Krithika Muthukumar

While you can have really compelling per-product pitches, the real challenge of selling a platform is getting prospects and customers to buy into a vision that unifying their systems is going to be a force multiplier for their company. The value is that 1 + 1 > 2. In selling a platform, it’s imperative the messaging is above-the-line focused because you’re trying to convince customers about the vision. There may be cases where a platform only has 80% of the features that a combination of point solutions have, but still wins out because the sales team was able to align the customer with the ...

For Stripe, we have a robust self-serve channel in addition to sold deals. Startups that start by processing very small amounts of volume can grow up to be quite big. Our long-term bet hinges on this cohort-based approach, so we prioritize both channels ~equally. Pageviews and impressions can be useful proxies to understand the impact a launch had on awareness, but the north star is usage and engagement. As a PMM group, we try our best to align our metrics with the product and engineering groups, which means we’re looking at metrics that are further downfunnel than most other marketing tea...

The only advice I can share is that customer insights (when shared in a clear and actionable way) are very hard to ignore. Survey users, talk to prospects, and bring customer insights to the product teams, even if they aren't solicited.  I thought I'd share a recent example from Stripe: a few months ago, one of my teammates was paired with a product group that was moving very quickly to deliver an MVP to the market. Because they were moving fast, they didn't invite marketing input. Synthesizing some of the challenges she was piecing together from members of the product group, my teammate...

We now offer upwards of a dozen products on the Stripe platform that go way beyond payments processing—from products for incorporation and billing management to fraud prevention and managing corporate spending. To manage the growing complexity, we introduced the concept of Anchor Tenants at Stripe this year. (This term comes from American malls, where there may be a large store that draws customers and traffic for the smaller stores.) For us, those are our core products: Payments (payments acceptance), Connect (marketplaces and platforms), and Billing (recurring revenue and invoicing). The...

Solutions can mean very different things for different companies. For example, Salesforce’s Health Cloud is an end-to-end product solution for their healthcare customers—you sign up for Health Cloud, your dashboard says Health Cloud, you’re billed for Health Cloud, etc. There’s also companies that offer bundles, such as Intercom, that provide a discount for using multiple products that work together to help address a job-to-be-done.  Stripe falls more towards the Intercom side of the spectrum. For us, solutions serve as new doors into the same house. At Stripe, we’re firm believers in a ...

These terms are used so interchangeably these days—some may argue it’s not even worth separating them out. However, the challenges for each are slightly different and a nuanced approach can change the type of impact PMM and your company can have. Here’s how I think about these: * Suite, portfolio: These are companies that offer a set of products that help solve problems in related areas, but aren’t necessarily interoperable or meant to be used together. Examples include the now-defunct iLife (i.e. GarageBand and iMovie both help you do creative things, but you aren’t meant to ...