How to be the first product marketer

Many startups I work with haven't hired their first marketing person yet. When they do, that person is going to be focused on product marketing. I help hire them, and sometimes mentor them, as they go through the trials of being the first person in a role.

Some things I've learned from being that person, hiring that person, and helping that person succeed.

Start before you start

There are things you should understand before day one, that you can discover during the interview process.

• What does product marketing mean here? How do they think about it?
• What specific business goals do they think product marketing will advance?
• What specific challenges do they have in marketing right now?
• What does everyone think you’re going to be doing: the founders, your boss, product, engineering?

Chances are that you will be working for founders, working with people, and reporting to a manager—who are largely unfamiliar with marketing. You should make sure you know what it means to them and what they think it's going to do for the company.

Make a dent

Software engineers will often ship something on their first day. That’s considered part of successful onboarding. As the first product marketer, no one is going to onboard you. If you started before you started, you should have a list of marketing challenges the company is facing right now.

Figure out what you can move the needle on and do it as a mark of your own successful onboarding. On day one.

Talk to everyone

Talk to everyone you can get your hands on—founders, product people, engineers, sales, support, customer success, users, customers, buyers, people who didn't buy, people who churned, investors. Everyone.

You're trying to get a feel for what really matters about the company and what it's building.

• What did the company build? Who did they build it for? Why does it matter?
• Why do people use? Why don't people use it? Why did they stop?
• Why did people buy it? Why didn't they? Why did they churn?
• What would happen if it was taken away?
• What were they doing before?
• How does it make their life, or at least the workday, better? How does it fit into their workflow?
• What are their favorite things about it? What about the least favorite?
• Was it hard to figure out what it does at first? What's the experience of trying to understand what it does via the website, docs, etc?
• What's their wishlist for the product?
• How do they describe it to other people inside their company? Outside their company?
• How would they explain it to a peer in another organization?
• What does it compete against? Where does it fit in the landscape of other ways to do the same thing?
• What do the founders want it to be compared to? What does it get compared to in real life?

Find the gaps

Pay special attention to the difference between how people inside the company talk about these things vs how users and customers do.

Write down what you hear from the company so everyone can see it. Do the same with what you hear from customers.

Then drive a conversation about the differences between the two, so you can start figuring out how to close the gaps. This is the start of your messaging and positioning platform.

In a lot of ways, this is your one job. This will be the thing you return to again and again to make sure that you're communicating the right thing to the right people at the right time. Not just in emails, or on the website, but also in things like docs or the messages that users get from the product.

Here's a basic messaging & positioning template I made as a starting point. Feel free to copy and put it to work! And read: 10 questions that tell your startup story and turn it into great messaging. Can you answer them?

Understand users

Through this process, you should begin to develop a deep understanding of your users and customers. This is important. How can you figure out how to communicate with a person you don’t work to understand?

For every person that your product touches or that is involved in the decision making process of whether or not to use or buy it, you need to have on the tip or your tongue and in the front of your mind:

• What their daily pains are
• What their goals are
• How they’re measured
• What success looks like for them in their role in their company
• What their pressures and constraints are
• Who or what influences their thinking about using or buying products like yours

Learn the product

It’s incredibly hard to build internal credibility as a product marketer if you don’t know the product as well as a product manager. Which might be a big task. But I guarantee that it's worth the work.

• Go through a product onboarding, learn how it's used and what features matter most
• Shadow anyone who gives demos or pitches, learn to do it yourself
• Attend user research
• Look at all the dashboards, queries, reports, and metrics that exist about usage and user behavior

You should be able to, in a pinch, act at as an acceptable product manager or sales engineer.

Write it down

Write it down. Write everything down. Make sure that everyone can see it.

For the company to be pulling in the same direction, everyone not only has to be building the same thing—they have to be doing it for the same people, thinking and talking about it in the same way.

Drive growth

If you can do all these things, you can help real growth.

• Write copy for the website, for emails, for campaigns, for ads, for landing pages, for talks, for chat bots, for in product communication, for press pitches, for press releases, for analyst briefings
• Run webinars, create videos, write blog posts
• Interview customers for case studies and then create them
• Create things like pitch decks, data sheets, and email templates 
• Help people understand the product better, faster

Launch something

Bring a new feature or product to market. Figure out how to talk about it, where to launch it, whether to try to get into the press, or if you want to launch on Product Hunt, etc. Once you know what you're launching and how you're going to launch it, the rest is logistics.

Remember, every successful launch does exactly one thing—drive more growth.

Keep things connected

Keeping product, sales, marketing—and maybe some other functions—connected is going to fall on you. Because product marketing sits at the intersection of these disciplines.

• How do sales people know what’s shipping and how to pitch it?
• How does product know what the biggest functionality frictions are that exist in competitive deals?
• How do performance marketers know what keywords to run campaigns against for a new feature?

Become an important voice

Become the voice of the customer and the market. You want people to look to you to know if a value proposition will appeal to customers. Or if a feature is going to be competitive.

Keep the company informed of what’s going on in the industry. Stay up on what your competitors are doing. Know how users, buyers, competitors, journalists, analysts, bloggers, and influencers are thinking about your space in general and your company+products in particular. Bring that viewpoint to everything you do.

Ask for help

You're not going to know everything. No one does.

Ask for help! Find a mentor! Tell your founders you'd like an advisor!

Embrace change

Any job where you’re the first doing something is going to change over time. Embrace the ever changing nature of your role!

You might go from creating messaging to training sales to writing email copy to interviewing customers to presenting on a webinar to briefing analysts to preparing the CEO for a Techcrunch interview—all in the same week.

You might report into the CEO on year, the VP Product the next, and a new VP Marketing the year after that.

You might be the difference between success and failure, so make the most of it. :)

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Good luck!