Pulkit Agrawal

In my experience, most product teams are not well incentivized to pursue adoption over moving onto the next feature or problem to solve. 

Dedicated product growth teams are great for this, and if your organization has one, then it's likely their job to drive product engagement. Product marketing can support this with customer marketing and the right messaging, or in targeting non-engaged users / non-customers. 

In cases where there isn't a product growth function / team / person, then I think there is good scope for Product Marketing to step up and drive adoption. Key things that this can include:

- In-product comms / marketing (e.g. targeting users that are a good fit with more info or mini announcements)

- Customer-focussed marketing (e.g. blog posts or emails for customers) 

- Training of AM / CS teams 

Of course all this requires a mandate for the Product Marketing team to drive adoption, a decent understanding of adoption metrics and some relevant systems / tooling to enable these activities, as described by others. 

As we move into a product-first world, the best companies have cross-functional teams designed to drive user engagement and success. Product Marketing is a key component of this. 

Roadmap planning is a crucial part of getting to product-market (or product-channel) fit and I believe Product Marketers have a key role to play in this. In fact, this is how I would define Product Marketing: 

Image source: A New Definition of Product Marketing

This means that Product Marketers have as much of a role in defining (shaping) the product as they do in communicating the product. Having a balance will mean that this becomes a virtuous circle and speed up the time to Fit. 

This may not be a standard definition (yet) and although there are many different flavours (and a lot of inconsistency) in defining Product Marketing across different organizations, it's helpful to have a holistic understanding of what the role can (and maybe should) include, especially as we collectively mature in our understanding of how best to treat this role amidst our teams. 

This question is already answered here, so check that out: https://sharebird.com/what-do-you-think-the-ideal-role-of-a-product-marketing-manager-should-be-in-roadmap-planning

People's responses vary based on their definition of Product Marketing at their company or in their experience. It's a fluctuating role, but my personal perspective is that Product Marketing should be part of the core team that provides inputs to help Product teams understand priorities from the market. 

I haven't surveyed the field, but as a consumer / customer, I find Uber and Lyft to do a good job; especially because they use the real-estate within their products to effectively notify me of product changes, upcoming promotions and company news. 

I never read the emails from these, but I am in the app regularly, and if you can leverage your captive audience within your platform, then they are best primed to act upon any marketing or information you present. 

I would approach this in two ways:

1. Identify where the problem lies -- use quant data to understand where drop-off is occuring
2. Identify why the problem exists -- understand user motivation and where the friction is in their flow that's preventing them from succeeding.

For the latter, you can ask questions along the lines of:

- Why did you sign-up for this product? What was the immediate trigger and the underlying pain?
- What were you hoping to accomplish during your first session?
- What part of the product were you most excited about playing with?
- How much time and investment were you willing to make in this first session?

This will help you understand the motivations, and then you can tailor your user onboarding towards that. If you can get users to an "aha moment " then they will have enough energy to continue to invest time and energy into your product. 

Curious to know if there are any metrics that the Product Marketing function is accountable for any metrics?

I know there is such a wide variety of jobs that Product Marketers do, but for example, if trial conversion or adoption purely owned by the Product Marketing function, or are all the metrics shared with other teams? 

My one piece of advice on this though is to make the announcement about the WHY and not the HOW.

Too often teams focus on showing people the feature (through a feature tour or tooltip etc.) but that really misses a key step, which is to get someone excited about how the change can add value to their life and work. 

Here is my suggested framework for in-product announcements (having worked on this for many years):

1. 2-3 weeks before launch: provide a heads-up / short teaser to let a user know a change is coming and why they should be excited by it. This also helps quell any anxiety when the change arrives. 
2. Announce the change and why you put the effort into making it (and how it'll add value to the user). Encourage them to explore and play (don't take the fun out of self-discovery by handholding them through it)
3. If they haven't used it in a couple weeks, offer a tour or walkthrough
4. Once they've seen it / used it, do a quick in-product survey to understand whether it met their expectations and how easy it is to use (this will help you relay info to the product team on whether the feature needs more work)

You can do a bunch of this stuff with Chameleon and there are a bunch of examples of what others have done here. 

Good luck!

Based on some research we did (admittendly small sample size), we found that 2/3 report to CMO / VP Marketing and only ~10% to Product.

Source: A New Definition of Product Marketing

At this stage unfortunately there isn't enough executive ownership of the Product Marketing function, but in future I hope it reports to either VP of Product Marketing or VP Product. This is because Product is now becoming about growth and needs to have a cross-functional team which includes marketing. 

Our folks at Reforge (that run growth courses) lay out the future of Growth teams fairly well here. 

We've actually been surveying product marketers about this, and the tools fall into a few different categories. Here are examples from each:

1. Research and analysis (e.g. UserTesting, Typeform, Heap)
2. Collaboration (G Suite, Asana, Slack)
3. Asset creation (InVision, Frame, Soapbox)
4. Launches / marketing (Hubspot, Intercom, Zoom)

There is a longer list in this post we wrote: https://www.trychameleon.com/blog/product-marketing-tools 

Great points from Scott. One perspective I'll add:

"Too many" implies the customer isn't motivated to answer the questions presented. Too many questions might be 1 question, or 15 questions. Therefore this is also a problem of UX design. Some things to consider:

• Help a customer understand the value / impact of what you're asking (why it will help them)
• Ask at the right time! Sending a survey via email is really hit and miss. Maybe try to ask them when they're using your product; this might be via a Typeform modal, or Intercom Messenger etc.
• Use progressive disclosure / logic where possible, so that answers are contextual. You may even consider using a bot, so that the survey seems conversational