Communities

Anna Wiggins

Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing , Bluevine

Content

What are good messaging framework resources that you use?

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • March 23

There are a lot of messaging frameworks out there. If you are on the hunt for templates, check out April Dunford's website (Obviously Awesome is a must-read of Product Marketers) or the Product Marketing Alliance. In general, a messaging doc should be the single source of truth and act as the bu......Read More

2657 Views

If product marketing is a relatively new function at your company (relative to product), what advice do you have on becoming a strategic partner and more involved earlier in the product roadmap development process?

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • August 11

I’m glad you are asking this question because this is exactly the right mindset you should have in a young Product Marketing org to avoid becoming solely a GTM service function. The path to this is through a mixture of education and showing value to the Product team. Something you should find ou......Read More

1100 Views

How do you more effectively influence product roadmap priorities and timeline?

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • August 11

It’s really important to understand your product’s team development process. How is the Product team structured and why? What and when are their sprint cycles. How do new tasks get on the backlog and how is the backlog prioritized. If possible, attend backlog prioritization meetings so you can un......Read More

1090 Views

How far into the future do you believe Product Marketers need visibility into the product roadmap to be effective and why?

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • August 11

This will depend on the type of business you are in. Hardware? Enterprise? These have longer development and sales cycles so the teams have to plan much further ahead vs. a self service model where products tend to ship faster. Also the maturity of the company will make a difference because Produ......Read More

1051 Views

What's a good strategy to always be talking to customers? It seems so hard to get account teams attention, then get a customers interest, then actually get a call scheduled to for persona, messaging, content, or user research.

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • August 11

Based on this question, I’m going to assume that your company doesn’t have a research function and that the account team holds the key to contacting customers. My first piece of advice would be to work on establishing a research function within the Product Marketing team so that you have constan......Read More

1007 Views

What is the difference between messaging and positioning?

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • March 23

Positioning is an internal exercise during which you define the unique value proposition for your product, how the product is differentiated from the competition, and where it sits relative to the competition/alternatives in consumer’s minds. Positioning is a building block for messaging. Messag......Read More

1001 Views

As head of PMM at a startup, how did your PMM team grow over time, e.g. what positions did you hire, when, why? How did divide scope of responsibilities? What were the most strategic hires you made, including non-PMM titles if any?

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • August 11

Since ManyChat is a younger company, we don’t yet have a lot of product lines that merit the traditional squad PM <> PMM structure. Today the Product Marketing team is structured based on target customer personas with each PMM also responsible for a functional area like research or competitive in......Read More

978 Views

What are common expectations of the type of feedback that alpha/beta users should provide to Product Marketing Managers and Product Managers? What are some perks or incentives that you offer for alpha/beta users?

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • August 11

This goes back to your goals for running the alpha/beta and what kind of information you want to gather. In general I look for honest feedback on some of the following themes, but you’ll want to work closely with your PM partners to define specifics. 1. Does the product solve the right problem ......Read More

966 Views

In terms of empowering your sales and success teams to get customers and prospects excited about upcoming features, how do you help them present the roadmap? Does product marketing create a roadmap deck that then gets shared out to the team?

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • August 11

I answer a similar question further on, but at a high level a great way to preview the roadmap is part of annual or quarterly account health checks. In the past I’ve had a section in the sales deck. We’ve also recorded videos with our PMs covering high level plans because customers tend to reall......Read More

908 Views

How often do you update messaging? And what is your approach when updating?

Anna Wiggins

Bluevine Sr. Director of Customer Research, Content, and Product Marketing • March 23

This will depend on the maturity of the product. If your product and target audience don’t change very much, you can look at doing annual refreshes. However, if you are working on a growing product with evolving audiences or you’ve recently pivoted, you may need to tweak your messaging more frequ......Read More