My thoughts and notes on Product Marketing
Let me just begin by saying, I have never officially held a title that had 'Product Marketing' in the name. So, why this post? Because I truly believe in the thought by?Shane Parrish ?- Writing is often the process by which you realize that you do not understand what you are talking about.
So by the end of the post, either I would have successfully absorbed all ambiguity and gave out clarity on the topic or I would exactly know what are those holes in my thought process about product marketing, and I can ask the people who know better.
So, let's take that plunge.
How do I define (understand) product marketing?
Product marketing deeply understands the company's audience and product and determines how to effectively communicate with this audience.
Borrowed from the?mkt1 newsletter , I like the definition because it is simple and covers the 3 fundamental pillars of the job - audience, product, and communication.
Product marketing is essentially about effectively communicating the product and its benefits to your audience. Expanding on each of these three keywords – product, benefits, audience – will give you what this function means for your specific organization.
If you can shed all other bells and whistles of the job and are able to do this with perfection, you'll be in the top percentile automatically.
The strategic role of Product Marketing
"Product marketers choose the market segments to target, determine what attributes the product needs to win against the competition, design an effective go-to-market plan along with the required positioning and messaging.
That's essentially is "where to play" and "how to win" - the pillar questions of strategy." -?Peep Laja
Here's an example of?Product Marketing being a strategic function ?at Intercom -?
Here’s a solid example from my earliest days at Intercom: When we finally released custom event tracking we could have just said, “Okay, you can now track custom events in Intercom”, but most people probably wouldn’t have cared. Yes, that accurately describes the feature, but that doesn’t tell anyone anything about why they would want to use it or how it’ll make their lives better.
The value in the Intercom Events feature was that you could send messages to customers at a perfectly timed moment, which wasn’t possible before. You could reach people when they logged in for the first time, or maybe when they canceled their account – so that’s the story we went with. I focused on highlighting the things people wanted to do, rather than the feature itself because people understood the value in doing them. This was a breakthrough. It wasn’t too long before the product managers realized that they should give us a heads up before they were ready to ship something, rather than after.
Since we're talking about the strategic role of Product Marketing, let's tackle the age-old confusion between product marketing and product management. Let's dive in.
Product Marketing vs Product Management
Why the confusion? Mostly because different organizations define product marketing differently and we, on the receiving end judge job roles by the deliverables, activities, and the impact of the job role.
In this case, both the roles are absolutely customer-centric. And have an impact on:
So, whenever you're confused between the two roles, remind yourself of?pancakes.
Imagine you're a part of the team that is given the responsibility of developing the readymade pancake mix.
It's a tricky product. You flip the box of the pancake mix and you'd find the mentioned ingredients - refined wheat flour, vegetable oil, baking powder, milk solids, and preservatives.
You can find all of those, in better quality on your kitchen shelves, and yet the pancake mix is a runaway success.
It leaves us with a lot to learn from.?
If you're the product manager of the pancake mix, you get to the customer research to find out the customer needs, understand the business potential, map out the ideal product that would serve the need, and ensure that the food scientists build out exactly what you envision.
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As a product marketer, even you need to understand the customer and the problem your product solves, but more from a messaging perspective. You need to understand the pain to write the tagline for the pain-killer. A messaging, and a marketing plan to get the best-fit customers to buy the pancake mix off the shelf and make it this Sunday.
The tactical role of Product Marketing
As a function, product marketing owns five key broad areas
However, the tactical role of product marketing is measured by the KRAs and deliverables and sadly there's no standard way of doing it. Almost all companies differ from each other while defining these, adding to the pre-existing ambiguity.
However, we can at least outline the ballpark of expectations. So here goes nothing:
When to hire for product marketing?
I believe in what?Marcus Andrews , Director of Product Marketing, Pendo, has to say - "Product Marketing is a 0-1 team. We create. We turn features into sellable, interesting, stories. We turn shiny rocks into "Diamonds". Other teams go from 1-2 or 1-10. It's just as important, and usually easier to measure, but different. It's hard, messy, fulfilling work."
However, if you need a framework to decide, I absolutely find merit in the one given to us by?First Round Review :
Skills needed to become a decent product marketer
The skills can be deduced from the definition of product marketing, mentioned earlier - Product marketing deeply understands the company's audience and product and determines how to effectively communicate with this audience.
Add the key responsibility of project management and your ideal candidate should have:
How to train folks into product marketing?
Product marketers need to be customer-obsessed with a pulse on competition, storyteller, analytical, a good understanding of marketing channels, and be a fantastic project manager.
According to?Charity Majors , the co-founder and CTO at Honeycomb - "Engineers who are interested in product marketing have often passed a point in their career where "how to build" stops being challenging, and they want a greater role in "what to build" and in educating the market of their peers."
In my personal experience, I have seen young folks from customer success and pre-sales become amazing product marketers. I have seen my very talented friends started out as content writers, and then evolving into some of the best product marketers right now.
With the sighting of a product marketer getting rarer than the BigFoot, you need to hire for the skills and not for the job role. The easiest way is to cherry-pick from the existing talent sitting inside your company, albeit in a different team. Trust me, it works.
Parting Notes
I don't know if this was helpful or not. I never know until you tell me. However, it would help me get rid of multiple bookmarks, and Evernote notes tagged under 'product marketing'. This becomes the rolling cumulation of my understanding of the function of the role.
Just remember - we all have seen and done product marketing before it was named as such. And if we have not, we haven't done marketing in its truest essence. If any form of marketing lacks customer focus, product know-how, and communication, we need to ask ourselves and our bosses - is it really marketing?
P.S: If you find my writing useful, it would be great if you subscribe at: rohitsrivastav.substack.com - keeps my motivation up.
Technical Product Marketer
3 年Very detailed take on Product marketing. Being in the same space myself, I would say the messaging is the most important and the most difficult. Make or break stuff.
Founder HROne
3 年Nice, that is an interesting read for the people interested in this area.
Founder HROne
3 年Nice read, product marketing is indeed very important.
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3 年Divya Deep Rishabh Jain
This is an excellent read and has been bookmarked for future reference! It amazes me how often Product Marketing is overlooked and/or misunderstood - this article does a great job of articulating the importance and outlining the value ??