Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing, HoneyBook

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HoneyBook Director of Product Marketing, Loren Elia on Stakeholder Management

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Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing

Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing

Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing

What strategies do you recommend for driving adoption of a new product, post-launch? What is the role of Product Marketing compared to other parts of the business in driving adoption?

PMM ultimately shares adoption goals with Product. There's two sides to adoption though: awareness and usage. PMMs focus is primarily in driving awareness and education (how and why you should use the feature), and Product's focus is usabilty (building a feature that solves a real problem). Becau...more

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Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing

How is the PMM team structured by product line, segment, function or by objective (ie. revenue retention, product engagement, etc)?

I think that depends on your company goals. At HoneyBook we've identified a specific segment that has the best product-market fit, so we're solely focusing on that segment. Therefore it makes more sense for us to split the work by feature (product line) and by user lifecycle stage. But I think th...more

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Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing

A product marketer jobs starts way before the product launch. However, it is difficult situation when the product launch is delayed from eng side. How do we approach the launch plan that was pre-decided? What changes in approaches would you recommend

This is challenging indeed and something I've had to deal with at every company I've worked for. What I've fund helps keep me and the business teams sain is to plan to launch features 14 days after the official planned released date. This makes product nervous most of the time, but most of the ti...more

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Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing

Product Marketing is such a cross-functional role - do you feel it is necessary to dip your toe in these other orgs/roles (ex. Demand Gen, Product) to fully comprehend your work and excel?

You need to truly understand your partner's motivations and processes. I don't think you need to have been an AE or a PM to be able to do great PMM work but you do need to have very open and very frequent communication with your cross-functional partners. Don't be affraid to ask detailed question...more

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Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing

What are the most important product marketing skills or perspectives that others inside an organization could benefit from that would improve their day to day? Running a "Think Like a Product Marketer" course next month and would love to hear others' thoughts!

1. User research. Know what questions need to be answered and either work with a research partner or do the research yourself. 2. Leadership. PMM is the glue that brings multiple functions together and you need to be able to motivate and inspire everyone. You also need to be able to keep people ...more

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Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing

How do you prioritize your product marketing projects and still make time for ad-hoc requests?

Ah, that's the million dollar question. At the beginning of each half we align with the leadership team which features and projects we're going to work on. This helps set expectations. Then I socialize with PMs what PMM is working on, which usually includes other projects besides feature launches...more

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Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing

What is the best partnership/process you have seen between product marketing and marketing when it comes to a product launch? We have these as two distinct teams in our organization and we're seeing some confusion when we do product launches. Any documentation or words of wisdom would be helpful.

Product Marketing should be hub and glue that brings all teams together. I usually create a brief for each product launch (see messaging framework question below to see what goes into the brief) and I think through what channels should push the feature. I use another framework for this, which cla...more

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Loren Elia

Director of Product Marketing

What are some effective strategies to inevitably influence the product roadmap rather than simply bringing that roadmap to market?

At HoneyBook we have established a product feedback process between Sales/CS/Product. We meet every 6 weeks and share customer feedback. We prioritize feedback based on number of requests, which we track in Salesforce and with an internal system. But what has really made a difference is that inst...more

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Credentials & Highlights

Director of Product Marketing at HoneyBook