Product marketing notes from a product manager
One not to miss!!
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We’ve reached our first mini-season for the year and it’s alllll about product marketing. This is definitely a specialisation that I think a lot of people want to get into, it’s hot, it’s trendy, it’s lucrative.
To kick us off, I am actually starting not from a marketing perspective, but from a product perspective! Ben Wirtz, who I have previously worked with, is a product wiz, and he’s been around the block once or twice (like, at Atlassian, Google, General Assembly, and BlueChilli just to drop a few names). You can check out everything he gets up to over on his website.
Interview time:
Kayla: Can you explain what you, as a product manager, want from a product marketer?
Ben: Most importantly, a close relationship and two-way conversations. I’ve been in organisations where one function dominates the other - marketing pushing requirements down to product, nor product throwing new features over the hedge to announce without a proper conversation.
Great products only happen when a diverse set of people, with different views of the world, are involved and aligned, so marketing needs to have our blind spots - and the other way around.
K: When you work with a marketing counterpart, what can they do to make the partnership the best it can be?
B: Being a strategic guide on how to best acquire customers for a specific value proposition that helps us inform product decisions. After all, the product sits downstream from the acquisition funnel in the user’s journey. All comms, in-product and outside, need to be consistent and set the right expectations, and product teams often need help with copy. Last but not least, in multi-product companies, product marketers play an important role in cross-pollination of users and getting eyeballs from other parts of the business to help make a new product successful.
K: Do you have any examples of good/bad product marketing? Which brands do you think do it really well?
B: I was fortunate enough to see some world class product marketing at Atlassian, which has been a multi-product company for the longest time. The team does incredible work with taking users on a journey, from their first use of one product to adopting a suite of products and rolling them out across the company, without ever having to talk to a sales person.
K: What are you, again as a product marketer, most proud of and/or wish got more focus?
B: Some of the best work we can do is simplify the world - for ourselves, our customers, and our teams. Most people have the belief that their most valuable resource is time - but I actually believe it’s headspace. Storytelling and better levels of abstraction can help is communicate more effectively and create more clarity for ourselves and the people around us. When people have a clarity, things happen faster because it’s easier to shut out distractions.
K: What advice can you give to product marketers (or managers!) to make them better understand 'product'?
B: Product is actually quite simple. Our goal is to ship value at the highest rate possible. That’s value to our customers, and the business - which means we need to figure out how much value each of the things we could be doing actually provides to those two in the long term.
Marketers can sometimes (in the worst case) be too focused on short term gains - the next campaign, and what feature would be cool to announce ahead of our competitors. But similar to how a brand can suffer from ‘communication debt’, when comms have been all over the place and customers are confused, products are much harder to evolve in long term when they have been built with an opportunistic mindset, because of technical and UX debt.
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Why am I putting this button here? It’s part of my year of being selfish when it comes to my work. Read more about that here, and I encourage you to start being more selfish as well!
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