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 ...Read More

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 co ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 th ...Read More

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 asp ...Read More

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 su ...Read More

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 a ...Read More

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 y ...Read More