What is your process for developing portfolio messaging and how is it different from developing product messaging?

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 tet ...Read More

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 po ...Read More

I think of messaging in terms of the marketing funnel. Top of Funnel - "The Brand Promise" is the highest level of your messaging. It is a concise, emotionally driven statement that captures your core experience or value. It encapsulates your differentiation, painting a picture of how your product will change your customer's life. For example, at one point, Salesforce's brand promise was "We Bring Companies and Customers Together". It's short, relatable, and easily understood. Middle of Funnel - ...Read More

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 ...Read More

Product messaging highlights specific capabilities, differentiation, and use cases tied to one offering. Portfolio messaging needs to unify multiple products under a single value proposition, making it broader and more strategic.  At Cisco, we focus on business outcomes rather than individual product features. For example, if your customers seek to “simplify their business operations,” then your job as a PMM is to illustrate how all products in the portfolio help the customer achieve that outcom ...Read More