Platform and Solutions Product Marketing

You nailed why platform products are difficult to message. This is also why I think they are more fun than working on “point solutions.” (Please forgive me for using that heinous jargon.) In the best-case scenario, you can identify an overarching value proposition for using the platform that resonates with your primary audience and helps them quickly understand the space you’re in. Then you prioritize use cases/solutions based on how frequently customers adopt them or their revenue value to your company. You want to make it easy for each customer group to be able to find the relevant use cases or value propositions for your platform. This can be done through website navigation, collaborating with your growth teams on which campaigns drive to which pages, and helping your sales team identify what problems or customer characteristics would cause them to focus on a particular use case over another.

Thank you for some wonderful frameworks and inputs on messaging and positioning. I have seen a trend especially across many segments - particularly in enterprise - to move from products to solutions to platforms. I had written a blog last year what that means, especially if the goal is to position a "platform" versus point products or point solutions. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/products-solutions-ecosystems-why-what-how-savita-kini/  In order for a "true platform" -- there needs to be an ecosystem approach in the go-to-market where you can allow other companies / startups/ISVs to build on top of your platform via APIs etc. I thought I will share this perspective here as it relates to messaging and positioning.  In addition to the excellent points on the messaging hierarchy -- I also recommend a one slide that summarizes the "executive industry perspective to the platform" and then the how is the solutions and point products. There is also an important nuance and distinction between what is a solution versus a point product.  Will leave it for another discussion. 

This will depend on what your product/service/platform does and who the target audience is. For instance, in one of my previous roles, we had one product for one audience. Of course the platform was extensible, had different feature sets, but the value was easy to articulate to one audience. On the other hand, in my current role at Handshake, we have a three-sided talent marketplace with very different products and audiences. We tackle this by having one company value prop and then tailor specific messaging to each side of the business. Remember that messaging should not be a feature list. From the article I shared in another question, try this exercise to get started on determining your hierarchy: * Define your target audience(s) * Articulate their problem statement(s) * Describe how your product/service/platform helps said audience with said problem  This is, of course, an over-simplified exercise (you’d also want to understand the competitive landscape and what makes your product unique), but it helps get to the value. Once you complete this for one or multiple product areas, try and draw some similarities across to ladder up to a company value prop. Your business should be able to take all of that and distill into 1-2 sentences to describe itself to your buyer (and even to someone outside of the space).

Often times, we say our platform has unlimited possibilities, it's the art of the possible -- because it truly is. But it doesn’t help the customer understand our unique differentiator vs any other option in the market. Starting with themes has been helpful to simplify the messaging hierarchy. We need to simplify the message, so it’s memorable. If we cannot do that, no matter how great the messaging sounds, it will be forgotten the next second. We developed a messaging and positioning framework to help articulate customer needs and our value proposition across 4 main themes - Connect, Modernize, Transform and Innovate. It was simple to remember and helped anchor our portfolio messaging and positioning to those pillars.

We now offer upwards of a dozen products on the Stripe platform that go way beyond payments processing—from products for incorporation and billing management to fraud prevention and managing corporate spending. To manage the growing complexity, we introduced the concept of Anchor Tenants at Stripe this year. (This term comes from American malls, where there may be a large store that draws customers and traffic for the smaller stores.) For us, those are our core products: Payments (payments acceptance), Connect (marketplaces and platforms), and Billing (recurring revenue and invoicing). These products serve the most common use cases that customers and prospects approach Stripe with. The rest of our products serve as add-ons to optional tools to help streamline your business operations. Getting this alignment is critical because we’ll focus our go-to-market efforts accordingly. It also helps reduce the cognitive overhead for customers to start on Stripe. We still have a ways to go on this, but I’m excited by the directional approach we’ve begun to take. An example of a company that does this “progressive reveal” really well is Hubspot, often described by users as being there to “catch them as they grow”.

I generally look at it like this: Use Case -> Business Case -> Story. Starting with the use cases, I think about what people actually do with this platform (cue the "two Bobs" from "Office Space"). Then I think about how those capabilities translate into solutions to real problems, as different stakeholders experience them (that last part is absolutely critical, by the way). Those are my business cases.  Once I have my business cases, I can do one of two things. Either, I can see that one, more than any other, represents the primary value of the product, both now and likely into the future. But the evidence must be pretty overwhelming for me to feel comfortable with this. More likely, I start looking for common, but not immediately obvious, threads across business cases. When I find some that are compelling, those become the building blocks for the story.  There will be times that each of the three will be used in messaging. Use cases will typically be "supporting evidence" to prove how something will be transformational; business cases will usually be directed at a specific stakeholder; the story will appear to be the "universal truth" from which the use and business cases emanate (even though that is actually backwards).  Does this help?

In my opinion, the most important thing in prioritizing your messaging is finding the common denominator across your platform. Does it create a new output, or solve a new problem, or enable a new style of working, for example. Then you prioritize that in your messaging hierarchy, and use the various things that your platform does as means to support that new narrative. For example, DocuSign's platform is composed of our ecosystem, our developer tools, our foundational infrastructure and our security and compliance. It allows a customer to control their own roadmap for agreements, because customers can trust that DocuSign is going to work for their needs (availability and security) and that it can support new use cases regardless of the specific path to usage (integrations or custom development).  So the platform does a lot, but the goal is to talk about what commonality comes out of all of those items working in tandem. That's the thing to focus messaging on, which will come to you if you focus on market context, the customer's pain points, and your differentiated point of view. From there, let what your platform does be the secondary part of your messaging.

Great question! You can consider your target buyers and prioritize messaging based on your top personas. This will help your field tremendously too. You can also identify common customer outcomes and make sure you map your buyers to expected outcomes to the general vision of the platform. Aligning all of this will help you really synthesize the top value prop of your platform. 

Your platform sits within a hierarchy itself (e.g., working bottom-up, messaging at the feature/function level are subordinate to product, to platform, to suite, to solutions, to corporate, to brand messaging). In other words, messaging cascades downwards from your mission and brand promise. Messaging at every level should map back to the previous level while telling its own story. Follow the MECE principle. Within your platform itself, prioritize the unique selling point. What about it drives the most value for your customers? List the top 3 buckets. Then for each bucket, note down whether it helps your customer unlock "new" value, "better" value, or "more" of the same value. Prioritize new, better, more -- in that order.

Our messaging and positioning starts with this framework below. We combined messaging and positioning into one document and have it built out for each product, solution, and industry. We engage with product management to start and confirm the value proposition, key personas and their pain points based on current learnings from customers. Then we validate our messaging with sales, presales to gain insights into prospect conversations.  This has become the guide for the content/editorial team and the other teams in marketing to help articulate business value. undefined [https://i.imgur.com/l1QtmDH.png]

In the Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, he says "comapnies that don't have a clearly articulated story don't have a well-thought-out strategy. The company story is the company strategy." With that said, that is a good starting point to consider. Your story must explain at a fundamental level why you exist. Why does the world need your company? Why do we need to be doing what we're doig and why is it important? Working with product management to make sure the story we are communicating maps to the strategic roadmap, connecting with sales and making sure we are capturing the customer insights in the narrative and connecting with CS to ensure the customer experience is reflected. 

You begin with the customer - either buyer, user, or both, depending on the objective of your messaging. We should definitely consult with internal experts in product, sales, customer success, and other customer-facing teams. However, it is important to take their input as one source of information. Messaging is actually the middle step of product storytelling. The order of formulating a story starts with: Positioning - How do we want our product to be perceived in the market? What unique value do we deliver relative to alternatives? What is our story? Messaging - How do we communicate the value? How does our product help the user solve their problem? What buyer objections must our story overcome? Copy - What words do we use to deliver the message? How do we describe the solution on multiple communication channels? In summary, always start with the customer in mind, and start with the why. Check out this great piece on how people don’t buy products - they buy a better version of themselves.

Someone once said that the best messaging joins the conversations already happening in your prospects' heads. Or something to that effect. With that in mind, I always start formulating messaging by talking to prospects and customers. Then I validate it with internal teams, including sales, customer success and product.

Of the three, product and solution have the most overlap. In a technology context most often the difference is that a solution involves more than just a piece of software. The whole solution may also include the software plus bundled content, professional services and an ecosystem of integrations, for example.   Personally, I don't find this dinstinction particularly useful, and mostly use product and solution interchangeably. A product is useless if it's not solving a problem (hello, Kickstarter!), so most PM and PMMs think in terms of "whole product," which includes everything needed to solve a problem.   That aside, products and solutions mostly stand alone as something someone is willing to pay for.  A feature is any subset of that that is not able to stand alone. It's something that most people are only going to be willing to pay for as part of a solution purchase. 

For more info on what Mike mentioned about the "whole product" I'd highly recommend reading the relevant chapter in Crossing the Chasm.

I'm going to focus on just one part of that equation: Solution. This is an often misrepresented piece of the product marketers toolkit. I have found that so many companies put together a list of products an call it a solution, I would consider this a 'bundle' 'package' or 'toolkit.' A solution, as the name implies, should SOLVE a very specific set of problems for a specific audience type. It will generally include both product, services, and even best practices or expertise from the offering company. 

To me, a solution is a prescriptive collection of products and features that solve a well-defined problem for your customer. A product is anything you could conceivably sell on its own, but a product can also be a collection of other products. A feature is a component piece of a product that adds to its value but cannot be sold on its own.    Products, features, and solutions tend to get different levels of attention from PMMs. Products will naturally get the most, solutions are really just collections of products and are therefore more an exercise in packaging and pricing. Features get attention insofar as they need to be launched, marketed, and incorporated into the story for the products and solutions they serve. Resource your PMM attention accordingly. 

Great question–tough to answer without getting too specific about Intercom and what works for us based on our own situation and approach in general. But, here goes. :)   For us, a product is a container for a set of mutually exclusive features that enable specific workflows to be completed. For example, our Engage product has a set of core features (available on Engage Lite) that make it possible to send targeted messages to leads and customers. Some of these features are audience targeting, auto messages (email, in-app, and push), and smart campaigns to name a few. There is an optional additional set of features available for on Engage Standard that enable more sophisticated workflow to be completed. For example, A/B testing allows you to optimize the targeted messages you are sending to leads and customers.   Our products can be applied on their own, or in combination with other products, to solve different problems for different teams–these are what we call solutions. For example,  Engage can be used on its own by marketing teams to onboard, activate, and upsell more customers. When combined with our Respond product, sales teams can use the same features to capture, qualify and convert more leads.   FWIW, internally we're not in love with the word "Solutions" because of some of the connotations it carries with it. Additionally, like 'Products', it's also noun which can cause confusion, since you don't buy "Solutions" from Intercom, you buy "Products" which can solve different problems based on how you apply them. We're still working through this. It's not easy and I've not come across anyone who does it particularly well.

Product: This is your product or platfrom (e.g. Salesforce Sales Cloud) Feature: This is a specific part of the platfrom that customers can use (e.g. Contacts, Leads, Accounts, Opportunities) Solution: This is a use case for your product - by need, industry, or persona (e.g. I need to track sales, SFDC for Financial Services, SFDC for VP of Sales)

It's a difference with little distinction. From a buyer's POV it's the thing that solves their problem or satisfies their need.  Some sales VPs want to use the word 'solution' because they believe they can sell bigger deals. OK. Whatever. The underlying thrust of using the world 'solution' is because it gets everyone thinking about problems. As in we have a 'solution' to 'problem X'. 

Interesting question for sure. I feel that most of these answers do a great job of highlighting the distinction, but something I would add is that the product is essentially the vehicle for the solution. You can't have a solution without a product, but you can have a product that doesn't offer a solution.  A feature is merely an additional part of the product that may create a quicker solution, a new type of solution, or just be a meaningless add-on.  Of course, there is a lot of contextual elements that go into this, but I would say that the summation of these answers gives you a clear view of the differences .

It's easy to use the words product, feature, and solution as different options. As product marketers, it's important for us to understand the subtle differences. * A feature is the smallest element or component that solves a specific job.  * A product includes a set of core features and functionality that solves for unique needs.  * A solution solves a business need and is typically tied to a target segment by market size and/or industry.

The distinctions between what is a product, feature, and solution can be somewhat subjective and can vary depending on the specific context and perspective. My POV: * A product can be thought of as a standalone offering that provides value to the customer and can be sold and delivered independently.  * A feature is a specific component or aspect of a product that provides a specific benefit or capability, and is typically part of a larger product offering.  * A solution is a combination of products, features, and services that addresses a specific customer need or challenge, and provides a comprehensive solution to a problem or opportunity. Usually, PMMs and PMs make a product catalog where each part of the functionality is kind of classifies to be a feature, standalone product, or even ecosystem solutions :)

I have taken the certification offered by Pragmatic institute foundations and launch certification. I found them to be good courses for PMMs in enterprise companies. They have used their generic framework for GTM. I got some clarity on a few concepts, but overall I was expecting to come back with many more actionable frameworks, learnings from instructors' experiences. I am looking to engage with an alternative program that may be focused on PLG and low touch sales programs where we can learn about how marketing has influenced growth more comprehensively.

I am aware of just a few 1. Pragmatic institute - I took it. However, I found that to be specific to B2B enterprise sales. 2. 280 Group: I recently found out about this institute, I am looking to connect with someone who has been to this program. 3. AIPMM: Seems to offer courses similar to Pragmatic Institute. I am looking to connect with someone who has been to this program to understand more. Outside of these, I am looking for more engaging courses, especially where we can learn how to influence PLG in low touch product environments, and contribute to strategy comprehensively.

I am not aware of any one key certification for product marketers. I work with PMMs that come from backgrounds in campaigns, sales, engineering, and product management. Each of those backgrounds lend themselves to a specific function in product marketing.  In my experience, there are three types of product marketers:  1. Technical PMM 2. Market Programs PMM 3. Go-to-Market PMM.  An aspiring product marketer should identify their entry point into one of the aforementioned functions. If there was one skill that unites each type of PMM, it is their ability to diagnose a market, create a positioning statement, and craft messaging that is clear, concise, and relatable. This skill can be picked up in intro marketing classes undergrad, MBA, or MOOCs.  * Technical PMMs - I would look for certifications or experience in the functional area of the product. Solution Engineers are usually the perfect fit because they can create demos and deliver messaging. * Market Programs PMMs - I would look for someone who is intimately familiar with the customer or who has experience demand generation programs. Customer marketing or campaign leads are usually a great fit because they understand the customer journey. * GTM PMM - I would look for someone who has sales experience. Sales has no time for marketing BS. Those who were on the front lines remember what training works and what doesn't. I've also hired folks who have a teaching background because in the end, that's what sales enablement is.

I'm a little biased here, but I don't believe that there are courses or certifications that are a prerequisite or requirement to jumping into product marketing. If you haven't done any marketing before, or worked alongside a good marketing team, Pragmatic Marketing by the Pragmatic Institute is a solid framework for twisting your head around what marketing is really about.  But the best way to learn is on the job. If you have a PMM function at your current company, get to know them. Ask about what they're working on, why it's important. What are the biggest challenges they're trying to overcome. In general, we love to talk about what we're really up to - because we still carry a bit of a chip on our shoulder, feeling that most people believe marketing is just pretty decks and presentations.  If someone ever asked me to to through the messaging framework, I'd jump at the chance! Why did you talk about the last product launch this way? Prepare for a 30-minute monlogue. But you'll learn a ton. And, I bet they'll be a problem you could help with. It's truly the best way to learn, and to build some faith. 

Courses, certifications, and books can definitely help transition into product marketing, but the best way to learn is by doing. I would see if there are side projects you can take on with the PMM team, in addition to self-driven learning.  For courses and certifications: * I typically recommend the Product Marketing Alliance: https://www.productmarketingalliance.com. They have a variety of programs depending on how broad or narrow you want to go, and how much time you have.  * I've also had great experience with General Assembly (https://generalassemb.ly); depending on your location they may have relevant product marketing courses to choose from.  * There's also Pragmatic Institute (https://www.pragmaticinstitute.com/course/product/market/) but I haven't heard any feedback there.  And my 3 must-read product marketing books are: * Obviously Awesome, by April Dunford * Positioning, by Al Ries and Jack Trout * Playing to Win, by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin Good luck! 

* Regular catch-ups (1-on-1s): These are important opportunities for specific line-of-business (LOB) / product leads to share top priorities & initiatives with those who operate more cross-functionally across PMM, and vice versa. In addition to 1:1s, these can also be in the form of quarterly roadshows between partnering teams.  * Regular readouts (1-to-many): Whether its giving visibility into the planned campaign calendar, or sharing recent research, finding a cadence and channel to regularly socialize the work being done across different teams within PMM helps cross-polinate ideas. These readouts serve as springboards to ensure consistency, optimize / expand on existing efforts, while avoiding duplication.  TL;DR: It's a two-way street. Make a conscious effort to get plugged in.  For every product launch, consider which solutions/segments to whom it's particularly applicable and invite those counterparts to share input as subject matter experts.  In a similar vein, PMMs who work more horizontally across product marketing should proactively be plugging themselves into launch & campaign calendars to capitalize on the right opportunities and marketable moments. Challenge teams to be specific about the type(s) of good fit customers so you can tailor use-cases and examples to ensure positioning is even more relevant. 

This is a common model at enterprise focused companies. . I can share a bit from my experience at Microsoft and Qualtrics  First- the industry PMM is the subject matter expert on that industry. They know the industry buyers, trends, competitive dynamics, pain points, use cases uniquely well. They are closest to the industry's customers, in-charge of those industry specific advisory boards and case studies, spend more time with industry specific sales teams (assuming there is some specialization there). The entire company needs to recognize this expertise Second- we built deep collaborative working sessions between industry PMMs and core product PMMs. Goal is for industry PMMs to understand product specific messaging/positioning/value prop/differentiators as well as an in-depth walk through of all messaging assets (pitch decks, demos, web pages etc.) by the PMMs. This would happen over a few sessions.  These two pieces above- industry expertise and a depth understanding of product messaging- allowed industry PMMs to build the industry specific version of the solution messaging. And also identified the gaps in the solution storytelling (e.g. case studies, solution demos etc.). They would then work with the right teams to fill those gaps.   We created multiple informal collaboration points between the two teams for proper knowledge transfer, mutual respect and feedback on each other's work. But most importantly - we gave the industry PMMs the full autonomy to own the assets for their audiences.

This is something we would like to get better at within our team. We aspire to be persona-led and data-driven, but don’t have processes/tools in place to perform the right testing for messaging and positioning. Today, we are able to test messaging and positioning with the sales teams(joining customer calls for customer feedback), Customer advisory board. We have identified champions across sales, presales, etc. for focus areas or use cases (by solutions/products/industries) to help us test the messaging with biweekly guild meetings. We would like to put more processes and conduct surveys to analyze impact and ROI for effective messaging.

100%. It’s a great option when you either 1) don’t have a direction and need to narrow your field of view or 2) you have very similar finalists for messaging and are hoping to choose a winner. Note that surveys rarely have crystal clear results. You’ll still need some amount of qualitative or other insights to help you make a final choice.

Yes! We can and we do - surveys, interviews, localization checks, experimentation, and instructor advisory boards. Some of these are a heavier lift than others, so it’s important to ensure you are really thoughtful to marry the content and desired outcome to the testing approach, to ensure you can glean as much actionable data as possible.

Sure do! I like to start with some qualitative research first to help get at any nuances in messaging, especially across different audience segments. Then, run a survey (max diff is a great technique) to understand what resonates most with your different segments. If you also have the budget and/or time, running your messaging by focus groups is another good option, so you can get a deeper understanding of their reactions and sentiment.

All the time! Again, I'm lucky to be a product marketing leader working on a market research product, so I have unlimited access to our own message testing solutions. We approach quatitative message testing a couple different ways: - Our live marketing assets provide a great testing ground for messaging: you can A/B test things like ad copy and email subject lines and copy. Click-through rates can be a great indicator of what resonates. (Keep the visuals the same so you know results are only related to the copy/messaging itself) - We also run copy tests on high-traffic webpages, like our homepage. We have our own home-grown experimentation platform for this, but you could also use a solution like optimizely.com - The above two methods really only work for short copy and require you to get something live in production. And depending on your traffic volume, it could take a while to reach statistical significance on your A/B tests. So we also use surveys as a faster way to test messaging. With surveys, you can get explicit intel on top challenges, most important value props, and can pit messaging statements head to head. I will almost always conduct a messaging survey when I'm building a fresh messaging framework for a new solution or target persona. An example from a couple years ago is we were starting to lean into professional services offerings, and I wanted to know which language would sound most impressive when talking about our team. I used a survey to test phrases like "market research consultants" vs "market research experts" vs "research scientists" and understand those terms across a variety of attributes like knowledgeable, trusted, and approachable.  Here's more info on our message testing solution: https://www.momentive.ai/en/solutions/message-testing/ and a guide to doing this yourself: https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/concept-testing-guide/ Qualitative ways to test and validate messaging would be to get in front of customers (interviews, injecting a question or two in existing research the team is conducting), and establishing a feedback loop with your sales & success teams that are actively using the messaging in conversations.

Yes! Glassdoor, under the leadership of Bonnie (Head of Market Insights), established two market research online communities (MROC): one for consumers (B2C) and one for customers (B2B). We regularly field message tests to these two research communities to get quick, detailed feedback on messaging. This is what Bonnie had to say about MROCs: 1. MROCs make message testing easy, efficient, and effective! Once your online community is fully recruited, you can send them a survey and usually get a sufficient number of responses back within 48 hours. Automatic reporting dashboards make it easy to share insights with the team. Fuel Cycle is our MROC provider and our partnership enables us to conduct far more research than we could before when we hired research vendors to launch our message tests for us. 2. One of the reasons we chose Fuel Cycle is because they’re partnered with Alchemer (formally Survey Gizmo). Alchemer is a fantastic survey platform, especially for team on a budget. In addition to all the usual survey question types, they have text and image heat maps which are some of my favorite tools to use while message testing. The PMM team loves to see which words and phrases engage the audience the most as well as words and phrases that are confusing or disliked. We can also cut the data to look at it by different demographics or audience segments to see how a message may affect groups differently. 3. When we run message tests, we’re not just looking to see which message is the best performing, we want to learn: 1. Which audience is engaging the most and why? 2. Are there messages that appeal especially well to specific target audiences, even if that message did perform the best overall? 3. Who are the product/feature acceptors and what do they think about the message linked to the product/feature? 4. Which messages are most likely to lead to the desired outcome? Pro Tips: * Sophia’s pro tip: Leverage the tools you have to get feedback. If you can’t field a survey, could you conduct a few in-depth interviews with customers that represent your target audience to see how they react? * Bonnie’s pro tip: Whether you’re using qualitative or quantitative methodologies, know your target audience and make sure to test the message with them. Getting feedback from outside our target audience may lead your messaging strategy astray. * Patti’s (Head of Consumer PMM) pro tip: In addition to surveys, when available, you can A/B test through the growth team in marketing and/or product. We recommend testing every part of the funnel to understand conversion and get a more nuanced understanding of what actually drives greater appeal (is it the color, design, certain parts of the copy/specific key phrases, etc.)

Where to start? Every company has different policies for promotion criteria, but ultimately it needs to take into account 2 things: merit and business need. Business need has to come first. It means that there's a larger scope of a role that needs to be done - more responsibility and complexity within an org / team - and there's now an opportunity or need for someone to fill that. If that doesn't exist, promotions shouldn't be happening arbitrarily. I recongize that especially within startups, individual contributors want to grow and should be recognized for their efforts, but when merit supercedes business need, it creates complications down the road (inexperienced middle managers, people promoted for the sake of being promoted and then drowning in the deep end, etc.). There isn't a blanket set of KPI's someone needs to hit before they're promoted, but there should be an expectation with any job description that success is defined by x, y, and z. What those things are can be a combination of both quantitative and qualitative results. 

OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have become a popular way for companies to clearly define goals and measure progress against them, at the employee, team, and company level. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OKR There's lots written about these that you can reference elsewhere, but it's a really helpful frame work that allows you to measure, quantitatively and qualitatively, how you're tracking against the "key results" that you've defined. The common expectation is that you'll hit about 70% of your OKRs - idea is that you're including stretch goals so missing 20-30% doens't mean you're performing poorly. I do try to quantify as much as possible in my OKRs but you also need to be careful to not arbitrarily quantify things to the point that it distracts from what will really add the most value to your team or company.

If you're on this forum as a PMM, you know that one of the biggest challenges for the PMM org is "What the hell do we measure!?" - an age-old conundrum that PMMs always struggle with. This is especially pronouned in an enterprise B2B environment vs. a fast-moving B2C environment where immediate usage/feedback may be available.  To me, the most primary thing I'm looking for is how effective the person is in relationship/ stakeholder management. In Product Marketing, you have many constituents across Sales, Product, and customer teams, as well as within Marketing itself. It's easy to get pulled in a lot of different directions with competing priorities - so how these stakeholders are communicated & collaborated with, along with how they're supported becomes something I really try and pay attention to when looking at how a PMM is advancing in their development. Additionally, with PMM being a strategic and highly cross-functional role - instead of a list of set metrics, I'll look to how the PMM is able to bring together and run a cross-functional project that has clear outcomes and success metrics related to that (we've moved to OKRs, and also have project-team goal-setting & feedback tools within Culture Amp that support this agile team structure).  I think what's most important is for the individual to know, depending on the team's overarching priorities (aligned up to practice and company-level), how the work that they're doing contributes and which of the projects they are running are seen as critical projects for them to demonstrate competence and success in to align with their career progression objectives. Though, one thing I've also learned in my career is to make sure that you've had this conversation / and gaining alignment with your own manager on this, before extending this clarity out. Because if the individual really leans in and delivers, but you aren't able to hold up your end (I've been on both sides of this), it can really torpedo morale and lead to the frustration of people feeling like they're on a neverending treadmill.

This varies by company and role, but I generally think about the path to promotion on the two key vectors: ownership level and degree of autonomy.  Strong performance against OKRs or KPIs is a core underpinning to that. When considering promotion I start there and then look at how the person has demonstrated rising levels of ownership and autonomy across the following: * Strategic Direction: As an associate, I'd expect you to own a feature set fully and demonstrate the ability to bring insights into the go-to-market under direction. As you rise in the organization, I'd expect you to own a product group and set goals and drive projects with more independence. As you approach the most senior levels of the organization you most commonly own an audience or problem set and are expected to develop and drive your KPIs with very little direction.  * Execution & Accountability: At earlier levels you're executing against problems you're given and working with teams to show the results. As you rise, you're expected to help the organization understand the questions to ask and align stakeholders around how to understand the impact of that work. * Communication & Collaboration: For someone just starting you need to demonstrate clear communication with your assigned team and to escalate when issues arise. As you grow in the organization, you become responsible for identifying the team you need and the escalation needs to become more strategic and answer-first. * Leadership & Influence: If you're an associate I'd expect that you're a master of your assigned area. For a director and above, you're sought as an expert on broad audience problems and most frequently work with the most senior levels of leadership.

The best way for a product marketer to get promoted is by demonstrating the impact of their work. To do this, I incentivize all my PMMs to befriend data and tie their deliverables to key business and customer metrics.  To me, the two most important categories of metrics are: 1) Customer insights a. Number of actionable insights that helped drive product development b. Number of actionable insights that informed a business strategy/service 2) Customer engagement a. Product adoption: This is the % of customers that adopted a new service or product launched by PMM. b. Customer lifetime value (LTV): The total dollar amount you're likely to receive from the customers that adopted the new service or product, over the average life of the product or services. c. Active and engaged customers: Number of customers that actively engage with the product, could be measured daily, weekly or monthly.

I'm not a fan of connecting metrics to promotions for a role like product marketing becuase there are so many other dependencies that can't be controlled. Rather I like to establish some expectations of responsibility for each seniority level. Seniority levels can usually be attached to the level of responsiblity you can assign someone. Can they run a launch end to end? Can they take a new offer to market? You can use success of some of those outputs to make a determination of how and when to promote.

PMMs often are measured by output, since most of what we provide are tied to other metrics. I would focus on delivering tangible assets on a regular cadence (case studies, one-pagers, pitch decks, etc) and in parallel - measuring utilization metrics like: product activation, MAUs, reactivations, attach rate, conversion velocity etc. These two streams (tangible output + metrics) cover your bases, establish influence and prove growth (worthy of promotion).

From a messaging perspective, you need to consider what's the "1+1=3" story. Part of this entails understanding when in the funnel to message on platform/solution-level benefits vs. more product-specific benefits, i.e. developing campaign messaging hierarchy so there's a red thread narrative that ties it all together. This also needs to be reflected in a holistic approach to pricing & packaging, otherwise you risk the perception of nickel & diming your customers with add-ons. Consider campaign messaging frequency -- Look to optimize the customer experience by streamlining communication, instead of bombarding their inbox with disparate notifications. Another consideration is how your audience needs may vary -- e.g. How do your smaller customers value/perceive "platform" differently than your larger customers? Smaller customers may feel 'oversold' or that the entire platform is far more than what they actually need on a day-to-day basis. Org structure is also an important element of transitioning into a platform company. The challenge of "shipping one's org chart" often stems from teams operating too much within their respective business unit/product silos. It takes conscious effort to exercise & scale new x-functional collaboration muscles and so frequent alignment on priorities is key.

Category creation is a unique messaging and positioning initiative when your startup is providing a differentiated value that doesn’t exist in the industry today. When I think about new markets like the subscription economy or SaaS platforms, these categories didn’t exist a few decades ago.  Every startup should look at existing categories and NOT try to fit into a category if that isn’t the value for customers. Often times, customer advisory boards help guide and share perspectives on the ecosystem and act as a sounding board for value creation for a new category.

In my experience, category creation requires two things at the start: * Point of View - which articulates your perspective on the problem(s) your target market is looking to solve [why is the problem worth solving, what are the key steps in solving the problem, what kind of tech solutions will help you to solve the problem].  * Positioning - which articulates your unique value proposition for your target market The messages and stories that flow from this become the basis for your campaigns. Generally, you’ll create thought leadership content designed to educate the market on recognizing the problem, why they need to solve it and how. While digital channels are most scalable (webinars, ebooks, website) you’ll also want to make sure you’ve got the right assets for your sales and customer teams as they’re on the front line delivering the message to prospects and customers on a daily basis.

Winning your category and taking control of it can be a super powerful strategy. However, I think too many go straight to creating a new category. We should first strongly consider how we can redesign a category that exists and win by renewing how people think about the category. Category creation isn’t for everyone. It is really hard to do. While it can be powerful, it can also be really difficult to pull off, take a long time, get expensive, and become a major distraction for your team if it’s not the right approach. I have seen a lot more success with redefining a category that has old-school incumbents and the way of doing things. Such a strategy needs a lot of channels to come together. PR, analyst relations, social influencers, and a content marketing strategy combined with strong messaging can create momentum for change in the consumer’s mind. Of course, a strong and differentiated product offering is a key ingredient as well. Another important consideration is to create sub-categories within known categories. Recently at TrustRadius, our team disrupted the category of buyer intent data by creating and pushing a sub-category called “downstream intent”. We realized that the biggest competition wasn’t direct competitors, but customer confusion among different types of intent data providers. Downstream intent is now starting to be a familiar term associated with b2b review sites offering intent data that is more down-funnel. This strategy has been in motion for a year and a half. Category design takes time.

If you're building demand for a new category, it's ideal that there's runway for a platform and not just a handful of features. Can you start in one area that you're uniquely positioned to own and then grow to serve different sizes of customers (SMB to mid-market to enterprise) or different stages (expand from checkout to post-purchase or discovery)?  It's important to prioritize where to focus initially and where to expand. Internal prioritization is great, and don't forget to talk to customers and prospects so you can understand where the demand is and where needs are unmet.

I came from a background in brand and so my natural instincts served me most well on the outbound side of product marketing. I had my fair share of imposter syndrom in the early days when I looked at my peers and realized that I'd never done the traditional inbound work of a PMM. I spent more time than I should have in those early days being afraid to ask for fear of not being able to meet the bar. It took building a relationship with a peer whose work I admired to admit that I was really learning on the fly and to my surprise, they were too!  We all have strengths and areas where we are still growing. Don't be afraid to admit what you don't know and never be ashamed of the things that you're great at. Rely on your peers and they'll also rely on you. Once I opened up, I felt more confident, I learned more, and I was able to give back to others.

I spent a lot of time in my early career worrying about getting to the next promotion and how I was progressing versus my peers. Looking back now, this was all wasted energy. I wish I had been more focused on learning and picking up as many skills and experiences as possible. I also wish I had been less worried about making mistakes. I think I would have been able to take more risks and push myself to try new things that would have ultimately helped me to build more skills. I also wish I knew how to prioritize better early in my career. I worked a lot of late nights and weekends in my early career because I was afraid to say no. Now, I am much more comfortable saying No. I try to communicate my (and my team’s) priorities early and often. I also try not to take on new priorities unless something is removed from my plate. It's not a perfect system, but I have much better work/life balance now that I did early in my career.

One thing I wish I learned earlier is the most powerful product marketing you can do is always centered on a shared human truth. When I look back on my very early PMM GTM work, I focused primarily on communicating about the product and the benefit derived from the features themselves. But the product features, however innovative, were only half the story. Connecting the Product to the Customer Need is where the true magic lies. Find the truth we all share (an experience, an emotion) and connect that to the new experience the product provides -- that’s where your message takes on real meaning and can more effectively get your customers to take action.

There is one key learning: Actively plan & manage your development. Here is what is involved: * Know the menu: Since Product Marketing is such a broad discipline, its important to understand the various functional competenices that comprise it. This way, you can assess where you have strengths and where you want to develop. These competenices span target segmentation definition, messaging & positioning, content development, sales enablement, pricing/packaging, PR/AR and more, they are quite different and require different skills. * The market will evolve: There are also constant market changes effecting PMM like sales lead GTM models moving to PLG models, B2B moving to B2B2C and more. These also add to the range of competencies required for a given PMM role. You might be strong in B2B SaaS content when there is a sales team but what about when most revenue is from self service? PMM needs to evolve to the market and the market should be reflected in your plan. * Becoming great takes time: With any of these functional areas, it actually requires experience to develop proficiency over time if you want to be able to do it well and lead others in the future. For example, core positioning development is actually quite difficult to do well, you need to have done it more than once. By understanding what PMM is all about, where you currently fit & where you want to go next you'll be able to take control over your career journey and make more thoughtful choices. Sometimes, a seemingly awesome role at a glamorous company might actually take you backwards, unless you know where it fits within your plan. Remember: If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there - Lewis Carroll   PS: Alternatively, you could not build a plan at all. Instead, just focus on doing great work and trust that good things will happen in the future. This might just work out great. Or, it might not. My learning: Build a plan and take control of your PMM journey, don't leave it to some other mystical force.....if its really a mystical force, it will still be there despite your planning. 

When you're starting out your career as a PMM, it is very important to remember that your value promise is to customers and not internal stakeholders. I don't mean to say that internal alignment and buy-in isn't important but it should never take priority over serving your customers. In my early days, I spend 80% of my time trying to understand what were the needs of my internal stakeholders and ensuring I was supporting them fully, leaving little focus on the customer. The moment I started prioritizing customer needs over internal stakeholder needs, when I started to champion customers internally, my work started to gain much more purpose. And while this approach initially created some internal friction, overtime I gained a reputation for being the voice of customers and someone people would rely on to validate product and service roadmaps.  Another thing I wish I knew early on was the importance of celebrating little wins. Driven by our ambition and desire to succeed, we often tend to give too much “air time” to our concerns, angst or even anxiety, forcing us to work extra-hard to ease some of those fears. As a consequence, we are left with little time to enjoy the ride, celebrate the little wins and be grateful for the journey. My advice to product marketers is: Enjoy the ride and find time to celebrate each moment along the journey. Out time on earth is limited and we spend most of our time working, so make a habit of finding ways to celebrate little wins, develop a purpose and enjoy the ride. 

* Don't box yourself, ever!  * Don't always stick to how things are always done.  * And ask questions more.  * And observe and take notes.  * And don't pretend to know it all!  Here's the thing: When you are early in your career, you are often embarrassed to ask questions or ask "why?" But asking those questions more would help you understand things wayyyyy better. Some of my best learnings have come from asking questions to understand things better. Think about it — if you can't understand a feature as a marketer, chances are that your customers won't. That's your biggest advantage; use it!

As someone with a tech background and self-education in marketing, I learn everything in practice. I wish I knew more about the importance of user research and CI at the beginning of my PMM journey: - User research: back in 2015, we released our first startup product which dramatically failed. We spent one year of development without proper user research, without defining the customer journey, or even having personas. That taught me the importance of knowing your users and their needs :) - Constant competitive analysis: somewhere in 2018 a competitor copied our startup features and added them as their offering (which became pretty successful for them). Doing competitive analysis could mitigate the risk of this happening. This situation taught me the importance of competitive intelligence, competitive differentiation, and the power of product stickiness. P.S.: based on the content from my recent interview for Product Marketing Alliance.