Pranav Deshpande

I've written about this in detail on my blog, so I'll summarize my thoughts below! Messaging and positioning work is never complete, so always treat your positioning doc as a living document that will evolve with your business. The framework I like to use involves starting with jobs to be done: Step 1: Start with the ‘jobs to be done’ What: Define the ‘jobs’ your product can be ‘hired’ to perform Why: As Peter Drucker once said, customers don’t buy products or features, they buy benefits. Jobs-t ...Read More

You can't think of developer GTM as just another channel you can tack on to an existing GTM motion, like paid social or sponsorships. Developer GTM needs to be an integral component of the company's strategy, with product, engineering, and sales all aligned towards making it successful. It requires hiring a different breed of marketer, specifically developers-turned-marketers, to operate. I think its also a lot easier to build this function during the early stages of your GTM journey to make cro ...Read More

In my opinion, benefits need to describe the outcome of using the feature. The outcome should address a real pain point for the target customer of the feature. The benefit should also be relative to the next best alternative available to the target customer. When we draft positioning statements for our products at Modern Treasury, we make sure they separately articulate pain points, alternatives, and top benefits for each key product feature. For example, for our Payments product, 'Direct bank c ...Read More

Your sales team needs a higher level of technical proficiency when you're a B2D company. It's important to hire sales reps that can form their own mental model of how your product works and integrates with the rest of a customers tech stack for them to be successful. They don't need to know how to code, but they do need to be able to develop a strong functional understanding of the product their selling.  Assuming you've hired sales reps that fit this criteria, enablement should focus on use cas ...Read More

To be honest, this has been difficult to figure out. I don't think we have the best solution yet, but for now, we write down positioning statetements for each product, which include key messages, to ensure that we have one clear reference for other teams in the company. Each positioning statement is versioned to make sure we're tracking how often its being changed.  What I've found is these internal docs are most useful to PMM or the rest of marketing. But they aren't great at dissemination. The ...Read More

There's both qualitative and quantitative ways to test messaging, and in my opinion both are equally important in the long run.  The qualitative approach involves directly validating messaging with your target audience by: 1. Joining sales calls, pitching the product yourself, and seeing how they respond.  2. Interviewing your sales and customer success team to understand which aspects of the messaging you've drafted for them are resonating. 3. Listening to recorded customer conversations. At Mo ...Read More

I think it's important to discuss the objective of investing in marketing to developers before answering this question directly. At Twilio, the Developer Marketing team described their mission as 'inspiring and equipping today's developers to build the next generation of communications'. Their goal was to make Twilio APIs an integral part of the toolkit of any developers, regardless of whether they had an immediate need from them or not. The thesis (which prove to be spectacularly correct) was t ...Read More

To start I'd say thorough competitive research is the foundation of great product marketing, so it's great that your company is investing in it. It's really important for the PMM that owns a product to be an expert on both direct and indirect competitors. Competitive research shouldn't happen in a vaccuum — it needs to be informed by persona research and the long term vision and product strategy. Especially at the early stages of a new product, the competitive landscape can seem vast and intimid ...Read More

Great question! The relative importance of these tips depends on your GTM motion (mostly top-down or mostly bottoms-up), but in principle they're all about contributing meaningfully to growing revenues and customer count: 1. Case studies - sales and demand gen love customer case studies. Nothing sells or converst quite like social proof, so creating a few case studies is a great way to get some early wins. 2. Competitive intelligence - competitive deep dives and analyses are foundational to PMM, ...Read More

Extremely. If you don't speak their language you will never be able to build credibility with them. Your messaging should also focus on education and explaining what your product does and how it does it instead of why your product is better. Developers tend to be skeptical of any such claims until they've verified for themselves, usually by playing around with the product. Your messaging also needs to be initimately familiar with their current worfklows, habits, and preferences so that you can h ...Read More