What is your process for developing portfolio messaging and how is it different from developing product messaging?

As a start-up, there really can't be any daylight between your mission, strategy and initial product manifestations. That is, your company positioning and your product positioning are the same. A disciplined, successful company will continue to invest in new products that pay into the company mission and don't require major strategy shifts in order to successfully get to market.

Of course, strategies will shift as companies and markets evolve, but innovation bets should, in my experience, be tethered pretty tightly to the purpose the company wants to play in the world. And though this sounds obvious enough, I bet most of us can tell stories about major investments in new businesses that looked too attractive to pass-up, even if they were patently off-strategy. I've never seen that work well.

So if management is sharp, the portfolio of products will make conceptual sense and play to company strengths. That makes the job of selling the portfolio easier; the portfolio positioning and the company positioning should look a lot alike. The product positioning is richer and more specific, but you should be able to see connections between each product positioning and the portfolio positioning. And once you have a portfolio positioning, I'd employ the same process to develop messaging that I use on a product level.

In terms of a process, I think what changes most from product positioning is the number of stakeholders you have to bring along for the ride, both in creating the positioning and in shipping portfolio assets. Better to find ways to bring them into the process than deal with sometimes myopic, product-centric objections that miss the point. Too many of us have probably also been tasked with back-rationalizing a portfolio message to make sense of a portfolio that was cobbled together for less than strategic reasons. I don't know that there's a right way to do that, but I think it's a good opportunity to highlight the lack of coherence and the problems it creates. 

At Fivetran, we actually have a few different Product Marketing teams in order to be able to do both core product messaging as well as more portfolio messaging. At Fivetran, folks find us / use us for particular analytic challenges - like Marketing Analytics, Finance Analytics, Sales Analytics, etc. As a result, we have pods dedicated to each of these areas. The core of the pod is a PMM and a PM - and they are mapped to the data sources associated with each use case (e.g., Marketing Analytics pod owns our Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. data sources). The pods also have other members - a Solution Architect, a Sales Engineer, and a CSM. These folks help with additional activities around enablement, or bugs when we are moving connectors (our name for sources) through our development process. 

As a pod, they share a north star metric around growth of customers using their connectors as well as usage of those connectors month over month. We treat them like mini GMs of their use case and they have to report out monthly as to their growth numbers, where we churned, where we grew, and why. 

All of this goes to demonstrate how closely our PMMs are to their use cases - this makes developing messaging for their areas a lot easier. They are deeply emmersed in their area of business - they work hand in hand with their PM on every new development and are constantly talking to customers, prospects, and the industry. This laser focus helps them continually develop and redevelop their messaging. 

The way it is different is that it is very much focused on particular pain points for that use case. As an example, our core product messaging highlights that we have hundreds of pre-built fully managed connectors. For our Marketing Analytics use case, all that messaging highlights the number of Marketing connectors - over 50 - as well as the ability to bring in complementary data to build more robust reporting - like Salesforce data. Or that Marketing teams often change tools - and for someone who is building custom pipelines, that can be a lot of wasted effort. But we've got hundreds of fully managed connectors, so as soon as your marketing team changes tools, we've got you covered. 

From a process perspective, I'm not sure I'd draw a disctinction between the two. However, portfolio may be a little more complex in that it's multiple products. One thing I've found successful is drawing out a marketecture for how that portfolio of products fits into the broader ecosystem of our technology. You can use it to help you understand how to develop messaging that is distinct from your other products yet tied to the overall product strategy and narrative that's been developed. 

When we had one product marketing manager (2015), we had the product knowledge to articulate business value and simplify technical concepts. With addition of solution and industry marketing managers, we evolved to product and solution marketing(2017), and we started to focus on buyer personas and customer pain points. This led to the evolution of portfolio messaging as the anchor for our team to help showcase our value and differentiation as compared to product management or marketing, where we own product, solution, and industry messaging. Today(2019), I am honored to support a team of 12 high performing and mindful team members that are driven to be the voice of the customer. Our team responsibilities include portfolio messaging and positioning, buyer persona research, product and solution launches, and competitive intelligence as well.

When we are developing product messaging, we focus on the product and the features and capabilities that simplify the life for the user. Our messaging/positioning leads to assets like product briefs, technical whitepapers/ebooks, and demos that focus on product awesomeness.

When we are developing portfolio messaging (product, solutions, and industry), we are looking through the buyer persona lens. A buyer exists in a specific industry and their pain points may be unique to that industry. When we conducted our buyer persona research, our interview responses were loud and clear - everyone wanted to see use cases and scenarios that are relevant to their industry, not just a horizontal solution. This helped us to look at our top 5 buyer personas and we are developing messaging and positioning that is relevant for a specific target segment.