Vidya Drego

It's pretty difficult to get a straightforward read on the effectiveness of your messaging and positioning but there are a few things you can do to ensure your messaging is more likely to succeed. 1) During the process of creating the messaging, work with your market research team to test aspects of the messaging with prospects and customers. This can be both quantitative test of words or descriptors you use as well as qualitative tests where you actually test aspects of a pitch with customer. 2) Get input early and often from your sales, customer success, and support teams. 3) Use A/B testing to evalute how the messaging resonates on your website, search, social copy. Once you've created the messaging, you can use your channel metrics to track how well it's resonating but give it time. Any change of messaging takes a while to take hold with the audience (be it sales or customers) so don't be in a rush to make an update just because you see metrics dip initially.

I like to ask questions in interviews that stem from real challenges and decisions my team are having or have made. I've seen great resources aggregated here on Sharebird, from the Product Marketing Alliance, and PMM Hive. But definitely don't memorize answer to questions or cases, make sure you connect examples back to work you've done or your own experiences.

I like to ask PMM candidates to deliver their company's pitch. I'm not grading their pitch but rather the empathy and insight they display for and about their customers' challenges, the way they deliver it, and the storytelling ability of the candidate. There's no one answer to this that's stood out but it's the delivery that makes the difference. People who can clearly explain what pain point their customer feels and succintly how their company solves it (and can throw in some proof) are always the stand outs. The best answers are from the few people who aren't afraid to role play and pretend i'm a customer that they're pitching.

It's an interesting time to be in product marketing because I think there will be significant shifts in the next few years in how we think about go-to-market. There's a fair amount being written today about how go-to-marketing motions have evolved from inside sales to inbound marketing to product-led growth and are heading towards more community-led growth. Each phase is additive to the one before it (i.e. companies are not going to stop doing one and move to the next but find more success in combining strategies) but I think a lot of the same skills will persist. First, PMMs will ALWAYS have to be exceptional communicators. Specifically, they have to be able to simplify the complex and not only write in their own voice, but typically in the voice of their company or sales team. They have to be able to understand a process or scenario that they're often not a part of and come up with ways of influencing it. And they have to be able to tell a story. Secondly, they have to be able to understand the dynamics of their market. This starts with who their customers are and how these people are changing or being challenged. The means by which a PMM influences or relates to their customers has changed and will continue to change but constantly listening to those customers and periodically picking your head up to evaluate whether the dynamics of the market have changed can often help you partner with experts to execute in the right way. As an example, my team has and will invest much more time with our customers telling their story, helping turn them into acvocates and build and develop their own communities. This is different from where we spent our time five years ago but involves many of the same skills.

We use a messaging ladder (a slightly customized version of many i've seen online) but are increasingly using a broader framework to connect our messaging to the buyer journey. The framework we use to structure the messaging doesn't dictate how often we update the messaging. For this, we try to anchor our positioning on our product vision at least 1 year out and figure out evolutions to our messaging that help us realize that long-term positioning.

There are a couple of ways to think about advancement in a PMM career. You can specialize in a specific aspect of product marketing like inbound or product launches, for example. Or, you can broaden your experiences and amass experience in a variety of areas of PMM. In the current job market, there are plenty of opportunities for to follow either path. My recommendation is to find the aspects of PMM that you truly enjoy and balance that with your interest in learning and practicing different aspects of the role.

Product Marketing is challenging because the function influences many metrics but isn't normally the owner of those metrics. Exciting new deal closed? There's usually a PMM that helped along the way although it's sales' win. Cool new product feature launched? Definitely a PMM in the mix, but it's the Product team's achievement. As a PMM, you have to be confident about your own contributions and not the type of person who needs complete ownership of a metric. Often, for myself, I like to make sure I have measures that help me understand how i've improved or advanced my skills as well as metrics that help me gauge my impact to the business. The former could like reducing cycles of review of messaging because you've committed to improving your writing skills or starting a program or process that helps solve a common challenge more efficiently. The latter depends largely on the organization and how PMM is aligned. If you're at a company where PMM helps shape product roadmap and adoption, how you test fit, launch, and drive adoption or usage could be your most important metric. If you're scaling an existing product, you may be looking at increasing average sales price (ASP) or improving the sales process or materials in some way. As I've evolved within PMM, more of my performance indicators are business metrics because my organization is expected to deliver for sales and/or product.

Positioning and messaging both help you explain the value you deliver. I've always thought of positioning as something that lives internally within a company to help the organization contextualize their product or service within their category. It's the strategy by which you choose to communicate your value. The messaging is the words they use to explain this to the outside world. The two are very related and in some companies with a mature offering, they may be mostly the same. For companies that are earlier stage, your messaging may reflect the immediate nature of where you are while your positioning captures where you plan to go.

That's a tough call. What we've found recently is that as we've adapted our messaging for an enterprise audience, it's resonated less with small businesses. Some companies choose to vary their messaging by audience size (e.g. Shopify) others have one-size-fits-all messaging regardless of size. I think another option is somewhere in between where there are different reasons to believe, proofs and sometimes even value propositions depending on the size of the prospect or customer (but with other aspects of the messaging ladder remaining the same). I think it's difficult for messaging to work for all size audiences though so if the differences are extreme, it's probably wise to force a strategic decision about what audience to focus on before trying to write messaging to work for everyone.

I think it's always possible for product marketers to learn varied skills by being open to new projects or opportunities when they've mastered a skill. At a large company, where roles are more specialized there are often opportunities to work on different projects or products that may have different product-market-fit. At a smaller company, the scope may be wider but you may not have the opportunity to go as deep with any skill set. I'd advise being open to all the opportunities you see around you and be unafraid to speak with your manager about your career and growth aspirations and have them help you identify projects or opportunities that might help you take the next step.