A product launch I worked on in 2022 didn't go as expected due to rapidly changing market conditions. We initially developed aspirational messaging, but realized it wouldn't resonate in this new environment where "doing more with less" was very top of mind for our target audience. We quickly needed to pivot our messaging across channels without delaying the launch. This experience taught me two lessons that still influence my product launches today: 1. Stay acutely aware of market dynamics: * Continuously monitor market trends * Keep a pulse on competitive activities * Regularly reassess your target customers' mindsets 2. Maintain flexibility and agility: * Be prepared to pivot if necessary * Have contingency plans in place * Prioritize launch timing over perfection For me, this experience reinforced the importance of balancing long-term planning with short-term responsiveness. It's crucial to have a solid launch strategy, but equally important to remain nimble and ready to adjust when the market shifts unexpectedly.

Great question, here are 3 potholes to AVOID when building 1. Not becoming the undisputed expert on your product, market, and audience: * Great PMM teams form strong opinions through rigorous research across market, product, and competition * Focus on three areas: market/persona understanding, competitive intelligence, and deep product knowledge * My favorite research methods: win/loss analysis, paid expert interviews, Gong calls, customer interviews, using competitor’s products, and podcasts 2. Not embedding with Product Management early enough * PMM should join product management discussions early in the product development lifecycle. This ensures PMM can: * Effectively scope and plan launches with full context * Develop and review differentiated positioning before go-to-market * Have time to conduct market and competitor research and course-correct if differentiation isn't strong enough * And in many cases, influence the product direction based on market insights 3. Not getting radical alignment on your messaging house * In the early days of building PMM, it's easy for PMM to think the foundational messaging is complete and understood by the company. More often than not, this is not the case. * It takes more discussions, collateral, and enablement sessions than you'd think making sure everyone, from exec leadership to ICs are fully enabled and aligned on your brand and product messaging. * It's easy to move quickly and skip this step, but it is crucial you spend enough time evangelizing the messaging before calling it done. * Certification programs go a long way to ensuring this is done well.

Probably an obvious answer but for me it's always started with the talent..people people people. Poor hires have always plauged folks and its very hard to translate that into high performing teams. Spend the time defining exactly what you need and the right fit of PMM that will be able to deliver on your expectations. Sometimes you're forced to make compromises (levels, salary, backgrounds, locations etc) but try to maintain a core set of skills and capabilities that will be the foundation of then growing these team members into strong PMM's. I'm a big believer in 'culture fit' as well and to not be swayed purely by experience or an impressive resume/LinkedIn profile. Through screens/interviews spend time on whether this person would add to the culture of the team! Once you have the right people as your foundation it's much easier to distribute responsibilities based on the key objectives of the business!

When deciding between which offerings to surface in messaging, I consider these factors: * Target audience: What do they care about and why? * Differentiators: What does our solution uniquely offer? * Customer sentiment: What are users most excited about? The answers to these questions help me hone in on the value I’d highlight to pique the curiosity of potential customers!

There are so many ways to conduct research on a limited budget—and even for free! * Gen AI. You no longer need to hire expensive agencies or consultants to write well-structured surveys. Use AI tools as a starting point and refine it. (See for yourself what happens when you ask ChatGPT “can you write a 10 question concept testing survey that will help me validate 3 new product name options?”) * Templates. Same point as above - here’s an excellent set of templates (scroll to bottom). * Online communities. Ask questions or post surveys in specific online communities, like LinkedIn groups, Reddit, or Quora. * One caveat about courtesy (and general good karma): make sure to give back to the communities. Don’t just pop in to ask people to take your survey or schedule an interview with you and then disappear; provide your help, time, and expert opinions to others in the community who ask for it. * Affordable (quality) panels. * It will cost some money to field a survey to a panel of respondents. Harder-to-find respondents cost more than others easier to find ones. To lower your cost, you can evaluate opening up your criteria to a broader set of targeting attributes and then use screening questions to filter out unqualified survey-takers. This can sometimes cost less than pricing respondents with highly specific criteria. * Also, the cost per respondents usually differs across panels and you can hunt for the most reasonable prices. Just remember to weigh this with the reputation of the panel—or run your survey to a small set of respondents to assess quality for yourself. You can do this by seeing if open-ended questions are being answered by real people—not bots or trolls, and by analyzing the close-ended questions to make sure there isn’t satisficing, straight-lining, or no insights at all (bot randomization). * Free tools. Pretty much every survey platform has a free option (SurveyMonkey, Google Forms, etc.). The functionality is more limited than a paid plan, but you can be smart and creative about what you ask. Paid plans are usually < $500/year. * Owned channels. Conduct A/B tests on channels that you own, such as: * Website: Run A/B tests on landing pages or your company’s website. (Just make sure you have enough traffic or can run it for long enough to get statistical significance on the test. Directional changes are not significant and thus due to chance.) * SEM: Test variations of messaging, positioning, concepts, or offers in your ads. You can measure CTR to know what’s most interest-piquing, which will get you very quick results (roughly 2 weeks, depending on your budget). You can measure CPL or another top-of-funnel conversion rate metric (may take a little longer), and you can measure down funnel quality (will take longer, depending on your sales cycle) to understand quality in the middle and bottom of the funnel (AOV, LTV, etc.). Email: Test marketing emails to prospects measuring similar metrics outlined above in SEM, or test cold sales outreach emails to prospects measuring engagement (what prompts recipients to engage, reply, convert?). You can test subject lines, content, CTAs, length, or anything else. In-product: If your company has a logged-in web or app experience, you can test in there. Social: You can test sets of paid social ads, or you can post on your own social media channels for free. Measure which variations get the most engagement and conversion. (Note: the audiences are often quite different for paid and organic social—often your followers are existing customers, and the people you show paid ads to are prospects.) * Sales, Account Management, and Support calls: Identify a select few counterparts on these teams and provide them with different call scripts, slides, and talk tracks to handle objections, promote new products/offers, or test new positioning. Listen to the call recordings (we use Gong) or ask them to note how the conversations differ and what resonates most on their calls. If you have enough volume, you can measure things like deal close rate and sales cycle length. * Existing data. You may already have existing data at your disposal, in which case you do not necessarily need to gather more information. You can leverage these existing insights, or analyze the data sets again from new angles. * Existing customers. Research can be with people you know, and they’re often more willing to share their opinions for free (or lower compensation) than people that you or your company don’t already have a relationship with. This could mean recontacting people you’ve interviewed before, conducting fresh interviews with a different sample set, listening to call recordings (we use Gong), or sending them a survey.

There’s a natural tension between generalized and segmented messaging, and striking the right balance is crucial. In general, I think of it like this: * Generalized messaging is useful when you’re addressing a broad, multi-segment audience, like in a keynote or a flagship launch. It focuses on the overarching value and broad benefits that resonate across different personas. * Segmented messaging dives deeper into specific user needs and pain points. It’s best when you’re targeting a niche or running campaigns that require precise relevance. For example, at Dropbox, when launching enhancements to collaboration features, our top-line message might focus on improved teamwork and productivity. But we’ll segment follow-up messaging to address the needs of IT admins (security and control) versus end users (ease of use and speed). Great messaging is layered, not binary. Your headline might be broad, but supporting content should reflect the nuance of each segment. A common mistake is trying to do both in the same piece of content—keep them distinct and deliberate.

Short answer: however works! Longer answer: Work with your Sales Enablement team (if you have one) and Sales leadership to come up with a plan. There are a few nuances that I think make roll outs more effective: 1. Interactive group exercises: Positioning isn't meant to be read off a screen, it needs to come alive in context. Make sure any trainings you run include lots of group exercises, role play, situational awareness, etc. 2. DIY (really): build credibility with sales counterparts (and conviction in your positioning!) by delivering the positioning yourself on customer or prospect calls. 3. Celebrate others: Shine the spotlight on reps who are successful. Have them evangelize the positioning and materials on your behalf - it will go much, much farther.

Lots to unpack here! My main takeaway--start with AI, then stretch your content as far as you can! To start, I love a good template. Once you have a good template in place, you can build out "sub-sections" to build from your key content piece. For example, you are writing a messaging doc for a seasonal product launch, but you also want to translate that into: a blog post, a social post, an email template for sales, new web copy, etc. This "source of truth" doc can also be shared with other teams like if you have a content team or sales enablement team to help them in building supporting content. AI can help you get started on these if you copy and paste the content and ask it to parse into the various other content you want. Feel free to message me for the templates I use! Second, repurposing content is key! Here are some ways I like to get the most out of the content I work hard to create: * Internal to External Reuse: Repurpose internal training materials for external audiences. For instance, a product overview presentation for sales enablement can be adapted into a blog post for external consumption. CS can help you choose some good ones/most commonly used ones to get started. These also tend to be more educational, which is great for content engagement! * Content Cannibalization: Break down long-form content like white papers into bite-sized pieces like blog posts, social media snippets, or infographics. I really like doing "Content Overview" carousels on LinkedIn like this. Finally, I love a good CMS, especially when you properly enable sales/CS to use it. Here's are some thoughts on tools for streamlining and collaboration: * Content Management System (CMS): Utilize a CMS to centralize your content assets, templates, and brand guidelines. A good CMS will also have integrated analytics (how many people viewed the content, how much time did they spend on that content, etc.). I personally really like Seismic. This gives you additional data points on what content sales is using the most, what content prospects and customers are engaging with the most, and help inform what type of content to prioritize next. * Project Management Tools: Implement project management tools to streamline workflows, track content creation progress, and ensure timely delivery. My favorites are Asana and Monday. * Marketing Automation Platforms: for scheduling content distribution, personalized messaging, and measuring engagement metrics, allowing you to optimize content performance and scalability. Historically, I've used Hubspot with GaggleAmp, but recently heard about Letterdrop for blog publishing, SEO suggestions, AI writing, and social scheduling features all-in-one.

Yes! It's really helped me speed up my work. I have a template that's attached to this AMA that gives examples of how to do exactly this. The rule of "garbage in, garbage out" totally applies to generative AI tools, models, and LLMs. With RAG, you can enrich your GPTs with relevant data for your customers, products, industry, and competitors to tune a model to become more relevant. Example source content: * Persona cards * Messaging frameworks * Sample content (blog posts, customer interviews) * Industry reports * Analyst reports * Brand tone guidelines * Press releases You can add as much data as you need to make your GPTs as informed as possible. Just make sure it's the right content.

This is one of the most important (and most common) questions so thanks for asking it! At the simplest - positioning is an articulation of what your company or product offers a target audience that differentiates it in the market it plays and is internal language while messaging brings this positioning to life in a compelling way that will (hopefully) make your target take a specific action. So they're both important. Here's a bit more detail on how positioning and messaging differ/build on one another: Positioning * Addresses what your company/product can do for someone relative to a context that differentiates you from other choices * Is internally facing so the language isn't customer facing * Should involve a broad cross functional group to form it as it impacts everything a company does. * Usually doesn't change for 12-18 months, depends on how active the category/market in which a company plays * Typically you don't really test this but you use insights to inform it and push your team that the positioning isn't differentiated by seeing if any other company could claim what you have written Messaging * Describes the positioning in a way that resonates with the audience you're trying to reach * Is therefore externally facing. * Created by marketing * Can be iterated frequently * Can and should be tested - I usually find doing this in context of a landing page is easiest - by talking to current users, utilizing a customer advisory board or user research tools like User Testing and Maze Both positioning and messaging should be grounded in deep customer insights but while you can (and in my opinion should test messaging with users) this isn't true for positioning.