READ ME: 🥸Designing the work
BONUS ISSUE: An excerpt from The Mehdeeka Method
📬In this issue:
A reminder that I wrote a book, and my little spiel
An excerpt from said book
^(International shipping now open, physical copies limited)
Hi Mehketeer!
Welcome to another bonus issue, in the last working week before the end of the year 🥂 In my mission to bring you emails you can read so you look like you’re doing work, but it’s really just laying low while being on a computer, today I’ve got an excerpt from my book, The Mehdeeka Method.
Reminder, this came out in mid-October, and it’s about introducing product marketing as a function to a business, but it’s really about getting teams to work together, getting buy-in from your stakeholders, and establishing a framework for what work actually needs to be happening.
Here’s the issue where I talked about how this book came about:
People have said a lot of really nice things about it, but the two quotes that stand out to me are:
It’s almost like a self help book
It’s so actionable, people start actioning it, and then unblock a bunch of work, get momentum, and forget to finish the rest of the book
The section you’re about to read comes after a chapter called Exploration Interviews, which is where all major stakeholders are consulted and interviewed about their biggest challenges, projects, needs, and desires, and your job is then to figure out if you can help with any of that through the lens of product marketing, or help by handing over what you’ve found out to the right person for it.
The below table is an example of how the findings of the exploration interviews are laid out (Substack can’t do tables so I’m sorry this is an image.) The table presents work that’s identified (and validated) as “needed”, broken down by team and link to a larger business goal.
After the table, we’re going straight from Mehdeeka newsletter issue into The Mehdeeka Method excerpt. Ready? Here we go:
From here, it’s time to sort your research findings into what’s within your remit, what you’re not going to touch, what’s a quick win vs a long term piece of work, and then cross reference all of your possibilities against the business priorities.
You need to find which pieces of work will lead to the biggest impact.
For example, here are some hypothetical business goals:
Retain 95% of customers
Grow new business by 30% year-on-year (last year was $1M, so this year you need to hit $1.3M)
Maintain overhead costs and budgets (i.e. no new hires or budget increases)
And now if we look back at the table of findings above, we already have some hypotheses coming through:
Sales is revisiting closed lost opportunities to hit the yearly growth target because net new bookings are slowing down.
Customer success is implementing quarterly business reviews (QBRs) to increase contract renewals and more clearly demonstrate value to existing customers to hit their churn target.
Product is focused on user engagement, which will help customer success with the QBRs and the churn target.
And the possible actions from this:
Connect the efforts of the product and customer success team - their work is related but they might not be approaching from the same direction.
Review what lead generation messages are being sent out by the marketing team - they might be generating top of funnel leads but there’s an issue downstream where they’re not converting to closed won deals.
Designing the work
Once you’ve identified the gaps, determined if they’re relevant to you, and prioritised them, it’s time to show other people your work.
Create a list of tangible assets and tools, and categorise them by which team will benefit and which goal they’ll tie back to. Here’s an example (quick note that your list shouldn’t be this long - try to keep it to work you can complete relatively quickly and list the longer work somewhere separate):
Notice that in the research synthesis table, it was sales who said their demo booking rate was going down, but in this table, demo booking rate has moved to the marketing column. This is because downstream bottlenecks are almost always caused by something upstream. Reviewing lead generation campaigns will help figure out what’s going on, whether it’s messaging, channel, cohort, or “other” problem. (Don’t worry, you’ll get the lead/demand generation team to help with this analysis, you won’t be doing it all on your own!)
What’s the point of this?
You need to sell to your boss (whichever team you’re on) that this is a valuable use of your time and it will lead back to your team’s targets. You also need to sell to other teams that you’re going to give them a bunch of value at no extra cost - that is: no extra work or headcount for their team, and you’re going to take something that’s been weighing on them off their hands and do it for them.
Story time!
One of the major challenges a company I worked at had been experiencing for some time was that the product was extremely technical, convoluted, and conceptually difficult to explain. The sales team struggled to succinctly summarise it, and prospects often left demos and sales meetings more confused than before the demo.
After running the exploration interviews, I then presented findings back to my stakeholders, where I hit a huge hurdle: The sales team felt that I was a threat to their jobs.
Their job was to pitch and to sell, and here I am uncovering that they were struggling to do this. Where they had been happy to have me around before, now that the findings were coming out, they were beginning to really shut me out.
I luckily had made friends with one of the technical pre-sales team members who was often brought into demos to actually explain what the product did, but they were brought in quite late when the prospect was beginning to bring in their IT or engineering team to talk integrations, and the confusion from the sales team had trickled through multiple teams within the prospect’s organisation.
This team member was sick of getting invited late to the party, having to course correct the sales narrative, and repeat themselves over and over to a team that didn’t really care.
The pre-sales team member and I worked together on a few small pieces of collateral that were designed to be given to the sales team to pass on to the prospect ahead of the technical sales calls. It was as simple as a couple of slides in the sales deck, and a technical brochure that went over requirements, how the integrations worked, and frequently asked questions as a pre-read.
Once the work started coming out and the sales team were putting it to use, they saw how much of an “extracurricular” workload it lifted off of them, while still giving them the benefit of that work being done.
The lesson is: Push through your doubters. The way to do this is to still keep them in the process. They need to see it to buy into it, and if they have put their two cents in and see their feedback be incorporated, then they’re even more likely to become a supporter of it.
How to prioritise
The actual work itself will be highly dependent on your organisation, what you uncover, and what your product and sales process is.
But, I can help you figure out how to prioritise it.
Use these reflection questions to guide your prioritisation process:
What is the ratio of input (effort) to output (impact)?
→ Prioritise high impact, low effort work.How quickly will we see results from this?
→ Match this with your needs: Do you need results now?Do those results directly link back to a business goal?
→ If yes, go ahead, if no, abandon.Do those results directly link back to a team goal?
→ If yes, go ahead, if no, abandon.Does this impact one team or more than one team?
→ Try to solve problems that affect more than one team for bigger impact, but it’s ok to solve for only one team when the need is high.Does this help my team?
→ Always put your own team’s needs first.How many individuals requested this work?
→ Just one person? Then it can probably wait. Recurring request from multiple people? Definitely higher priority!Am I able to independently verify that this is needed, through data or findings separate to an individual requesting it?
→ Never take just a request, always validate the request independently.Will this open up pathways for future work or opportunities for impact?
→ Identifying constraints is a whole skill in itself (and has a whole theory around it!) but if you see that one piece of work will unblock something else, then it’s valuable.How long will this piece of work be used for? Is it evergreen or does it have a short shelf life?
→ Pair this with how big of a pain it’s solving, short bandaids to get you through something really important are worth it, but if it’s not urgent you can take more time fixing it once rather than a bandaid.Will I need to re-do this work in less than six months?
→ Very similar to the above, is this worth the work if you’re going to be back where you are in a short time? Conversely, is this something that will get iterated on regularly? The answers may change how you view the work.Will I be able to get consensus from stakeholders that this is important?
→ You may need to give up on something you care about when you’re the only one prioritising it.
It’s possible you’ll find work that’s just not within your remit or ability. Pass anything like this on to the relevant team or team member, along with all relevant data you collected, and wipe your hands of it.
What order to do the work in
You may have noticed in the table at the top of this chapter, the product marketing playbook is explicitly called out as the first piece of work. This is the one thing you must do first.
After putting this together, all of the other work will come together much faster. Think of it as a power tool that will replace your manual tools. Rather than strain for an hour hammering in nails, use a power-drill for two minutes.
Keep following this book in order and you’ll get there before you know it.
Build in public
You’ll have a huge list of work spanning short, medium, and long term. Putting this somewhere public, whether you use a company-wide productivity tracker like Monday.com or ClickUp, a team wiki like Notion or Confluence, or even an internal newsletter, it’ll help keep yourself accountable to the process, continue to engage your stakeholders, and remind the company as a whole that this great new function called product marketing exists. Here are a few things you can do:
Present your work at all hands/town hall meetings
Send out an internal newsletter whenever you release work with links to older work that’s still relevant
Offer to help onboard new hires
Offer to do workshops or run-throughs with individual teams
Keep a public to-do list – if you have a tool that allows it, you can also make a suggestion form with a public backlog of ideas
Build a roadmap and host it with your product team’s roadmap
Another part of building in public is sharing your drafts for feedback. Ugly first drafts are for yourself and your direct team members, but second drafts and onwards can go wider. Start to ask people if they would be eager to use it, and if not, what would improve it?
For marketing collateral it can be frustrating to share the copy of something, and then get design feedback on it. You’ll need to either shake this off and ignore it, or explicitly stipulate what you’re looking for in the feedback and how you’d like to receive it.
End of excerpt
Back to present-day Kayla. This is the part where the waiter comes around and asks “how was it” and “would you like to see the dessert menu?”
Well guess what, the dessert menu is a list of more ideas I’ve had about “things to put on your to-do list when you want to be productive but not really work that hard”
Deep clean your keyboard/devices
Send thank you notes to people you’ve worked with this year
Clean out the files on your desktop
Unsubscribe from all the emails and newsletters you don’t read
Look into videos on productivity hacks for calendars, emails, etc. I started getting Google productivity reels on Instagram and figured this is actually helpful to know information and a good time to learn it
More of this kind of stuff, as well as reflection and goal planning exercises in last week’s issue:
And now’s the part where the waiter gives you the bill and asks you to pay, AKA buy my book!!!!!
For a physical copy, click here (I ship these out myself, you’ll get a bookmark, a sticker, and a thank you note!)
For the Kobo store, click here.
To read on a Kindle, click here for Amazon Australia, and here for Amazon US. Honestly it’s annoying that ebooks are geo-locked on Amazon, if you’re not in AU or the US, just search The Mehdeeka Method.
That’s all for this week, and actually for this year! See you in 2025. I hope you enjoy some time off, spend it doing what you feel like doing, and that your holiday read of choice is The Mehdeeka Method.
My final gift for you is the embarrassing memory that one time I quoted Babe and said “that’ll do pig” (accent and all) when a waiter was about to overflow my glass with water and then I realised from the horrified look on their Gen Z face that they’d probably never seen the movie and thought I was calling them a pig.
Ciao!
Kayla