’t lost on

The most important thing here is to ensure there is consistency and alignment across the entire company on the GTM motion, and the metrics that matter. While a large number of dev-centric companies de

I have a fairly extensive persona methodology which I wrote about here (https://www.workinproduct.com/blog/elements-of-a-positioning-system-part-2-customer-personas).Rather than get prescriptive with

Developer personas are diverse! You could rename them "technical practitioners" to better describe this group of humans. High level, in the business world, they are the folks who put fingers on the ke