Alissa Lydon

This is an age-old question, and difficult to answer because PMM looks different from one company to the next. The most broadly applicable advice is to get product marketing as close as possible to the north star business metrics. Things on the go-to-market side like revenue, retention, and pipeline, as well as activation and expansion on the product side. Which metrics are closest to the C-suite? Those are the ones that PMM should be laser-focused on. It can be hard to perceive how PMM impacts ...Read More

At its most basic, messaging is about answering 3 key prompts: What is the problem facing the market today? What solution (generally) will help solve this problem? What does your product do to help solve it? To me, competitive falls squarely underneath that third bullet point. It's one thing to list the entire list of features for your product, but the real exercise in messaging is to find the differentiating features (i.e. what makes your product different from "the other guys"). Therefore, it' ...Read More

I've read a couple of great books on building messaging. The two I enjoyed the most were: The Aha Moment by Andy Cunningham. She has worked with some of the most iconic brands in tech (including Apple during Steve Jobs' heyday). She provides a great framework for understanding what she calls "your positioning DNA." And she not only presents her concepts in a very straightforward way, but she also supplements them with lots of great stories from her experiences. Storynomics by Robert McKee and Th ...Read More

For new products and major features, I find it invaluable to go through a complete messaging exercise. This is an iterative process that involves collaboration with Product, Marketing, and Sales. I've developed a template for this over the years that combines the things I liked most from the past messaging exercises. While this list is not exhaustive, these are the things I have found are most valuable to building messaging that resonates not only externally, but also internally with the teams t ...Read More

The best interviewing advice I ever received was when I was in Sales: always close your interviewer. Your final question should pivot away from asking about the company or opportunity, and instead start shifting to the next steps. Something like, "Based on our conversation today, is there any additional information I can provide about my experience that would move me on to the next step?" This gives the interviewer a chance to provide feedback on what they like about your experience, or even giv ...Read More

When I am looking for messaging and positioning validation from outside the org, I find that people engage more with a story than with a static framework. And as far as stories go, everyone much prefers pictures to reading dense Powerpoint slides! To that end, putting together a solid "marketecture" is a great place to start. This allows you to paint the picture of not just your product, features and functions, but you can also start assigning value and differentiated messaging to each of them. ...Read More

Let the data tell the story of your ICP! Use your existing customer base as a starting point. Take your best customers and look at them in aggregate - what patterns emerge across industries, company size, tooling adoption, maturity indicators, etc.? From there, you have a great base to help inform outbound targeting efforts. If you're starting from scratch, then lean on internal expertise across the org (Sales, Product, Exec) and market data to build your hypothetical ICP. From there, you can va ...Read More

For organizing and keeping track of launch activities, I created templates that I have carried with me from company to company. They contain all of the best elements from past launches (both my own and other PMMs I have learned from). And frankly, there is nothing fancy about them - they are mostly just spreadsheets! It's not to say that there aren't tools that can help streamline processes - I've seen launches effectively organized in Trello and Asana, for example. But what I like about my coll ...Read More

Messaging is made up of two equally important components - Brand and Product. Brand messaging encompasses the product, vision, market, customers, culture, and more. It can be much more aspirational and future-facing. This is normally owned by corporate marketing, or maybe you have a specific brand team that cultivates this message. Product messaging (as you can probably guess) is solely focused on the product. More specifically, it speaks to the problems your product is solving, who you are solv ...Read More