Robin Fontaine

It's been a while since I was at an early stage startup, but I find the process isn't that different than working on on early stage product within an established company, which I do a lot of! In the early stages, clarity and focus are critical. I would start with: Positioning and Messaging – based on customer interviews, competitive insights, and founder vision. ICP and Segmentation – Who are we targeting now vs. later? What are their pain points? Launch Framework – What constitutes a “launch” a ...Read More

There are a few approaches I have found helpful here. A good ol' SWOT analysis may be what you need. This is a pretty common framework where you list strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your own product, and a competitor's. Placing the two side by side can illuminate areas where your team should focus. Sometimes a feature comparison table is helpful if you need a more granular view of how you stack up against a competitor at the feature level. Here you can use a spreadsheet or ...Read More

Even if accessing quantitative data is a challenge, you can almost always find a way to get great qualitative data by setting up interviews with customers or prospects. You can do these over video chat. Here's a process you can follow: Write a research brief that includes goals, target audience you want to interview, whether you will pay the subjects, how you'll recruit them, and the timeline for your research. Create a discussion guide for the interviews. This is like a script our outline you'l ...Read More

Product Marketers should be able to support of execute fully on a few types of research. What role they play in the research will depend on whether or not they have dedicated researchers at their company, or budget to hire an agency. Surveys: PMMs should be able to author, send, and analyze the results of surveys. Key skills are: writing good questions that will not unwittingly bias the answers, and data analysis of the answers (though many are using Chat GPT to help with summarizing takeaways). ...Read More

Every company and sometimes each team within a company can have a different approach to this. As a Product Marketer, you need to build some flexibility and contingencies into every GTM plan. Most of the time there are at least some long term strategic priorities that have been on the roadmap for a year or more. Most teams I have been on will do a roadmap planning cycle every 6 months, and sometimes a mini planning cycle every quarter. Then there are times when the roadmap has to change quickly d ...Read More

There are many tried and true frameworks or this. Here are some I use: STAR Method There’s one you’ve likely been told to use in interviews: The STAR method, which stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. You can apply this same framework to product storytelling. For example, what Situation is your prospect in? What are they Tasked with doing (and what are the obstacles)? What Action were they able to accomplish with the help of your product? And what was the positive Result? Duarte Method Na ...Read More

A strong research program should include both qualitative and quantitative data. And if you're strapped for time and resources, which we often are, the best place to start is talking to customers, even if you can only do so once a week. Try to set up a system that keeps you in the groove of having regular customer conversations. This will give you great qualitative data. For quant data, a regular cadence of surveys can be valuable. This might take the form of a longer survey once a year to asses ...Read More

Almost always, a better approach is to make your target customer the protagonist of the story. No one really cares about your product. They care about how it will help them or their business. They care about how it might make them a hero in the eyes of their colleagues or friends if it delivers on its promise. Imagine your target persona realizing they have a problem that your product can solve. What’s the pain like —the time wasted, the frustration, the lost revenue—all because they don’t have ...Read More

When I was hired at Patreon to build and lead the product marketing function, my first big project was a repricing and packaging exercise. Among other things, we wanted to move from a one-size-fits-all pricing model to a 3-tiered “good, better, best” model.  I started out thinking that it would be a terrible outcome if we ended up calling the three pricing tiers something generic like “Basic, Pro, and Premium”. Our customers were artists and creators! As creative people, surely they would prefer ...Read More