Kevin Garcia

One way that I like to prepare for an interview is to go in with the mindset that you are an investor (which you are, with your time!). As an investor, you want to learn everything you can about the company: 1. Who are they? (homepage, fundraise announcements, careers page descriptions) 2. What do they do? (docs, G2, TrustRadius, Twitter, support forums, YouTube videos) 3. Who are they solving for? (main nav website, titles on G2/TrustRadius, blog posts) 4. How big/interesting is that market? (industry sites, Twitter, influencers, analyst reports) Why all the preparation? The same reason you research your audience when launching products: the more you know about the context around the company and who they target, the more you can cater your career story to what matters for them. At a bare minimum, every PMM should read a company's website, blog, and (if applicable) technical docs. This preparation is more valuable than memorizing generic answers to interview questions! Take, for example, if you wanted a career at AdRoll (one of my former employers who offers software to run ads, emails, and growth experiments). They mostly generate business through product-led growth (aka self-serve signups) and cater to SMB businesses. If you know that when talking to the head of sales, you can cater your conversation to how you've helped create launches that expand self-serve users to annual contracts—which is much more relevant to them simply because you know how the company acquires most of their customers. 

First of all, you're not alone! I've definitely fumbled my way through several interviews. Rather than offering really general advice, I'd like to get specific. When I think about interviews, I think of two ways you can impress a hiring manager: 1. Substance - You show that you're qualified for the role and would add value to the team/business 2. Style - You show that you're a great communicator and are someone that the team wants to work with I think there is A LOT of high-level advice for both that exists on the internet, so I'm going to focus on tactical things that you can do the week before your interview. Substance 1. Read their website, their docs, their latest funding announcement, and their last blog post 2. Write down your top 3 best product marketing experiences onto sticky notes that only include: what you launched, what audience you were going after, and what impact it had in the business (specific numbers) 3. Write down your biggest lesson you've learned from messing up onto a sticky note that only includes: what went wrong, the impact, and a specific action you took to fix it/prevent it from happening again 4. Record yourself on your phone describing the last product you worked on. Watch the video 24-hours later and decide what needs to improve. 5. Record yourself on your phone describing the product the company sells. Watch the video 24-hours later and decide what needs to improve. 6. Write down 3 questions that you NEED to know the answer to if you were an investor that was curious about their strategy or product (e.g. "Does the company intend to stay focused on developers or do you intend to eventually sell to non-technical teams?). 1, 4, and 5 help you learn what you don't know and feel confident in the interview. 2 and 3 help you be thoughtful and structured when retelling your experiences. And 6 is crucial. I don't hire PMMs that aren't curious/passionate about the space we're in. Asking substantive questions is a HUGE signal that you're a great thinker. Style 1. Record yourself on your phone giving a 30-second opener about yourself that includes: highlights from your career, why you're interested in their company, and one thing that you read about them that stands out to you. Watch the video 24-hours later and decide what needs to improve. 2. Practice talking about your last product as if you were talking to: a coworker, a stranger at a conference, a stranger at a music festival. 3. If you tend to be shy/quiet in interviews, watch standup comedy and take notes about how they respond to their audience and keep the conversation going. 4. If you tend to be talkative/intense in interviews, watch TED talks and take notes about how they balance passion with objectivity/calmness. 5. Write down your top 3 favorite co-workers ever onto sticky notes that only include: their title, how they worked with you, and what they did that made you want to work with them. 1 and 2 are all about getting comfortable talking about yourself so you can cater to your interviewer on the fly. 3 and 4 are all about remembering the qualities that help you feel more like yourself in the interview. 5 is all about gratitude. Hiring managers are building teams. They want to work with someone who can build meaningful relationships with others. PMMs that are proud of the people they've worked with give me great signals about cross-functional collaboration and long-term success.

As a rule of thumb, you should always test your messaging. The level of rigor and criteria for success should be sized appropriately the higher you go in the messaging hierarchy. For this answer, I’ll use a pretty simple messaging hierarchy: * Company-level: Who are you and what do you do? * Use case-level: What problems do you solve? * Buyer-level: How do you deliver value to a specific buyer (e.g. CMO)? * Capability-level: How do you enable the buyer to get that value? In every case, you will never regret testing the message with a customer on a call or email. You will always learn something, and if they love it you will gain conviction and ammo to defend that messaging. * Company-level * Rigor: Go super high. Use qualitative and quantitative research. Test with customers, analysts, and prospects. Spend the time to align with a broad set of internal stakeholders in GTM and Product. * Success: Strong positive signals from user research. Alignment to company strategy and differentiation. If you’re messaging is a key input when the company makes big decisions, it’s a huge success. * Use case-level/Buyer-level * Rigor: High. Quantitative can help you narrow the use case list and qualitative can drive the clarity you need to understand the ‘why.’ It’s most critical that this aligns with your executive team and GTM teams (these need to be the use cases that they actually see in the market). * Success: Strong positive signals in marketing and sales channels. Are people resonating with your pitch? Is the content focused on these use cases driving conversions? If your messaging helps accelerate people connecting with your solution, it’s a winner. * Capability-level * Rigor: Medium (can be low for small features). You really are aiming for clear and concise messaging at this level. Don’t go for flourish, go for clarity. * Success: People just get it. If a capability is well explained, your messaging should be the de-facto way that sales, product, and marketing use to describe it.

Great question! A great GTM strategy is ultimately focused on driving 1 business metric forward. I'll share an example where a podcast made a lot of sense: We researched our enterprise market to try to understand: Which audiences should we focus on within this broad category and what do those people want? After rigorous research, we discovered that the most relevant enterprises for Segment are those that are doubling down on digital experiences (new apps, new experiences, often called "Digital Transformation") And many of them mostly wanted to hear the inside story of how to get it done from people who had already transformed their businesses. So when we thought about our most important GTM play, it became clear that if we wanted to increase sales velocity (1 business metric) we needed to give these people access to an inside look at how companies have digitally transformed using Segment. When we asked customers and prospects how they would most want to digest this information, podcasts were the clear winner. And we're launching a podcast very soon to address this case.

Messaging is hard to get right. At its best, messaging is a clear and simple distillation of who you are, what you do, and why it matters. But in my experience, there are a few common themes that lead to missing the mark: 1. Trying to connect with too wide an audience. No messaging, no matter how clever or well-written, will resonate with every audience. The act of trying to make it work for every buyer persona, every company size, and every industry eventually leads to generic messaging that might broadly apply but is no longer impactful. Great messaging requires focus. 2. Developing messaging by committee. In an ideal world, your CEO, sales team, and customers would all be perfectly aligned on what messaging you should use. But in practice, this is rarely the case. Many teams will naturally resort to creating “Frankenstein” messaging that tries to marry everyone’s preferences…and it almost never goes well. 3. Trying to fit in every last detail. Think about buying a car. For those of us with a long commute, you might care most about gas mileage. A salesperson might try to also sell you on the backup camera, entertainment console, and sunroof, but those don’t solve your biggest problem—getting to work in a cost-effective manner. So now instead of looking more impressive, the car seems bloated, expensive, and irrelevant. Too much detail often works against you.

First of all, I feel your pain! With the company moving fast, it can sometimes feel that your messaging is always playing catch up. In cases where your product and business evolve quickly, I recommend anchoring your messaging on the elements that remain most constant: * The market trends around you * The top pain(s) your audience feels * The top use cases your company solves If you work for a mobile attribution company, your product might change every day. But the growing number of digital touchpoints (trend), difficulty connecting all of the dots (pain), and the desire to effectively manage your marketing budget (use case) will stick around a long time. So anchor campaigns on what won’t change. An example from Segment is our “What good is bad data?” campaign. Does it talk about our product directly? No. Does it address our differentiated features? Lightly. But it does speak to a pain that a lot of technical audiences experience, so it has worked as a multi-quarter campaign across both brand and demand generation.

You will never regret QA-ing your messaging with customers. Not only will it help you land on great messaging faster, but it will give you conviction as you defend your messaging across the organization. It is different at every company, but at Segment each PMM follows a pretty simple path: * Develop the messaging * Test with customers, peers, and their core working group * Align with me and our VP of Marketing * Share broadly, refine. Repeat. 

I've mentioned this framework in other answers, but I believe that great product marketers are great researchers, storytellers, and project managers. A standout product marketing portfolio would include work that helps you cover these critical bases. I've added below some examples of things that could help you stand out in each area. Research: * A summary of a research project you ran and how the insights were used * An example of a research question + interview questions you used in customer calls * An overview of a beta process you helped run, how many customers you talked to, and the outcomes that your insights helped solidify * An example of how you incorporated insights from industry experts or reports into a launch Storytelling: * Core messaging + the landing page you built to distill the message * A product blog post you wrote to support a launch + outcomes * A video tutorial or webinar that you helped write or execute * A product announcement email + outcomes Project management: * A project plan that you used + the outcomes of the project * A product launch plan that you used + the outcomes * A hefty asset + a description of the team you coordinated to ship it * A cross-functional project timeline and breakdown + how you'd do it better

I've seen this play out a few different ways: * PMM owns content, Design owns design/dev, Marketing ops owns analytics/reporting * PMM owns content, Web team owns design/dev/project management/analytics/reporting * Brand owns content, PMM assists, and other teams own other things I'll start off with a few lessons learned: * If you try to be the gatekeeper of the website, you will eventually become the bottleneck of the website * Not all web pages are the same, and some are just not worth your time and energy * The more cooks in the kitchen, the less responsibility anyone feels toward anything My favorite dynamic has been: 1. You define the most critical pages on the website (usually homepage, pricing, and pages that made it into your header nav). If it's related to how a user/buyer would consider and buy your product, PMM owns. If not, it's owned by Brand or Growth. 2. Everything else on the website is owned by the team that is most impacted by it (i.e. Field owns events pages, Growth owns SEO pages, HR/Recruiting own the About page). 3. A centralized web design/dev team (and contractor group) works on all these things for visual cohesion and ownership when things inevitably have bugs or break. Because core web pages aren't shipped every day, you can focus on nailing the pages that are most strategic for the business. As someone who has owned the website for extended periods of time at 4 companies... trust me... you do NOT want to be the person who owns the entire website for any longer than you absolutely have to. It's not where your PMM strengths are best used, and is a huge distraction from core work. 

AI/ML means a lot of things to a lot of businesses. Some companies have high data maturity where AI/ML tools are a vehicle for data science teams to create proprietary value for the business. Others are fairly low on their data maturity (which is fine!) and they want out-of-the-box AI/ML for fairly simple use cases, usually around personalization. The best messaging technique here is clarity. Do the work for the prospect. Is this product for advanced or basic users? Technical users? Does it require a data lake? By being really clear about where the product and solution fit, you give the right people the opportunity to raise their hands.