What companies have product marketing that you really admire, either overall or particular elements?

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 everything they do. Salesforce does great customer content, and of course the Dreamforce event is industry standard! 

For developer products, Stripe and Twilio are great inspirations. Stripe has a clear message and value prop on its website, and they've been doing a great job recently of upleveling beyond developers to speak to broader business value. Twilio has a big challenge: communicating the value of a very abstract, technical product. They've done it elegantly, and I also appreciate the way they illustrate the value of the product with use cases and customers from different industires.

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 counters DIY as the alternative. Something tech products always have to fight is the natural inclination to build this yourself (whatever *this* is). One look at WorkOS and it’s clear – that’s not something anyone wants to do themselves. That’s solid positioning right there, something they can build on as they grow.

Outside of my technical area of focus, I’ve been following a lot of the newer class of collaboration tools like Figma, Airtable, Notion, Coda, and Miro. What I especially like about these companies is how they’re using community-generated content as a flywheel for adoption and growth. I really see that as the next frontier for the new class of tech products – as the community becomes experts and contributes content, new users can easily consume as examples, the flywheel spins and spins!

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 the simplicity of messaging, its really easy to understand what value Webflow provides and how it is unique, they also develop a ton of great content.

Zeplin: Impossible not to include this on the list! I'm really proud of our core messaging & assets like our hero product video, I think its beautifully crafted and tells a great differentiated story in a crowded market. 

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. ROI calculator)

Core / product-line PMMs were given a broad scope, and in some sense they effectively functioned as "outbound product managers", owning GTM strategy (e.g. should this primarily be positioned as a day1 attach for prospects / new deals vs. upsell to existing customers), pricing and packaging, on top of traditional PMM responsibilities of product launches, messaging & positioning, content, enablement.

I also think Salesforce does a tremendous job of selling the vision (given their history of pre-launching products and giving PMM the task of marketing vaporware). And they deliver a phenomenal experience at DreamForce - presentations, keynote demo.

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/

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 have 1 or 2 products, but positioning a broader portfolio and bringing a holistic message, to multiple verticals -- thats hard in Enterprise. 

My 2 cents. 

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. 

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 sharing the results of their year on Spotify. Literally almost everyone I knew, across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. 

Not only does this product "feature" put the user at the center of the universe, so to speak, but it also creates shareable content that promotes Spotify and motivates other users to adopt the platform. 

It's an incredibly tough competitive environment - you have Apple Music, Amazon Music, Pandora, Fitt Radio, etc. 

How do you compete and differentiate? 

More songs available? Lower price? It's tough to do. 

But by using data about your listening habits (and who doesn't love to learn something about themselves) and packaging it in a way that it's very shareable, you just gave me another big reason to keep using Spotify. 

My runner up would be Fitt Radio. 

While I have not seen much product marketing from them yet, they have done a stellar job at identifying a need from a sub-set of the streaming music service customer segments. 

They specifically solve for fitness-minded folks who need pre-created playlists (from top DJs) to support workouts. 

I love Spotify, but Fitt Radio now dominates my use because I can easily find DJ mixes for anything from elliptical to heavy lifting. I was tired of my pre-created playlists on Spotify and their workout mixes don't always flow very well. 

They've clearly nailed the foundational elements of product management / marketing. I look forward to seeing how they can use product marketing to scale adoption. 

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

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

Intercom does a great job