How do you ensure that product marketers you manage are creating great messaging, and hitting the right milestones?

I'll focus on the creating great messaging, because frankly that's the most challenging part of the job. Especially given the noise out there with so many products, and so many companies being funded, it's really hard to stand out. I think there are lots of ways to create great messaging, but it all comes from the same place: Great insight into your customers drive great messaging. That's it. So then the question is, how do you get there? For me it means holistically understanding the environmen ...Read More

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. C ...Read More

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 stakehol ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 sa ...Read More

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 mat ...Read More

As a manager, I follow a structured approach for our target audiences. Here are the key steps: Audience Identification and Ownership (15% of effort): The first step is to clearly define the target audience segments and ensure that the team understands who they are communicating with. Product marketers are responsible for "owning" specific audience segments and crafting tailored messaging for each. This audience segmentation and channel messaging are explicitly tracked and documented. Messaging M ...Read More

The easiest way to ensure that product marketers you manage create effective, compelling messaging is to establish a formal internal process for creating positioning and messaging including how determine what works and what doesn't. A formal, evidence-based process ensures that the proposed position and messaging you come up with will stand out from the competition and resonate with buyers. I use a positioning framework that my partner developed when he was an early Microsoft employee. We fine t ...Read More