
Derek Frome
Vice President Marketing, Ouster
Content

Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • September 6
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 ac......Read More
1741 Views

Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • July 19
For sales messaging, I haven’t encountered anything better than “Command of the Message” which you can google.
1435 Views

Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • September 6
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 ......Read More
1187 Views

Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • September 6
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 in......Read More
1147 Views

Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • September 6
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......Read More
1141 Views

Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • July 19
Twilio, splunk, nginx, newrelic are good examples.
1097 Views

Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • September 6
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 se......Read More
1043 Views

Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • July 19
Depends how market-facing your PMs are. If they're obsessed with serving customers and creating products and features that will generate new business, probably don't need to be very involved. If they're focused on internal things though and are more interested in how engineering will implemen......Read More
1008 Views

Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • July 19
+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......Read More
729 Views

Derek Frome
Ouster.io Vice President Marketing • September 6
At a previous company, we started by maintaining a wiki page for competitive intel that was the "single point of truth" for the sales team. Mike is correct when he says that at an early stage, CI is everyone's job and the PMM's job to QB the effort. I would suggest that a solid level of competiti......Read More
723 Views