Anna Wiggins

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 building block for any external-facing language used in your marketing. Also, it's likely that you won't always be there to walk folks through the document, so it should be as clear and self-explanatory as ...Read More

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 intelligence. As we grow, I could see us moving to the squad model. Also we are a global company with diverse english language proficiencies and as a result product marketers ended up acting as copy ...Read More

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 out is why the Product Marketing team was created and who was the driver behind the creation. If the momentum came from outside of the Product team, the PMs likely won’t know how to work with Product Market ...Read More

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 frequently - even on a quarterly basis. You should set expectations with your stakeholders on your message refresh frequency as part of your annual product marketing plans.  And of course, major changes in pr ...Read More

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. Messaging is customer-facing articulation of the product’s value proposition. Messaging is the building blocks of all customer-facing language whether it’s on your site, your pitch decks, or your ads. In genera ...Read More

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 Product teams at younger companies tend to have shorter foresight themselves because they are potentially still experimenting with product market fit.Taking into account the context of your world, apply a tie ...Read More

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 or in other words is this a problem the customer actually has?2. Does the product actually solve the problem? If not, what would need to change. 3. Does the product meet customer’s expectations. If not, wh ...Read More

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 really like hearing from the team that’s actually building the products they use and this gives the PMs an opportunity to celebrate their work. Some PMs also enjoy going on sales calls to directly experience c ...Read More

I would start by understanding why it’s not seen as a priority - does this feature align with your overall product strategy? Perhaps this is an area that the company has made a conscious choice not to enter. However if this is simply a prioritization issue for the Product team, I suggest you quantify the impact. How many customers are asking for this and how many accounts or how much revenue are you losing by not having this option for your customers. Also, can you estimate if a customer adoptin ...Read More

This depends on the nature of the conversation but in general our Product team expects us to come to the table with an educated, data based POV on how to approach a strategy or a problem. However, I would reframe the second part of your question. We are not delivering to our Product team, instead together with our Product team we are delivering to our customers. With this mindset we develop shared KPIs that help our customers find the value in our product -- eg drive X lift in adoption of Y -- a ...Read More