Aneri Shah

Think creatively about marketing-adjacent work you've done, and put together a series of case studies that you can share with the hiring team. Examples can include: * Identifying customer insights and defining a scalable solution or creating a piece of collateral, e.g. identified a trend in X vertical, and built a vertical playbook to help customers in that vertical grow * Website work that shows how you structure problems and present information * Presentations you've created that could be customer facing * Work you've done to help a nonprofit or organization grow * Examples of design work * A product or flow you've created or helped design * User research you helped drive, and the recommendations you put together In all cases, be sure to present the context behind the work in a way that helps position you as a marketer, with the following framework: * Challenge: What was the problem you were trying to solve? Why was it important? What were the challenges or constraints you had to work within and why? * Solution: What work did you do? Why did you pick this solution? How did you do this work - who did you work with, what tools did you use, whose feedback did you consider? * Results: How did this help solve the problem at hand? Can you qualitatively and quantitatively demonstrate success? 

Yes, great question! As a PMM, I've always worked closely with a separate integrated/brand marketing function. The PMM sits closer to product/eng, is more initimately familiar with the product, owns inbound product marketing (including user insights, strategy, competitive benchmarking, roadmap prioritization etc.). When it comes to outbound marketing, PMM sets GTM strategy and works with a variety of GTM stakeholders, including comms and integrated marketing, to bring a launch or campaign to life. The integrated marketing team usually works with a group of PMMs covering an entire product area, which has the benefit of upleveling how the brand shows up to consumers and ensuring you're telling the right brand narrative, versus a product specific narrative. They also have more specialized skillsets, such as working closely with creative teams (or being creatives themselves), are accountable to brand/campaign goals rather than product goals (e.g. driving Q4 sales vs. driving adoption of X feature) and are great thought partners for how a product will show up to consumers. 

I also love Drift and Intercom's blogs and handbooks! First Round Review also has some great case studies. For courses, I like Pragmatic Marketing [great PMM frameworks] and Reforge [growth-focused, but really valuable for PMM too]. I find a lot of PM-focused resources to be helpful too since there's often a lot of overlap between the roles - I've subscribed to the Product Manager HQ newsletter for years and often find valuable resources that way. 

Here's a simple 6-step process you can follow: 1. Write the brief: Write the brief for what you want your name to accomplish. This should include a description of what the product is, all your positioning work (audience, problem to be solved, key differentiators, proof points etc.), and the goal your product is trying to achieve. This should be widely socialized with everyone involved in the naming process. 2. Define naming categories: The next step is to structure your creativity. There are many different types of names, and you want to come up with options in a range of different categories. These may vary based on the business and your brand guidelines, but some categories include abstract (e.g. Asana), functional (e.g. Marketing Cloud), descriptive (e.g. Photoshop Express), evocative (e.g. OneNote), branded (e.g. GSuite). Having a range of categories will allow you to generate many different outputs and provide guardrails. 3. Have a 'namestorm': This is the fun part! Work with a group to come up with a long list of names in every category until your creativity runs dry. 4. Vet the names: Go through the names and see where common themes are arising. Come up with a shortlist. 5. Go through necessary checks: Go through various checks: trademark, legal, cultural sensitivity etc. Think about SEO and domain names if necessary. Present the final contenders to key internal stakeholders. 6. Finalize & flesh out: Decide on your final name and the full package that goes with it, e.g. logo, tagline, brand guidelines.

Having worked across both, the key differences in my mind fall into 2 key categories: 1) ability to get customer insights, 2) role in the GTM motion. 1. Customer insights - In B2B, it's relatively easy to get on a customer call and get deep insights from some engaged customers. There are also certain customers (e.g. enterprise clients) whose feedback it's easy to skew towards as they contribute disproportionately high revenue. In B2C, you need to get feedback at scale, which is better done through user research, and you need to ensure the users you survey/interview are more representative of your whole customer base. In B2B, I've found that PMM's role in gathering and surfacing customer insights is stronger, whereas in B2C, you're more likely to rely on your Marketing Insights/User Research partners. 2. Role in GTM - The key difference here is having a Sales or Partnerships team in B2B, versus usually using more scaled marketing tactics in B2C. This means a PMM's role will shift closer to one or the other - e.g. in B2B, you spend more time on enablement and ensuring that these teams can take your messaging and communicate it, whereas in B2C, you work more closely with in-product and scaled messaging channels to share your messaging. The messaging itself varies significantly too - consumer messaging is focused on being concise, clearly articulating benefits, and, often, driving immediate action, whereas business-focused messaging must consider all client scenarios, whether a product is solving their exact needs, edge cases and specific requests. Tactically - my messaging docs in B2B end up being 4-5x longer than those when I was in B2C!

When your product or solution isn't sufficiently differentiated, focus on the other key aspect of your positioning: the audience. Who is your product disproportionately better for? While many products in a given category may be highly similar, is there a user persona for whom your product is better, e.g. a specific vertical, geography, company size, or role? Don't be afraid to take a strong POV and use your messaging to lean in to a specific persona until you have deep penetration within that segment. An example I love here is Klaviyo, which sits in the crowded marketing automation platform market, really positioning itself for retail and e-commerce brands, and that positioning reflecting as a through line from their website messaging to their case studies to their content marketing.

1. Speak like you would speak to a human: We often write messaging that speaks to corporations rather than individuals. Think about how you'd explain what you do to a client on a sales call. Now think about how you'd explain it to your mom, a friend, a child, or a stranger at a party. What do all of those descriptions have in common? What are some of the most salient concepts for you to communicate? Focus on those. Pro tip: Use AI to help you riff on your messaging if it's feeling a little stale. Ask ChatGPT to 'summarize this for a 10 year old', 'phrase this more colloquially' or 'rewrite this without corporate buzzwords'. 2. Show it's the best in a specific way: Often, the goal of using these cliches is to show something is "the best". Ask yourself to be more precise. In what way is it the best? Is it the cheapest, the fastest, the easiest to use, the most scalable, the most well-known etc.? Lean in to your specific advantages.

Do it for fun! Try it on products you use but don't work on, ads you see on TV etc. It makes it much lower stakes to get into the mindset of using a messaging framework, and you'll find it's a muscle you can build over time. It's also much easier when you try it on a product you use - you can ask yourself the questions you'd be asking in messaging research: who do you think it's for, why do you use it over others, what problems is it solving in your life? Think about this the next time you watch something on your streaming app of choice, order from your favorite delivery app, or buy something online. Why this product, and how should they tell their story?

Here's a template for the framework I use! Feel free to make a copy and try it yourself.

I find that you have to: 1. Understand the audience, their problem, and how they currently solve it 2. Use that to define your product's key benefits and proof points 3. Once you have both the problem and solution well-defined, build your messaging. This is a high-level exercise that tells the story you want to tell about your product. Here's my messaging framework template if you want to see how this comes to life.