Sophia (Fox) Le

Once you are clear on the value proposition of a product/feature and/or a positioning statement for the company or product, you are ready to pull together a messaging framework that your cross-functional stakeholders (from marketing to product) can leverage.  In terms of a messaging framework, I have found that formats vary by company but all fundamentally cover a combo of key elements based on what your teams require for a successful launch (ideally delivered as a 1-sheeter or 1 slide format): ...Read More

Yes! Glassdoor, under the leadership of Bonnie (Head of Market Insights), established two market research online communities (MROC): one for consumers (B2C) and one for customers (B2B). We regularly field message tests to these two research communities to get quick, detailed feedback on messaging. This is what Bonnie had to say about MROCs: MROCs make message testing easy, efficient, and effective! Once your online community is fully recruited, you can send them a survey and usually get a suffic ...Read More

Per our head of PMM (Eric Petitt), it is important to think about and understand the market leader positioning because the leader often defines category expectations… as well as their weaknesses. And when a challenger tries to play catch up to the market leader, the copy-cat will die over time because they are not adding value. The recommendation then is to pick a tighter target audience and a differentiator that will “de-position” the market leader. Your strengths should call out their weakness ...Read More

Quantitative and qualitative market research. Working with expert market research partners will help you get to solid customer segmentation, customer journey mapping, competitive landscape analysis, market trends, and market sizing, TAM. This can be costly, but always worth it!  Qualitative customer interviews. This is probably the easiest and most powerful thing you can do yourself in partnership with product or product design counterparts. You can do 1:1 interviews or even leverage tools like ...Read More

Great question and critical to the success of any product launch! At Glassdoor, we start by creating a digestible framework with initial messaging recommendations and “seed” this throughout the process with key stakeholders. The initial messaging recommendations are developed using insights from previously conducted research and feedback from key stakeholders or subject matter experts/SMEs. Two of our greatest advantages at Glassdoor Product Marketing are (1) our Head of Market Insights who is l ...Read More

Data, data, data! Once you are able to identify your customer’s unmet needs, motivations, and attitudes, you can put your customer at the center of your business cases to influence product priorities. And couple that with market insights on your competition, your product counterparts will have to listen. Are you able to identify any gaps that your current feature set does not address? Is there an opportunity for your product to be first to market by fulfilling an unmet need that they cannot get ...Read More

It is so easy to fall into launching with technical jargon when you've been living and breathing it as a PMM! Two ways that I have found helpful in simplifying, and even transforming/replacing techncial jargon are (1) launch customer interviews, listen and use the language they use, and (2) crowd source ideas internally and externally with as many different POVs as possible. Pro tip: Get inspired by looking outside your field to see how others are taking tricky technical language and turning it ...Read More

Change is inevitable! So whenever possible, going to market with “final” messaging should include room for evolution over time based on various external and internal factors. Markets change and evolve, and customers’ needs or perspectives also change and evolve based on whatever is important to them in that moment--sometimes even driven by trends or current events that cannot be ignored (think, Covid!). If in a B2B org, you can quickly leverage feedback from the field to validate whether your me ...Read More

Build relationships. Show up to add value; ask, remind, repeat. Bring the voice of the customer to the table. Leverage customer interviews, NPS verbatims, third-party research findings, competitive intel. Bring data to validate and strengthen your recommendations with the customer wants, needs/unmet, and motivations at the center of said suggestions. Bring your marketing calendar with you. Create shared aspirations to get as much exposure and adoption of products set to release while opening dis ...Read More

If you have relationships built with your product counterparts, and product leadership, you can influence through this relationship. This is especially the case if your product marketing org is accepted as a strategic partner instead of just a tactical partner. Ideally this partnership if founded on your PMs leaning on you to contribute as voice of the customer, data-driven insights on the market landscape, the competition, trends.  As the voice of the customer and market insights SME (subject-m ...Read More