Derek Frome

To me, a solution is a prescriptive collection of products and features that solve a well-defined problem for your customer. A product is anything you could conceivably sell on its own, but a product can also be a collection of other products. A feature is a component piece of a product that adds to its value but cannot be sold on its own.    Products, features, and solutions tend to get different levels of attention from PMMs. Products will naturally get the most, solutions are really just coll ...Read More

Painted door tests are your friend here (google it). You could create two or three landing pages with different message variants, each of which leads to a "request access" form. Depending on what your campaign is for, your message testing could be as simple as running it by product managers or account managers. Or you could grab a few web visitors through a Qualaroo survey and interview them. You could grab people and buy them a coffee at a conference. Basically, there's no big trick to this - y ...Read More

I'll take a more extreme position on this question. You're setting yourself up for failure by asking us how to "defend" your messaging. Instead, I'd ask you to listen to those people who you are used to "defending" your messaging from. It's not your messaging - give up that pride of ownership in order to listen and learn from sales, product, and your executives if they choose to care about your exact phrasing. That doesn't mean that they get to write the exact words - but all of those constituen ...Read More

I'm going to take a somewhat contrarian view on this and say that in order to really break through in a crowded market, it takes more than clever messaging (though that never hurts). You have to position your product correctly and you have to prove that you are better. Now would be the time to invest in a really solid customer marketing program to tell their stories of success with your product. All the better if they moved to your product from a competitor. Include that question in every win in ...Read More

+1 to that James and I'd add that targeting a specific type of business user can work if that business user has outsized influence relative to their title, e.g. software developers. Freemium model is super important: Twilio, PagerDuty, AWS, NewRelic. depends on what the project kickoff looks like. If the project is "here, we got you this tool, now go solve the problem" you're screwed. If it's "Here, go solve this problem" then the model works still, though you're going to have to still go throug ...Read More

Mike's answer is spot on. Since you've been laid off 5 times in 10 years though, I'll add one other thought. It's possible that you're focusing on outputs, not outcomes. PMM done right is much more focused on outcomes - well defined, measurable (as much as possible). It's the PMM lead's job to secure buy-in from execs, product leadership, and sales leadership on those outcomes. Then it's your job to hit them. It's easy to churn out 2 white papers per quarter and think you're doing something. It' ...Read More

In my opinion, this is the wrong question to be asking. A much better objective would be to aim for a promotion, not a pay raise. Of course, promotions carry pay raises, but the point is that a promotion is more easily understood and communicated. It's easier to ask your boss "what do you think I need to demonstrate to earn a promotion to [title]" than to ask your boss "what do I need to do to get a 15k raise".    The above answer assumes that you are being paid roughly market rates. If you are ...Read More