Linda Sonne-Harrison

Congratulations on considering a career in product marketing. I "carried a bag" (literally) and it was an invaluable experience. The good news is that you have a ton of useful knowledge: customer needs, your customers' buying groups and personas, their buying process, and more. You probably have some true empathy for customer pains that your product can solve. Skills that you may need to build up: - Writing. Lots of it. - Critical thinking and analytical skills. Product marketers have to see beyond the deal and the customer to look at the bigger picture. -Cross-functional collaboration. Product marketing's success depends on many other teams doing stuff. Skills you may need to develop: - Understanding of marketing technology and measurement approaches. - Understanding market research and quantitative analysis

I use different templates depending on the company, nature of the product, and relative importance of the launch (see related question on this topic), but the elements I would include: * List of new features, with SHORT descriptions that include functional capabilities as well as business value. What someone would say conversationally if they had to describe what’s new and explain why a customer should care. * Elevator pitch/ buyer personas, if different from before * Use cases * Demo script/ screenshots to support the items above * Presentation, or slides to insert into an existing sales presentation * Discovery / qualification questions to use with customers * Competitive positioning * Common objections to expect, with answers

Glad that you're already planning to 1:1's. Taking the time to understand your stakeholders' perspectives is an important first step in building trust. I don't have a standard list of questions. I come in with observations (what I learned prior to engaging with my client or from previous stakeholder converations) and ask both closed- and open-ended questions. Examples: "This message is for CMOs, but traditionally you have sold to product managers. What are the things your sales team will need to do to reach CMOs, besides just having different messaging." Versus, "What headline would you want to see the press using in 3 months?" Prepare for each 1:1 by doing your research on the person and his or her role in the company. Come in with 25% more questions than you think you'll have time to ask. End by asking them if there's anything that you can help with immediately. Follow up on any requests you get.

I have found that customers are more willing to share their experiences in win-loss interviews than you might think. The keys are to: * Make it clear that you're not going to sell them. Make sure that the outreach doesn't sound like another outbound email. * Position yourself as neutrally as possible. The purpose is to help improve the product, more than improving marketing or sales. (That information will come anyway if you ask the right questions.) * Respect their time. Ask for 20-30 minutes (depending on the nature of the sale and your audience) and stick to it. Be prepared with the right questions and background information from your CRM. * Have a few open-ended questions ready. I have gotten some surprising answers in win-loss interviews.

I'm not sure what "academic" frameworks exist for competitive analysis, but I have worked with dozens of companies and haven't seen a lot of variation in how they approach competitive work. There are three distinct workstreams: 1. Competitive analysis: Building an accurate understanding of how you compare to your competitors. This involves identifying the key capabilities required by your buyers (and important to their buying decisions) and doing research to analyze how you and your competitors stack up. The deliverable is a comparative analysis along with a high-level summary like a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats). The audience for this deliverable is primarily product management, engineering, and marketing. 2. Competitive positioning: An exercise to identify a strong position for your product, where it is differentiated from competitors and where this differentiation matters to your target buyers. The deliverable is a positioning document and the primary audiences are product marketing, product management, and some executive leadership (e.g. engineering). 3. Competitive sales tools: These sales tools make the competitive positioning actionable for the sales team working an opportunity. Aside from just telling them where you are strong, they would include not only feature comparisons but also questions to ask buyers, features to demonstrate, "trip points" to plant, etc. The deliverables are typically called cheat sheets, kill sheets, or similar names, and the primary audience is sales. Sometimes people confuse these workstreams and create deliverables that try to serve multiple purposes. Even though the work overlaps from one to the next, I think it's important to recognize the distinct audiences and create deliverables specific to each purpose. 

The first step is executive alignment. When I start an engagement with a client, I do a thorough messaging audit including internal stakeholders, customers, and sometimes analysts. I analyze my findings, present them to the key stakeholders, and get their buy-in before beginning the actual messaging process. It's also important to note that some of these key stakeholders don't know what positioning and messaging are. They may not care. You'll need to educate them. Positioning is how your product fits in the world (product-market-fit) and different from alternatives. Messaging is the product's story to the outside world. 

This sounds like a classic case of product family positioning, where you would define a common positioning for what makes Shopify unique across both products. And then absolutely, you would do separate competitive positioning for each product edition based on the needs of the customers it serves and the competitive environment. 

Good question! Over my career, I have seen release cycles shrink a lot and fewer and fewer requests for datasheets! My advice: 1. Minimize the number of "sources of truth." If you can get away with just having a web page, do it. If you need printed collateral, what about a piece that explains the value proposition and includes a QR code for a web page that shows the details? Likewise, makie sure that internal information is stored in as few places as possible. 2. Set a threshold for the number or signifance of features that would trigger a datasheet update. P1/ P2/ P3 releases. 3. Streamline the production process as much as possible, so updates aren't as painful. 

Pricing–and ownership of pricing–is often a loaded topic for companies. My view is that product marketing, not product management, should own pricing. (Of course I am biased because I am a product marketer!) Why? Product management’s primary focus should be on the vision for the product. Product marketing is responsible for bringing that product to market. Pricing is an integral part of a go-to-market strategy, one of the 4 P’s. At the highest level, pricing is driven by: 1. Company: Marginal cost to produce/ operate, overall business strategy 2. Customer: The value that customers perceive that they could realize by solving the problem that your product solves 3. Competitor: The amount that customers would pay to competitors or substitutes to solve that problem Of course, product management and product marketing both have responsibilities in all three C’s. Product management is typically more involved in #1 (along with Finance), product marketing in #2 and #3 (along with Sales).

There’s no single career path that leads to a product marketing position. In B2B SaaS companies, I have seen successful transitions to product marketing from product management, sales engineering, consulting, corporate marketing, consumer brand management, and customer success. I have also seen failed transitions from all of these roles. Regardless of your prior work experience, I think a successful product marketer will need to exhibit all of these skills: * An interest and ability to understand the product you’re marketing. You don’t have to know how to code it; you don’t always have to be able to use every capability; but you have to be able to demo it and deeply understand the problems it addresses. * Empathy, especially when it comes to being able to look at the world through a customer’s eyes. Product marketers also need to have empathy for their sales teams, development teams, and the rest of the marketing organization. * Strong communications skills, both written and verbal. No matter how big the organization is, product marketers are constantly having to win over customers and internal stakeholders, verbally and in writing. And they’re constantly having to align their stakeholders on competing priorities. * Perseverance: Success in product marketing depends on the success of others in the organization—sales, demand gen teams, product management, and engineering. You’re often fighting some strong headwinds. * Critical thinking: Product marketing has to be able to turn “what” into “so what.” It can be like solving a 3D puzzle with 10 people handing you pieces from different sections in random order.