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, target
Technical Product Marketing
What should I do differently? Developers do not want to be sold to.
13 answers
Product Marketing at Hedera Hashgraph • July 22
Vice President Product Marketing at Unity | Formerly Splunk, New Relic, Microsoft, Oracle • March 13
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 conc
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Twilio • October 28
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 dev
Product Marketing at Okta • February 18
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 thou
Head of Core Product Marketing & GTM, ITSM Solutions at Atlassian • February 19
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
Head of Marketing at Orb | Formerly Cloudflare, Google Cloud, Google Developers, Observable • April 15
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
Director, Product Marketing at Salesforce • April 20
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 thrivin
VP of Marketing at Mux • April 21
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
Head of Product Marketing at Cortex • September 14
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 alway
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 tea
Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle • December 7
For companies targeting developers, it's a good habit to build up a culture of
developer empathy. Practical exmaples include: Provide them 101 sessions, enough
for them to be dangerous and speak the
What companies have product marketing that you really admire, either overall or particular elements?
11 answers
VP of Marketing at Spekit • July 19
Salesforce is my #1 in B2B. just overall content is amazing. very customer
oriented
Head of Lightroom Product Marketing at Adobe • July 22
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-doneI also
think stripe has a great website for their
Director of Product Management, Speech and Video AI at Cisco • April 12
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 executi
Director of Marketing, Strategic Partnerships at SearchLight • January 15
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, t
Vice President Product Marketing at Unity | Formerly Splunk, New Relic, Microsoft, Oracle • February 9
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. A
Product Marketing at Okta • February 18
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 presen
Chief Marketing Officer at Blend • July 8
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
Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle • December 7
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.
3 answers
Product Marketing at Okta • February 18
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 wi
Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle • December 7
If technical buyers are critical to the sale, then you have to address their
needs. Host accurate technical content. If you're choosing to reserve your
primary real estate for your homepage / above-t
4 answers
Product Marketing Director at Eightfold • May 23
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 custome
Product Marketing at Okta • February 18
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
Vice President Product Marketing at Unity | Formerly Splunk, New Relic, Microsoft, Oracle • November 23
As a product marketer, you should strive to have the same degree of functional
understanding and empathy as a product manager and the same ability to
contextualy step through/use the product as any te
Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle • December 7
Great PMM teams have balance, across the dimensions of positioning & messaging,
communication, industry depth, and technical expertise. It's rare to find the
"unicorn" PMM that is outstanding accr
2 answers
Vice President Product Marketing at Unity | Formerly Splunk, New Relic, Microsoft, Oracle • November 20
I've been fortunate enough to work with some amazing Technical Product
Marketers, and I've found two extremely strong backgrounds are technical pre &
post sales (SE, services, etc) and practioner,
Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle • December 7
Technical Product Marketers have a variety of career paths. Should they choose
to stay in the PMM org, some more organizations offer management roles for
Technical Product Marketing teams, which at so
5 answers
Vice President Product Marketing at Unity | Formerly Splunk, New Relic, Microsoft, Oracle • March 13
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
Director, The Jay Hurt Hub for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Davidson College • April 29
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 wh
Product Marketing at Okta • February 18
[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
VP, Product Marketing at Podium • February 2
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 th
Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle • December 7
The answer is you need both, but targeted to the right audience: business value
for the economic buyer and technical value for the user / implementer. In some
cases, the buyer AND the user are technic
2 answers
Product Marketing at Okta • February 18
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 ma
Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle • December 7
This should be aligned with the key responsibilities of the role (see previous
answer), but here are some sample KPIs: Improvement in head-to-head win rate
against a key competitor: typically for opp
2 answers
Product Marketing at Okta • February 18
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 ro
Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle • December 7
Techncial Product Marketers have a higher degree of industry knowledge and
technical expertise. In a team, they are specialized in the areas of:
Competitive intelligence: owning the maintenance of ba
What are some considerations when setting up a Product Marketing discipline to keep the focus on the product value for developers, without sacrificing expectations from the commercial teams?
2 answers
Product Marketing at Okta • February 18
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
Vice President of Product Marketing at mParticle • December 7
The most important thing here is to ensure there is consistency and alignment
across the entire company on the GTM motion, and the metrics that matter. While
a large number of dev-centric companies de
Looking for slides or document that spells out what particular personas like or don't like as well where they congregate (what media they read, what groups they follow, etc)
2 answers
Product Marketing at Okta • February 18
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
Head of Marketing at Orb | Formerly Cloudflare, Google Cloud, Google Developers, Observable • April 15
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 ke