Lauren Craigie

My first advice here is to not accept an interview if you’re being asked to create a full GTM plan for a product they actually plan to ship :) But aside from that, I think the best way to start is by asking a few key questions you should already be asking in the normal interview process. In my opinion it’s the questions alone that PMMs ask that helps me decide whether they’d be the right fit. Some examples of what you could ask prior to getting started on the assignment: Describe your ICP for th ...Read More

We have a strong community in the dbt Slack channel, but it's not inclusive of all dbt practioners. So we use four main channels to get in front of our target audience: 1. The dbt Slack community, when announcements are highly relevant to their work 2. Quarterly product launch events targeting existing users that want to go deeper on new releases 3. A "how to" write-up for our DevBlog paired with a "why we did it" blog for our Corporate Blog  4. A monthly product newsletter that might include an ...Read More

Great question, because timelines will ALWAYS slip. I think some of the most important things to remember are: Get alignment on the goals. If you're launching something that your pipeline goals depend on, for example, you need to keep coming back to that to remind folks why tight deadlines are critical. Always ask, "What are the things that might be more important than this? What is less important than this?" Make dependencies clear. I once was asked by the head of engineering to give a presenta ...Read More

Curiosity and a desire to be understood. These two qualities over nearly everything else. You can easily learn the frameworks--steps for a successful launch, format for a battle card, considerations for pricing... you can also improve your writing to align with brand and write high impact choppy copy. But it's not easy to teach someone how to be curious about how a user ACTUALLY feels about your product. How to dig into data to find which features aren't being touched. How to keep iterating on s ...Read More

I wish it wasn't different, to be honest. If I say what people normally say here, like, "it's more honest, it's straight-forward, it gets right to the meat of it," I'm left thinking... Why don't we market that way to everyone? Why don't we create tiered experiences that let you get right to the details if you want, or float up high in the "business value."  But, to be actually helpful here, I think developer marketing typically happens in a company with product-led-growth, which means you need t ...Read More

Great question. We actually have a third unit – Developer Experience. I'm sure it differs at other organizations, but at dbt Labs... Developer Relations is focused on growing the community (measured by Slack members and weekly active projects in the open source product), building lasting relationships with members, enforcing community guidelines, elevating diverse and marginalized voices, and highlighting the contributing work of members around the world. They build trust. Developer Experience i ...Read More

I think everything new in the product is launched to some degree, but we do use a launch tiering system— Tier 1 to Tier 3. I've seen this model at other organizations and it works well to align on a standard set of actions for each launch depending on the goal. Major product initaitives that will materially impact your brand, audience, or bottom line? Tier 1—press release, sales enablement, videos, one-pagers, website landing page, paid promotion, blogs, guides, social posts, etc.  Adjustment to ...Read More

I've heard before that product marketing KPIs can be squishy—that it's hard to quantify the value of what we do. I don't agree! I have a few KPIs that are unique to PMM, and a few that are tackled with PM, just from a different angle. I'll focus mostly on the shared KPIs: Shared: Feature adoption. Self-serve or Sales-led/assisted - PM would be responsible for continuous feature use over the lifecycle of an account (is the thing we built actually useful and intuitively designed?) - PMM is respons ...Read More