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Technical Product Marketing
Technical Product Marketing
11 answers
Product Marketing at Hedera Hashgraph
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, targeting the developer and administrator
personas.
Developers are experts at searching for information; they're most likely to make
buying moves after doing their own research and product comparisons. By the time
a developer is actively engaged with sales, you can almost guarantee that
they've made up their mind about what they want.
One way to enable your sales team in selling to developers...more
Product and Marketing Guy at Greg Meyer
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 you are pitching to developers it helps to build a scientific, clearly
logical and reasoned case for them to abandon their current solution and adopt
yours based on a productivity or efficiency gain, or because you enable them to
do something they simply couldn't do before.
Keep it simple, explain yourself in plain english, and err on the side of less
bs and more details and developers wi...more
Group Vice President, Industry Marketing at Oracle
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 concretely explain what your product does
and how it works/fits in with other stacks (as much as developers love to claim
that they're immune to marketing/branding - just look at the stickers on their
laptops. C'mon - that's brand loyalty/affinity on par with pre-teen pop music
fans) then get them into some demo/free trial/"doing the thing with your
product" as quickly as possible with resources (d...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Twilio
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 developers and what they want, then it
makes it really easy to figure out how to approach sales enablement.
1) Developers will question to the end. They will question every word on every
slide and understand it as a direction or intention. So make sure that any
presentation or pitch you build for your sales team is fully accurate and
defensible. A developer will ask about every permutation of the co...more
Product Marketing at Okta
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 thousands) to be able to carry a
highly technical conversation from end-to-end, nor would I want them to! But I
am responsible for dev and ops-centric products, so it can't be ignored.
What I try to do is zoom out of the customer lifecycle, pinpoint who on the team
is having the conversation, and what they need to do to get to the next phase
effectively – then I craft enablement for that, and that...more
Head of Product Marketing, ITSM at Atlassian
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 pitches locked in a drawer.
It will also require in-depth technical enablement and understanding of
technical use cases as well as how to answer questions without trying to sell
them something.
The biggest shift might be the mindset, where the sales team needs to focus on
what is the best answer to my customer/prospect vs what I want to sell them. It
is a very different motion and requ...more
Product Marketing Lead at Observable
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 from developers and forcing them to fill in forms might give you
a short term bump in leads, but the quality will be low.
Instead, think of the sales funnel as living side by side with the individual
developer journey and look for ways to compliment the activities with the key
decision makers and their technical practitioner teams.
The developer journey can be sliced and diced a few way...more
Director Product Marketing at Salesforce
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 thriving enterprise revenue stream.
Learning from these companies, they always focus on the developer success by
doing things such as corporate hackathons, architect support, engineering blogs,
etc. that helps to build advocacy for their products. It will be hugely
beneficial if the sales enablement programs can incorporate a developer-first
mindset by acknowledging that developers are the key influen...more
Director Product Marketing at Salesforce
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 thriving enterprise revenue stream.
Learning from these companies, they always focus on the developer success by
doing things such as corporate hackathons, architect support, engineering blogs,
etc. that helps to build advocacy for their products. It will be hugely
beneficial if the sales enablement programs can incorporate a developer-first
mindset by acknowledging that developers are the key influen...more
Head of Marketing at Transform
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 enjoy the experience (or get to the
aha moment) will they evangelize the solution up the company's ranks. Developer
motion strongly aligns with the product-led-growth (PLG) motion. The trial
experience from onboarding to docs, inviting team members, and getting to the
aha moments can play a pivotal role in converting them to customers. Growth
marketing also plays a significant role because thi...more
Director of Product Marketing at dbt Labs
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 always consistent, even if the
language changes a bit to accomodate the audience. You might consider a mapping
exercise that lets you chart that narrative. For example, "velocity" is one of
our core product value pillars.
For the individual: Code portability, modularity, and packages helps each
developer code faster, to focus on higher value work.
For the company: More developers coding faster me...more
VP Marketing at PopSQL | Formerly Matterport, WeWork, Google, Mulesoft, Box, Salesforce
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 team, product or support team who are
dealing with your developer.
You are correct in saying that developers do not want to be sold to, but they'll
still want good support if they need it. That comes in different forms and the
good news is that your organization can divide and conquer across this.
1. First of all your docs gotta be like butter. Most developers will try and
figure out a ...more
4 answers
Group Vice President, Industry Marketing at Oracle
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 precise on “we’re different in that
we solve these problems in these ways” is super important so that those details
aren’t left entirely for SE’s in a discovery meeting with a prospect. If you
have a highly technical product offering chances are you also have highly
technical users/decision makers that you're trying to reach - treat their time
and intelligence with respect by getting to the "t...more
Director, The Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Davidson College
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 who will be influencing the purchase
in a B2B context. For example, when we're talking about the breadth of offerings
we have in Morningstar Direct for financial professionals, we need to ensure
that we're addressing the overall business value to those execs who are making
the decision to purchase our solutions for their entire enterprise, but we also
need to ensure that we have more technical me...more
Product Marketing at Okta
[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 the inverse of that, now that I think about it)
This manifests itself in a number of ways, but you almost always needs an
explicitly budgeted project to attach to. Thinking top down – execs who mandate
certain initiatives send managers out looking for technical solutions. When a
practitioner tries a product out and gives it the thumbs up, that works its way
up the chain. Thinking bottom up ...more
Head of Product Marketing at Podium
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 this is to establish buyer personas. Who's
involved in the buying committee? Are they the key decision maker or an
influencer? What do they need to know? If you don't know, start by doing
win/loss in partnership with your revenue teams. Try to get a handle on who was
involved in recent purchase decisions, what their process looked like behind the
scenes, what motivated their decision, and where ...more
10 answers
VP of Marketing at Spekit
Salesforce is my #1 in B2B. just overall content is amazing. very customer oriented
Head of Marketing & Growth at Topology Eyewear
+1 for Intercom. Also Buffer and Autopilot. All focus on training their target customer to be better in their job.
Group Manager, Engagement & Retention Campaigns at Adobe
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-done
I also think stripe has a great website for their products and reference it frequently: https://stripe.com/
Segment has pleasantly come a long way - they have a clear explanation of who their product is for, use cases, etc: https://segment.com/
Product Marketing Lead at Stripe
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 website shines as a result.
In the SaaS category, Zendesk and Mailchimp are some of my favorite
inspirations, and of course Salesforce. Zendesk has been very successful at
leading a broader category of cloud customer service, and the product pages on
their website are always smart and relevant. Mailchimp's voice and tone are so
unique and appropriate to its brand, and carry through in every...more
Director of Product Management, Speech and Video AI at Cisco
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 execution cadence that I learnt. From products
to solution to positioning platforms, working with ecosystem partners, ISVs,
Channels. Website alone to me is not a good indication, yes, today it is, but
the real value is in business that is driven and impact product marketing is
having in driving that.
In the Saas space, I would agree Salesforce is probably the benchmark.
It is easier when you ...more
Product Manager, Video Advertising at Dealer.com
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, to a data-rich, "teach me
something about myself" package at the end of each year.
Dating back a few years, Spotify will summarize the time you spent listening to
music and podcasts, your top artists, your top songs, your top genres, your top
podcasts and other data points in a fun UI that is very socially driven.
Toward the end of 2019, I saw lots and lots of social posts from people ...more
Group Vice President, Industry Marketing at Oracle
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. All of it tic and tied back to the brand and voice of the company, which had a sort of open source community vibe despite being a commercial entity.
Product Marketing at Okta
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 presence that never compromised on technical value
and authenticity. Some of the Product Marketers I looked up to most when first
getting into the dev tools/cloud infra space came from Heroku.
A newer company I’ve had my eye on that I think is doing a fantastic job in this
regard is WorkOS. Simple and clean – very direct to the job-to-be-done. But
beyond that, they’ve hit a strong narrative that c...more
Chief Marketing Officer at Zeplin
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 is in
Sales, Product, Operations, HR or some other function, the PMM team at Asana
know your top use cases and help you understand how Asana can help.
Notion: Also do a great job positioning a horizontal product but the highlight
for me is the core content & messaging. Its so human and straightforward, no
jargon or fluff. The tone of voice is also friendly and approachable.
Webflow: I love ...more
2 answers
Product Marketing at Okta
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 an explicit example here, I’ll share something
I run i nto a lot that I think gets it wrong – bucketing CTOs/CIOs into the same
“Technology Executive” persona.
There may be some overlap, and it’s tempting to consolidate profiles, but in any
modern organization, these jobs are vastly different, and should be treated as
such.
Both are responsible for making company-wide technology decisions, ...more
Product Marketing Lead at Observable
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 keyboards, not the folks who write checks.
The operators. Because of this, there are personas that will work for some
products, and not others.
Some of the ways developers can be grouped is by job title:
1. Software developer
2. Software engineer
3. Mobile developer
4. App developer
5. Web developer
6. Data scientist
7. Data engineer
8. Machine learnist
9. Network engineer
...more
1 answer
Product Marketing at Okta
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 make the most impact on both sides of the house is with velocity targets. On the GTM side, that's things like sales cycle velocity. On the product side of the house, that's things like onboarding velocity. The content that gets created by tech PMMs should be an accelerator, so the KPIs should match accordingly.
1 answer
Product Marketing at Okta
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
roles is at the target persona level – your more traditional PMM may focus more
on the executive personas/solution marketing/business value route, while your
more technical PMM may focus more on the practitioner personas/example use
cases/how to guides route.
If you're trying to figure out your own path here, one could either look to
double down on one area or improve in others to gain broad...more
1 answer
Product Marketing at Okta
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
me, but for technical products, authenticity trumps all IMHO. I always cringe
when I come across a bland, “what is [tech topic]?” blog post. I would much
rather land on a “how to do [tech thing]?” blog post. But the best lesson I ever
got in marketing was, “if you don’t cringe just a little, you’re not doing it
right.”
For those two examples specifically, the “what is” posts should be target...more
3 answers
VP of Product Marketing at Oyster®
I don't have a recommendation on the group, but a good next step if you don't get an answer here would be networking with a couple of PMMs at companies that sell to/engage with developers to get their perspective. Folks at Atlassian or Github, for example, could probably give you some really great insights.
Director of Product Marketing at Appcues
One suggestion would be to see if you have any talented sales engineers that may want to make the move. These individuals have spent a lot of time speaking with customers, understanding their technical needs and frustrations.
It is not always the case that you will find an ideal candidate there, or want to "poach" someone from that group, but just something to keep an eye on as they already know your company and customers well.
Tech Storybuilder at Wrongless Consulting Ex: New Relic, Juniper Networks, IDC
+1 for your sales engineering team or the sales engineering teams at your
competitors. The primary issue here is often fighting through HR's functional
discrimination that sales = more pay than marketing. Hopefully you have a
culture or team that doesn't throw up that stupid barrier. The other place to
look is within your engineering teams or within your customer's engineering
teams. Occassionally you can poach one out of a bigger company. Know that if you
hire an established evangelist with a large following, that will be more
expensive than developing one. And the established one may not ...more
Product Marketing at Okta
I should have a better answer to this than Twitter, but I haven’t actually hired
for that role in a long time, so might be out of touch, sorry!
One thing I’ll say, and this might be a bit controversial, but I’m personally
cautious of high-profile developer evangelists. There is absolutely a ton of
value in building a public profile, and the role lends itself to community, but
a strong advocate is someone who spends more of their time talking with
customers, less time talking with other evangelists. The best ones I’ve seen
balance this very well, all grounded in being helpful – engage with ...more
2 answers
Director of Product Marketing at Hibob
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 feedback take a moment to look into it, find out whether that is the view of the majority of your buyer personas. If you find that to be true, it's time to change how you communicate with your audience.
Product Marketing at Okta
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 with “the why”, and win over with “the how”.
But each section in that narrative has to be punchy and unique. I’m a Rule of 3
type – bullet points, icons, lists, etc. I get reinforcing key points, but
nobody has time to scroll through the same statement over and over again! On
each...
Personally, I care more about making an association with “the what” than trying
to get creative. Just be presc...more
2 answers
Product Marketing Director at Eightfold.ai
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 customer. So if you
sell to developers, then you should have enough technical background to speak
intelligently to those professionals. This doesn't mean you actually need to
be a great developer, just that you understand the needs of great developers.
* If your company is highly data-driven and does not have visual reporting
software, you may need to know basic SQL or another databas...more
Product Marketing at Okta
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 you most definitely have to get it.
I often joke that I’m just a good enough programmer to know I shouldn’t be one.
What this really means (aside from being a really bad joke) is that I can write
about *it* and hold a conversation about *it*, so I can be an effective marketer
to those who do *it*. Now *it* has changed for me over the years – I’ve worked
on dev tools products, cloud infrastruc...more