Jeff Hardison

First, I try real hard to let go of my ego and temporarily forget about the past (e.g., how I worked with demand gen in another company). Every company’s marketing department is structured differently, and it’s important to quickly adapt. Then, I try to be human and have a conversation with each demand gen person, asking how can we help them achieve their goals. Sign up for some activities to help them with some shared KPIs. Once you get some shared wins, other departments tend to start trusting you more. Then, they might allow you to weigh in on their strategy too. 

Growth can mean different things in different orgs. In some orgs, a growth person owns acquiring new users (with performance marketing or ads, and so forth). In other orgs, growth helps with proposing and testing different growth levers (e.g., an invite-a-friend option in-app, adding signup-for-free CTAs to collaboration opportunities such as an email a Calendly meeting invitee receives). Sometimes, growth owns the lifecycle marketing from signup to first-time user experience in app to emails and in-app messages weeks after the user signups. Growth product marketing generally helps with one or more of the above. At InVision, I helped with all of the above. I recommend getting your feet wet in growth PMM by offering to share a KPI with a department/staffer helping with one of the above. For example, you could go to whomever is in charge of acquiring new free users and offer to share a KPI (perhaps write social-ad copy) of theirs for the upcoming quarter. You could go to a product manager owning in-app growth levers (invite-a-friend call to action button) and offer to help with some customer research around what they're doing. Approach your email manager and offer to help test various experiments around the initial emails a new sign-up receives. 

This is one of my favorite topics, and I write more extensively about product-led marketing versus sales-led marketing on the Product-Led Growth Collective site: https://www.productled.org/blog/marketers-prepare-product-led-growth The tl;dr, though: In many product-led growth (PLG) companies non-salespeople (e.g., product managers, designers, engineers, founders, etc.) helping to create the actual product have the initial greatest influence on what product marketing does. In many PLG companies, product marketers find themselves in particular helping out product managers with research, positioning/messaging, launches and adoption marketing. In sales-led companies -- or traditional software companies -- the sales leaders have a much greater influence -- than in pure e-commerce PLG companies -- because they’re bringing in the revenue. Not some PLG e-commerce engine. In sales-led companies, the product marketer is doing everything they do in PLG -- research, positioning/messaging, launches, and adoption marketing -- and they help out the sales team with sales content, new-product training, and more. Today's most difficult job for a product marketer, I believe, is working in a PLG company that’s going "up market" because you have three masters: product leadership (who ran the show when they only way to buy was with a credit card), sales leadership (who is trying to influence company direction to close bigger sales deals), and of course whomever your boss is. :)

I’d have to see your assignment response to make recommendations! And I probably shouldn’t print my recommendations here publicly, as this company probably wants to keep the assignment confidential. Feel free to befriend me on LinkedIn, and I'll take a look at your assignment and give you feedback. 

Because product marketing is such a collaborative function -- we're like diplomats and glue between product-engineering-design, marketing, customer success, and sales (if you have it) -- I try to open up my "empathy reserves" for the various departments I'm going to work with. If it's B2C, I think about product-engineering-design, customer support (dealing with thousands of tickets), and my friends in marketing. If it's B2B, I think about all of the above plus the sales team (which is likely a newer department than the B2C ones and, therefore, they're probably struggling to get resources and having their voices heard). Then, I think about how we're all going to work together to address the needs of these various customer segments, which often have different needs and like to be dealt with differently. 

I just say, "I really think this feature idea is really cool!" Just kidding. One of my go-to tactics is compiling customer feedback about a problem or feature idea from several customers. Create a Notion document, outline the problem, and list several quotes from customers about said problem. Even better, get Gong/Chorus recordings of the customers talking about the problem to bring the issue to life. 

Good product marketing helps build the brand. Good brand marketing helps drive usage of the products. To me, they're like cousins in marketing. Perhaps more so than any other marketing disciplines. Take Apple, a master of marrying their brand marketing and product marketing. Here's an old ad for the iPod. There's the logo, and an engaging illustration of someone dancing, sure. Some people's idea of brand advertising might stop there. But Apple doesn't. Then they add: 10,000 songs in your pocket. Mac or PC. That's Product Marketing meets Brand Marketing. 10,000 songs (feature) in your pocket (benefit plus differentiation — other MP3 players were big and/or didn't hold many songs). Mac or PC (audience targeting). Makes you want to dance — and look fun to others (brand).

There are two main ways tech companies make money: - sales-led: a salesperson works with a customer and closes the deal (which was the norm for decades) - self-serve: a customer can manually enter their credit-card information into the product to purchase something, bypassing a human. Self-serve/credit-card sales is only one aspect of product-led growth (PLG), which also includes using the product to sign up customers (which humans used to own), activate them (which humans used to own), upgrade them (see above), and renew them (which humans used to own). At its most basic level, PLG marketing is more about helping the product itself — and the humans who work on it — do the heavy lifting of attracting customers, getting them to sign up, trying various features, upgrading, and then renewing. Sales-led marketing is more about helping your human coworkers (salespeople, customer success managers, etc.) do more of that marketing/sales/customer-success work. A hybrid company (PLG + Sales like we have at Calendly) is about doing a mix of both.

Years ago, a VP of product management made a joke while asking me about the status of my 30-60-90 Day Plan: "Let me guess, it's 30 days of studying, 30 days of planning, and 30 days of finally shipping something." He was right of course! My 30/60/90 was a collection of activities in which I was listening and studying the company, another 30 days of planning with stakeholders, and another 30 of starting to ship projects. Not just one project, though! 😀 Using this measured approach probably creates the best foundation for success down the line. Challenge is, few leadership teams really want you to wait until Day 60 to start shipping. They've likely been waiting for you for months and could really use a hand in something only you could help with. Even if you just tap largely into instinct and past experiences to help out. This sense of urgency will grow even more, if you're the first product marketer in the company or the new PMM leader. (Joining a larger team? Well, waiting until Day 60 is easier to get by with in many orgs.) So, in summary, keep your 30/60/90 Day Plan of studying, planning, and shipping. But consider shipping something earlier if you can. People will thank you. 

I feel fortunate that I’ve led positioning/messaging workshops since I graduated college because I worked for an agency that mandated them for every project we worked on for tech clients. Getting an exec team to agree on a document outlining positioning and messaging isn't the hard part in my opinion. The difficult part is to get the messaging to stick once you put it out in the world: on a homepage, in a blog post, an ad, a slide deck for sales, etc. When positioning and messaging is put to use, execs start to realize what they signed up for. “Wait, we’re going after that job title in that small industry? I thought we were going to be all things to all people.” So, I generally recommend immediately following the positioning/messaging documents with some type of customer-facing project where you use the messaging. If you have success with it -- customer sales deals, signup conversions, etc. -- people tend to get onboard in a sustained fashion.