Vishal Naik

At DocuSign, there are product marketers across our main product categories, as well as industry and audience teams. Every company I've ever worked at has grouped their teams differently, so I tend to consider new roles based on mapping skills to company needs. If the largest TAM is in a vertical...more

I view the role of a PMM as being someone who owns the full story/customer perception of a product, is the product-line CMO so to speak. Sometimes you will need to market a solution, sometimes you will need to launch a product, sometimes you will need to convince sales people to do something and ...more

An Engineering leader at a previous company described this to me as a tripod--decisions made based on the intersection of PM, Eng and PMM. Here PMM is representing the customer, and to an effect, also Sales opportunities. In an ideal state, you'd have this. When you don't, you'll need to understa...more

Market research is a pretty valuable data point in terms of prioritizing verticals (or any other segmentation slice), but so too is your product ownership point of view and your internal usage data. So you don't need to lean on external research, but it can certainly augment your other efforts. I...more

The biggest thing I consider is that the messaging created is about the customer and what they are thinking/feeling/experiencing. Rather than what we are building and what we are selling. I've kept a messaging template from a previous org where we focused on market context, customer pain points,...more

Great question. To be frank, even for companies with a reputation of being open and extensible, this one is always a challenge when you're in a Platform role. Because at the end of the day, the Platform is less about what products your company creates and more about what a customer can do. Thus y...more

When selling a platform, you're selling what a customer can accomplish, less what a customer is buying. Obviously in the SaaS world, a lot of our marketing is based on the product being the thing that gets a customer to a desired future state, but that's even more true when selling a platform. T...more

I'm big on analogies (perhaps annoyingly so), so equate it to a concert: The Portfolio or Suite is like the band. It's the grouping of the products that you sell/come to see. The Ecosystem is like TicketMaster or StubHub. It's how you gain access to see the band/use the product if you're not walk...more

In my opinion, the most important thing in prioritizing your messaging is finding the common denominator across your platform. Does it create a new output, or solve a new problem, or enable a new style of working, for example. Then you prioritize that in your messaging hierarchy, and use the vari...more

Answering this based on the context of the question being asked from the POV of a CRM vendor looking to scale: The biggest challenge I've come across is attribution. The framework to drive consistent lead generation really focuses on the mediums, but any marketer is going to test and optimize bas...more