Cortney Jacobsen

Data reporting and analytics. Having the ability to gather data (read: SQL skills are both rare and valuable for Marketers), cross-reference data, and - most importantly - draw insights from this data are essential for efficiency in your marketing experiments. A lot of marketers are masters in taking insights and developing a story or a plan, but having skills in the magic that happens before the plan is where a Marketers can stand out. 

Favorite answer: It depends :-) It depends on your target customer, the type of product, and the maturity of your product and business. Some examples for each - e.g. If your target customer is developers, it may be a good idea to spread features out so that you give your customers time to implement new features, launch them in their own products, and then gather data about how those features performed before you starting throwing more features at them. On the other hand, if your product is a consumer-facing web app, new features every couple weeks could be exciting and build product engagement. e.g. If your product or business is not a brand new concept and you are playing catch-up with your competitors, getting features out there publicly is more urgent than if you are creating a new niche. If you are building a product from a mature concept/industry, just make sure that the features you are lauching are highlighting your competitive differentiator. 

I have a lot of experience with international product launches during my time at Amazon. Here's some lessons that I learned - HQ should create the playbook for how a product launch should happen, including a timeline of all the milestone activities (beta, translations, marketing assets created, legal review, PR, etc.). My role was at HQ and was to lead local offices through this playbook of launches, clarifying and constantly tweaking the playbook to help the local offices be more self-sufficient and also to consider different cultural/geo needs. The local team consisted of a staff that led each culturally-significant function - marketing was the biggest one here, along with content editors/curators. In international launches, it is important that the local office understands the main essence of the brand and is bought into it, but also for HQ to be able to adapt to local needs. After the launch, the relationship between HQ and local offices should be kept up on a regular basis and the local office is going to be challenges with providing HQ compelling data that supports their need for new features or resources. The liaise at HQ (which was me in the my example at Amazon) should be the advocate at HQ for the local teams. 

That can be a tricky situation! Essentially, you need to develop your customer engagement in order to develop your customer engagement :-) Classic catch-22. I have been in this situation in my work at smaller companies and have found a couple things that work well - 1. Adopt the mindset of "quality over quantity." It is fine that you don't have dozens or hundreds of customers to talk to - you only need a handful for interviews anyway. Don't worry about the numbers. 2. Pick out 5 names from a customer list who have had a memorable sale, testimonial, recent meeting, or other transaction with your company, and contact them directly with a highly personalized message. If you can only find 1, 2, or 3 customers, that's fine. Start with that! If needed, spend 10-15 min with the Account Manager or Sales person to understand a bit about that customer so that you can tailor a message for them. On blanket emails sent out to large groups of customers to participate in interviews, I have found that a 5-10% response rate is about as high as you're going to get. But on the personalized emails where I reach out to people directly, response rate is very nearly 100%. 3. Be humble and human. You are contacting your customers because you want to improve your product or your business. Be upfront with them about this, and don't sound like a robot when you write your email to them. Make sure you sound like an empathetic human being who genuinely cares about their business and their experience with your product. Don't be afraid to use a bit of humor to loosen the vibe. Good luck!!