Martina Lauchengco: Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products

Excerpts

Foreword

For startups, achieving product/market fit, including and especially the go-to-market strategy for that product, is really the only thing that matters.

But while discovering a winning solution may be necessary, it is not sufficient

as the name implies, there is another dimension to product/market fit, and that is the market

A product manager's partner in achieving product/market fit and getting this product to market is the product marketer.

They are happening in parallel, and they are very much intertwined

Which is why the product manager/product marketer partnership is so important to get right

I have always visualized this partnership as the product manager working with the product marketer to triangulate on product/market fit.

the product marketer helps to answer some very fundamental questions essential for a product's eventual success: Determining the best ways to reach the target customer* How and when the customer will be able to learn your product exists* How to position your product so the customer knows how to think about your product* How to message the value so that it resonates with the customer's underlying needs* How the customer can evaluate your product* Who and how the customer will make a buying decision* Finally, if you've done your job well and the customer loves your product, how they can tell their friends and colleagues how much they love your product*

great product marketing can't overcome a bad product. However, in our increasingly competitive reality, in order to succeed, we need both strong products and strong product marketing to succeed.*

In some cases, especially at early-stage startups, the product manager may need to cover the product marketing role as well. In other cases, others in the marketing organization may need to cover the role.

Martin Cagan, November 2021

Introduction: My Story

Getting Flamed by Bill Gates

“I just got an email from Bill Gates. It said, ‘Word for Mac is depressing Microsoft's stock price. Fix it.’ So, I'm here to ask, what are we doing?”

Up to that point, the Windows and Mac versions had different code bases, features, and release cycles. This new version used a single code base for both

the Mac version was late—very late

We rushed to get the product done, deciding its new features were worth a hit in the product's performance. Mac users HATED it. It was so slow that in their eyes it felt barely usable*

Start with the End in Mind

Although it didn't get everything right all the time, Microsoft did do a lot of things right much of the time

I watched how a systematic approach of combining great products with equally great market strategy killed our two biggest competitors at the time: WordPerfect for word processing and Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets.

The Barefoot Guy on the Cover of Time

if Microsoft was the command-and-control–style dad, then Netscape was the laissez-faire, chain-smoking uncle. New products or programs were cooked up overnight and announced in a press release. Teams scrambled to make them a reality

But it was where I first experienced the foundation of how modern product teams operate

It was also where I saw how innovative ideas can give birth to new startups.

Markets Shape Success

Ben Horowitz was the most revered executive at Netscape when he chose to co-found a then-new startup called Loudcloud (later Opsware) with Marc Andreessen, Tim Howes, and Insik Rhee.

While the vision was there, the services required and architecture of Internet infrastructure at the time—no matter how much our software automated—was too expensive to deliver in a cost-effective way. I got schooled on the limits of company and category creation while leading marketing and being Ben's chief of staff*

How to Use This Book

There is a stark contrast between how most companies do product marketing and how the best companies do it. It's largely because product marketing is misunderstood; it is the most foundational work required to market any tech product

There is one big assumption in everything I write: you can't succeed in go-to-market without a strong product. If you're not yet there, please read Marty Cagan's INSPIRED

Chapter 1: When David Beats Goliath: Why Product Marketing Matters

Marco Arment had the Silicon Valley “It” factor. A prolific developer, he was the lead engineer and chief technology officer of Tumblr

It's no wonder tech press were captivated by Instapaper, Marco's next creation after Tumblr.

But around that same time, Nate Weiner, a self-taught code slinger from the Midwest, had seen the same problem. People saw articles in their social feeds or web pages and wanted to save and view them later. He created Read It Later to do just that.

in just a couple of years, Read It Later was used by 3.5 million people—nearly triple the users of Instapaper

Instapaper stayed its course, occasionally adding new features. Three years after he created it, Marco sold Instapaper to Betaworks. Growth languished. Eventually, what remained of the company bounced around in a game of musical owners

In that same period of time, Read It Later rebranded as Pocket

By the time Pocket was acquired by Mozilla, the makers of the Firefox browser, it had 20 million users

Despite none of them having the title “product marketer,” they collectively worked to shift focus from just building the product to a “product marketing” mindset.

This is just some of what they did:

Sharing data around shifting trends in consumer behavior

Connecting their product's purpose with broader trends

They connected themselves to a much bigger “anytime, anywhere” megatrend, saying “we're the ones who are doing this for Internet content.”

They also developed an API that let any app integrate their “save-for-later” functionality, making it an industry standard.

Rebranding from Read It Later to Pocket

Making it free instead of $3.99

Like many who build products, Nate's initial instinct to beat Instapaper was to add more features

without a market context that gave them meaning, it would have just been more feature noise in a world already drowning in apps. The natural inertia behind Instapaper would have kept it the industry's darling.

who's the right market, the best ways to reach them, and who needs to say or do what for your product to be credible. This is the job of product marketing*

What Is Product Marketing?

If you look at the list of what Pocket did, everything framed why Pocket had value even when they weren't talking about their product

The job also includes working with product teams to make better decisions affecting market adoption. This can range from prioritizing a feature to writing a piece of content that reframes a competitor

My hope in writing this book is to refocus product marketing around its purpose—leveraging product investments in a deliberate way so the go-to-market machinery can achieve a business's goals. That requires clarifying what it means to do the job well.*

It starts with the foundation of product marketing, which comes down to just four fundamentals

• Fundamental 1: Ambassador: Connect Customer and Market Insights
• Fundamental 2: Strategist: Direct Your Product's Go-to-Market
• Fundamental 3: Storyteller: Shape How the World Thinks About Your Product
• Fundamental 4: Evangelist: Enable Others to Tell the Story

Why Product Marketing Matters Now

I'm intentionally using the function product marketing and not the role product marketer

Not every company has people willing or capable of doing this, but it does mean you can get product marketing done without the perfect team formation yet in place

There is no way for a product to stand out and win unless its entire go-to-market engine is carefully coordinated and it holds a clear market position. That's product marketing

Where Product Marketing Fits

There is a lot of confusion about the difference between marketing—the function at large—and product marketing, the specific role often part of the marketing organization

The art of finding and reaching that customer on their journey with the right message at the right time so they are willing to consider a product is the job of marketing. The art of selling and converting a prospective buyer into a customer is the job of sales.

Marketing specialists rely on product marketers to do their jobs well. Product marketers define what aspects of a product to promote, who to target, why target customers care, and which channels are most important. They are the bridge between the product organization and ensuring the actions from the go-to-market engine of marketing and sales result in business impact.

Chapter 2: The Fundamentals of Product Marketing

The job is to drive product adoption by shaping market perception through strategic marketing activities that positively impact the business

Fundamental 1. Ambassador: Connect Customer and Market Insights

This goes beyond knowing what problems a product solves and who target customers might be. It's about providing market and customer insight into any situation

The range of work encompasses segmenting customers, knowing frustrations and problems that drive them to seek something new, and delineating the steps they take along their journey to become customers

It includes knowing what makes raving, loyal fans and the “watering holes” that create influence or amplify influencers

It also requires deep product knowledge of what customers find useful

Fundamental 2. Strategist: Direct Your Product's Go-to-Market

Product marketing considers why a customer might want a product and how they are likely to find it, then plans accordingly

Much like product managers use discovery techniques to determine if a product is valuable, usable, feasible, and viable, in product marketing, aspects of product go-to-market can only be discovered by trying things in-market

This means defining a strong product go-to-market is iterative

That's why defining strategies—and all their associated activities—well requires a strategic and learning mindset

Fundamental 3. Storyteller: Shape How the World Thinks About Your Product

Not everything that's said about a product is in a company's direct control. But the foundational positioning work that strongly shapes how the world thinks about a product is.

The key messages supporting that positioning are what marketing and sales teams say and promote over and over to reinforce that position. A broader story narrative is what stiches it all together to make it stick.

For positioning, every marketing action can reinforce position, but defining the goalposts by which your product and category are measured are some of the most important

Our brains process stories differently than straight facts. It's why positioning and messaging is best done through stories—an employee's, a customer's, the product's, or the company's—and why product marketing must be good at telling stories that bring it all together

Fundamental 4. Evangelist: Enable Others to Tell the Story

Another benefit of stories is they are easier for others to tell

Evangelism only works if it feels authentic

Evangelism also means finding the most meaningful influencers that move your market—key customers, analysts, pundits, press, bloggers, social influencers, online forums—and inspiring them with stories and evidence so they advocate for your product

Chapter 3: Ambassador: Connect Customer and Market Insights

When Julie Herendeen was VP of Global Marketing at Dropbox, her team thought they knew their customers

they felt confident customers were divided broadly into two categories

She decided it was important for her entire team—not just the product marketers—to get out of the building

realized some of their assumptions missed the mark on why customers valued Dropbox

Yes, they were smallish businesses, but they needed to easily collaborate on big jobs

The customer visits also revealed important aspects of how Dropbox customers liked to feel. They valued the freedom to work with whomever they wanted, however they wanted. These much more nuanced insights made clear how her team needed to market differently.

Most underestimate how nuanced and layered both customers and markets are today, and just how much time and work it takes to truly understand them

Market Sensing

Modern go-to-market requires understanding nuances around not just what customers are trying to do, but their entire journey toward product consideration—like which products they already use and compare a product to.

here are some baseline product marketing practices

Have direct customer interaction—ideally weekly

Develop a standard set of open-ended questions to ask customers or prospects

Reflect insights into product and go-to-market team discussions

Write the most important insights down so they can be easily shared and used.

To understand what people actually do, use, or value, you must test market assumptions in real life situations.

This is clarified through customer discovery work

not all customer insights are equal in unlocking markets. Product marketing is responsible for deciding which key learnings help go-to-market and product teams do their jobs better. Will an insight help a team make a decision or tradeoff on what to say or do next? If the answer is yes, it's additive. If the answer is no, archive it.

What are they trying to do? Do they recognize and prioritize this problem?* What is motivating them to solve the problem?* What compels them to take action?*

How can we delight customers so much that they want to talk about the product with others?

As with products, learning the market side of product fit is a dynamic process

Third-Party Insights

third-party data, research, reports, articles, websites, reviews, press, and social media. Third-party content has the benefit of revealing competitive insights and is a great way to tune into public perception.

Remember at the start of Pocket's journey when it was Read It Later, despite having many more users and supported platforms it was still not thought of as the category leader? Their product marketing challenge was to move the ecosystem's perception toward their realities

The Competition

While you can't let the competition dictate your course of action, you can't ignore how much they can shape perceptions

That said, beware of over-rotating toward competitive response. Companies can lose their own way if overly responsive to competitors' agendas rather than staying focused on what's best for their customers or market

Ambassador of Insights

Customer insights can sometimes be heard as customer requirements. These are two distinct things

How any insight impacts product priorities falls to the product manager to decide.

Customer insights also often get translated into artifacts—like Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) stories (often used by product), Personas (often used by design or product), Ideal Customer Profile (ICP, often used by sales), and customer segmentations (often used by marketing). Each has a purpose that is specific to the function.

Chapter 4: Strategist: Direct Your Product's Go-to-Market

Nate wrote the marketing strategies guiding Pocket on the whiteboard: grow a loyal user base, define and lead the category, and leverage partnerships for growth. Using them as guides to judge each idea, the team agreed an online launch like 4.0's wasn't enough

The solution came in an idea internally called Pocket Matters. It was an in-person 5.0 launch event with press, partners, and 10 Pocket users at a San Francisco wine bar.

Within hours of the event, they had a flurry of press, downloads, and partner discussions that accelerated. Less than a month after the event, Nate was also named one of Time Magazine's 30 People Under 30 Changing the World.

Key Terms

Go-to-Market (GTM) Engine

Marketing Strategy, aka GTM Strategy.

Product Go-to-Market

Distribution Strategy, aka GTM Strategy, GTM Model, Business Model, Adoption Model

Direct sales:

Inside sales (LowTouch)

Channel partners

Direct to professional/customer

Trial or freemium

Product-led growth: customers are acquired or converted by the product itself. Often used in combination with other GTM models.

Channel Strategy, aka Partner Strategy, Marketing Mix.

different marketing channels, such as PR, events, social, digital paid, or content

Product Strategy

Business Goals or Objectives

The Role of Marketing Strategies in Product Go-to-Market

product go-to-market plan, in which marketing strategies tell us the why behind all market-facing activities.

keeps activities strongly aligned with business goals

If strategies answer the why, the when is the next most important factor (Rarely)

Marketing activities also need to be grounded in the realities of a company's resources and stage

the Pocket example, they right-sized their event to their stage—inviting just 10 customers and partners

Here are some starter questions to help think through your marketing strategies

A product marketer's job is to then articulate strategies specific to their product's situation and go-to-market

How Company Maturity Evolves Product Go-to-Market

For a startup with one product, everything you do in market is part of a go-to-market puzzle. You're experimenting rapidly, learning about market dynamics, which customers are good ones, what product to build, and the best ways to bring it to market—all at the same time

It's also why product marketing plays such an important role at startups and why I advocate making a product marketer your first marketing hire

At more mature companies, the go-to-market machinery is much more established and complex. The work is as much about internal coordination as it is about accelerating product adoption in the outside world

Regardless of where your company falls on the maturity spectrum, a product marketer is responsible for crafting the marketing strategies that shape a product go-to-market plan to keep activities aligned with what the business needs

Chapter 5: Storyteller: Shape How the World Thinks About Your Product

Building a great product isn't enough to succeed if you don't also take the time to position it in the market. Don't make the mistake of assuming the world knows how to think about your product and why it's valuable. You must frame its value. If you don't do it, other market forces will

positioning a product well is much harder to do than it looks

Positioning is your long game. Messaging is your short game

Part of the confusion between the two comes from a formula that was popularized for writing positioning statements

This formula became the straight jacket of positioning

Use Formulas as Input, Not Output

Positioning starts with knowing the story you want to tell about your product—and having the evidence to support it. The most visible place this happens is in a product's messaging

formulas focus teams on what they want to say and not on what is most important for customers to hear.

Company B chose to be longer and more concrete—a good choice for this audience

Modern teams test messaging, but that's not enough to guarantee a good result. It's easy for teams to test variations on a theme and not probe the landscape of possibility enough

A Better Process

I don't advocate a formula, but offer CAST as a guide to check if your messaging is grounded in what customers want to hear

Clear

Authentic

Simple

Tested

Beware: simple and compelling often get confused with jargony and promotional

The Tendency to Be Overly Precise

Messaging should be concrete enough to be credible to the technically savvy. But that doesn't mean say everything with technical precision right out of the starting gate. The job of messaging is to create a connection

Search Engine Optimization

the keyword phrase ecosystem surrounding you and your competitors must be considered in how you position and message

Keyword audits show what words others are likely to associate with your product

Here again, SEO is all an important input, not the sole driver of the output. It guides which words to consider including in messaging. Beware the temptation to chase keyword phrases that get clicks. It can be at odds with your longer-term positioning

Positioning = Your Actions + Others'

every activity in a product go-to-market plan can reinforce positioning in some way

If a company does a proof-of-concept during its sales process, it should direct the assessment criteria toward its strengths. For a product demo, how features are shown should reinforce the positioning

That's the positioning work within your control

But an equal if not more powerful force influencing a product's perception is the 70% of decision-making that happens beyond a company's control

Some aspects of this are referred to as dark funnel or dark social

Comparison sites, reviews, ratings, social postings, shares, online forums, other people's content, and even employee buzz are just a search away

Pay attention to the power of word-of-mouth and what people are saying. It can become your de facto positioning

The Long Game

Chapter 6: Evangelist: Enable Others to Tell the Story

Quizlet is used every day in nearly every country of the world to study for medical school, pass beautician exams, and memorize grocery store codes

But for its first 10 years of life, the company didn't spend a dime on marketing

They're just so genuinely grateful for what the product does, they want to share it with the world

This is the best kind of organic evangelism that has a big impact on social media and messaging platforms. But it is just one example

when I say evangelism I mean the systematic enabling of influence through others

This includes the more traditional amplifiers of go-to-market reach—sales, the press, investors, or analysts—as well as the armies of specialists in the go-to-market engine whose full-time job is to activate evangelism through their domains: social media marketers, content marketers, public relations, analyst relations, technical evangelists, community managers, field marketing managers, event managers, partner marketing, customer success, and sales managers

Enabling Others

The key is understanding what type of advocacy matters most for your product's go-to-market and then figuring out what enables and then activates it.

Slack's initial evangelists were users getting teammates to join Slack workspaces and immediately getting the team productive. While product-led growth is often led by growth and/or product teams, product marketing must make sure the rest of the product's evangelism efforts complement that GTM model and are effective.

Customer reviews, third-party blogs, social media, meetups, or the digital equivalent where more candid conversations happen is preferred. Think through if those forums help tell your story.

Communities are another common way to scale advocacy through others

Evangelism vs. Promotion

Tailor Evangelism Tools to Your Product's GTM

Evangelism Is a Team Sport

Nearly everything is ultimately executed by others. Product marketing is the catalyst and director on behalf of the product.

Most important, product marketers use all they've learned and created in the first three fundamentals as a foundation on which this fourth gets built

Part Two: How to Do the Role: Who Should Do Product Marketing and How to Do It Well

Chapter 7: Strong Product Marketing: Skills of the Good

By the time Zack fired all but one of his sales guys

sales weren't coming. He couldn't figure out why. Zack was CEO of StartX (real company, names changed)*

As is common at this stage, Zack was leading almost everything—sales, product, marketing, and people—but had never done any of it before. He assumed if he wanted the product to sell, he should hire sales guys

Zack had to be at every sales pitch because his team didn't know the product well enough

He finally stopped trying to sell the product at every meeting and instead took the time to ask, “What are your top priority problems?” It's how he learned the problem their product solved not only didn't make the top five priorities for execs; in some cases, it didn't even make the top 10.*

They regrouped to pivot and solve a problem much higher on executives' priority list.

but again, getting signed contracts remained hard

He finally hired a director of product marketing. Enter Josie.

She immediately diagnosed what had been impeding the sales team: a lack of clear, repeatable messages that communicated the product's value, not just features

Key Skills of Strong Product Marketers

Product marketing's purpose is to drive product adoption by shaping market perception through strategic marketing activities that meet business goals.

skill set that overlaps a lot with product management

Deep customer curiosity and strong, active listening

Genuine product curiosity

Strategic and strong on execution

err toward strategy as there are many others in an organization who can cover execution

Collaboration

Strong verbal and written communication skills

good at simplifying—they don't need to say everything to be clear. They avoid hyperbole and know how to communicate in a way that feels authentic

Broad marketing knowledge

Business savvy

Technical competence

Key Responsibilities

Product Marketing Foundational Responsibilities

Fundamental 1. Ambassador: Connect Customer and Market Insights

Fundamental 2. Strategist: Direct Your Product's Go-to-Market

Fundamental 3. Storyteller: Shape How the World Thinks About Your Product

Fundamental 4. Evangelist: Enable Others to Tell the Story

At the startup stage, product marketers tend to do much of this work directly

Beyond company stage, go-to-market models impact how product marketing gets practiced. Let me dive into some of these differences.

Growth Marketing

Growth hacking is the original term for the data-driven, test and trial, largely product-led aspect of growth

Direct to Customer Businesses

I use direct-to-customer (D2C) because while these go-to-markets were once the domain of businesses selling to consumers (B2C), increasingly, sophisticated business and developer products go directly to their customers (e.g. Zendesk, Atlassian, Slack, Drift). (Not standard use of the term)

Whether the focus is consumers or professionals in businesses, this bottom-up approach focuses on a product-led, digital, or mobile-heavy approach to acquiring customers.

rigor around customer, market, and product usage-based segmentation

Focus Areas for D2C PMM

Business to Business

direct sales

doesn't mean product marketing focuses only on enabling them

Modern customer journeys mean a lot of product assessment is done before a “customer” even puts up a hand showing interest

Product Marketing Anti-Patterns

Strong on style, soft on substance

Stuck in technical weeds

Functioning like a service

A “give them what they ask for” service orientation is seductive and common because there is swift action that makes other teams happy

Insufficient dedicated product marketing

Chapter 8: How to Partner with Product Management

my time as a product manager on Word for the Mac set the bar for what an exceptional partnership

Jeff Vierling was my counterpart, and we were a dynamic duo

Each of us took the necessary time to understand customers and markets. One of us translated them into the product getting built; the other translated it into go-to-market. Because each of us had the other's expertise to rely on, we felt more confident in the decisions we made. (Pairing)

Beyond the Core Product Team

This collaboration works best when product marketing is embedded with product teams and there is a designated product manager partner. Some refer to it as the triad expanding into a quad

Translating discovery work toward what's reasonable or likely in actual go-to-market is product marketing's wheelhouse

Set It Up for Success

In modern product organizations, there can be hundreds of product teams. It makes the lines of where to slot in product marketing challenging.

average being 1:2.5 product managers for every product marketer

You might have designated product marketers for the enterprise. They are an overlay in addition to the individual product PMMs

Let's take another example that might be a huge growth opportunity for a business: building a subscription service combining many different product experiences.

brief evolution

Startup

Individual product forward

Product suites forward

In a larger, more mature company, it is not uncommon to have product marketing focused at the individual product level, the suite level, and customer segments. In these scenarios, there are product marketers without product manager designates

Verticals/New Markets

Product marketers focus on verticals, and may not have designated product counterparts

Customer segments

Anti-Patterns, What Better Looks Like

What product ships, sales can't sell

Product ships at a terrible time to market it.

Product managers are tapped too often for product collateral or sales support

product marketer simply doesn't know the product well enough

Chapter 9: How to Partner with Marketing

Securities and Exchange Commission financial professionals

Workiva

top-tier event production

Attendees left the conference raving fans, engendering loyal word-of-mouth in a community not really known for that

Using the Right Marketing Mix

in this chapter, when I say marketing, I'm referring to all the other roles in marketing

Marketing brings much of go-to-market to life, which means they play an enormous role in shaping a customer's experience of a company

Not everything a company does in marketing is about a product's go-to-market

Making customers aware of the problem, the solution, and a company

Encouraging consideration of a solution

Encouraging purchase or renewal

Enhancing awareness and loyalty around the brand

Set It Up for Success

It's important to set up processes that let product marketing be systematic in how it coordinates with marketing.

Agile marketing, an increasingly popular practice in marketing, is one of those methods

Anti-Patterns, What Better Looks Like

Campaigns perform but product isn't getting positioned

“Future state” is too far ahead of current reality

future aspirational state that is so far ahead of product realities, it detracts from a company's credibility

Creativity that pushes the edge but doesn't connect with customers

Chapter 10: How to Partner with Sales

When this company's midmarket sales team badly missed their sales target, they arrived at their quarterly review meeting with only one request: paper data sheets

When pressed, the team said they needed a leave-behind that prospective customers brought back to their desks and that kept the product more top-of-mind than an email. Plus no one else was doing paper data sheets so it stood out.

sales presumed the solution (paper data sheet) instead of asking for what they needed: a more memorable prompt encouraging follow-up.

In this particular case, marketing had many other ideas that weren't paper data sheets and met sales needs: a customized video email, a direct-mail follow-up, or additional training on ideal customer profiles. All of these should have been discussed.

Balancing Urgent and Important

Sales

they need pipeline and training. Marketing is the means to that end.

A natural tension exists between sales and product marketing. Sales wants to get it done now. Product marketing wants to get it done right

The most powerful tools in this relationship are (1) reference customers and (2) a sales playbook.

Playbooks show appropriate actions by stage, next step, relevant tools, and what criteria qualifies a customer to flow from one stage to the next

When done well—and if followed—a good playbook can make an average sales rep successful in a faster than average amount of time

Set It Up for Success

Anti-Patterns, What Better Looks Like

If product is the engine of growth, sales is the gas. Marketing is the gas station. Product marketing is the gas station attendant making sure sales gets tanked up with enough to get to their next stop.

Marketing as a service to sales

Lack of awareness before sales engages

Spray and pray” awareness style campaigns are extremely costly and only appropriate for more mature organizations that have the scale and need for such broad awareness

Lack of adherence to sales playbook or use of official materials

Chapter 11: Discovering and Rediscovering Market Fit

Formatting as specific as how to indent a subpoint in a legal brief is strictly defined. And back when I was on the Word team, it didn't do it right

Fixing these issues required a rewrite of some of Word's underlying layout engine

It meant the “legal will love this” version was at least a major release cycle away. Even though it was our biggest growth market, we couldn't fully hit the gas until those product issues were addressed.

focus marketing on law firms who were more technology forward. For example, those who wanted to use the rest of Microsoft Office—PowerPoint for trial presentations or Excel to make charts.

The Market Side of Product/Market Fit

I see so many companies find an initial beachhead of customers, think they have product/market fit, and then find their growth stalling. It's never about just one thing. But it's often because not enough attention was paid to market fit

When I say market fit, I mean discovering “market pull.”

product discovery work around value is intended to find this answer. Although it is the most difficult and important risk to probe, it tends to be underdeveloped.

Value discovery work must probe beyond “would you buy this, would you buy it from us, and how much would you expect to pay for it?” Assessing market fit requires probing more deeply on market conditions that motivate action or create urgency. Sometimes it can be about how a product is distributed.

They catch things like segmenting customers by those that might be better evangelists and not just focusing on likely initial users. Or how actions might be more influenced by word-of-mouth from what is read on a comparison site or on a developer forum than an actual trial product experience.

Probe Early, Probe Often

nothing beats live customer conversations (calling them interviews can be a little intimidating)

Do they really have the problems you think they have?

How does the customer solve this problem today?

discovery work done should answer these more market-oriented questions

Value Who is most likely to use this?*

Growth / Connection What created curiosity?*

Any product discovery technique that engages directly with customers can be adapted to inform this work—from prototypes to usability tests to A/B tests to the Sean Ellis test

Here are some examples of discovery techniques

Exit surveys

A/B messaging test

don't just pay attention to what performs better. Ask what the relative performance differences tell you about market perception.

Demand test variation

Ad testing

Sentiment probe

Usability test variation

Additional Techniques to Understand Market Fit for Existing Products

Win/loss analysis

Sales call shadowing

Intent data

Social/customer sentiment

Active Listening

Chapter 12: Product Marketing in the Age of Agile

alignment

The fix lies in clarifying expectations and defining a process that lets all teams categorize “releases” together and act accordingly. (?)

Create a Release Scale

A sprint is a short, time-boxed period

A release makes public a new product or combination of features that provides value to customers.

Sometimes people call releases launches

For go-to-market teams, a launch is a major, cross-functionally supported release that the entire company gets behind

The distinctions between a minor release and a major launch are really important for everyone on the go-to-market side.

Developing a shared understanding of how a release should be categorized and what go-to-market activities will get done is the purpose of a Release Scale

The Release Scale sets standards around release “types” and the go-to-market activities done to support them

also clarifies how much lead time marketing teams need to do their job well

Here's how to create your version

Decide on the calibration scale. Be it levels, grades, names, numbers, or tiers,

Use known past releases as examples to define the levels.

Identify customer impact

Define marketing objectives.

Define typical resources and promotional vehicles used.

Articulate needed lead times

Talk about releases using the scale in planning meetings

one or two Level 5 releases a year

Agile Marketing

Rapid iterations over Big-Bang campaigns

The highest functioning version of this has product marketers act like product managers with a marketing squad. They lead this cross-functional group of specialists—communications, advertising, digital, web, design—in weekly “scrum” meetings to discuss how to prioritize workload for that week.

This more dynamic process lets something urgent—like a competitive response tool—jump to the front of the line versus just being on a list waiting its turn

Chapter 13: The Metrics That Matter

Unlike sales, which hits its numbers or doesn't, product marketing doesn't have many hard metrics showing a job well done

Product Marketing Objectives

goals vary by company situation and stage

some example product marketing OKRs

Become recognized category leader by major analyst firm(s)

Launch product to improve market awareness indicators

Grow organic evangelism by 10% on key digital and social platforms

Metrics for Product Marketing

Product Metrics

Happiness, Engagement, Acquisition, Retention, Task Success (HEART) metrics.

Customer funnel metrics

Marketing Metrics

Customer journey engagement

Marketing qualified leads

In organizations with a product-led motion, product qualified leads (PQLs) either replace or augment how marketing qualified leads gets defined

Inbound discovery

Sales Metrics

Sales cycle time

Win rates

Financial Metrics

Conversion rates by product

Customer acquisition cost (CAC). This should trend down or stay level if the marketing channel mix, messaging, and positioning are working. If CAC is increasing or unsustainable, examine customer segments, messaging, and the marketing mix

Lifetime customer value (LTV).

Retention. An important but lagging indicator

Net Promoter Scores or other periodic customer satisfaction metrics can be leading indicators for retention

Practice Patience and Persistence

Part Three: Strategist: Guardrails and Levers: The Tools to Guide Product Go-to-Market Strategy

Go-to-Market Strategy

Chapter 14: When Strategy Guides Product Go-to-Market: Salesforce

Dreamforce is like the Super Bowl for SaaS. Salesforce's annual event in San Francisco brings together over 170,000 people

But Michelle Jones decided she shouldn't launch her product there. As the then director of product marketing for Salesforce's B2B Commerce software, she decided a much smaller Salesforce Connections conference in Chicago earlier in the year was better for her product*

This is what a strategic and comprehensive approach to product go-to-market looks like.

A checklist version of what Michelle did—product messaging, press release, customer and analyst testimonials, sales first-call deck, launch presentation, sales playbook—removes all the context that made hers a really good product go-to-market, in particular the strategic context that shaped when and why.

Chapter 15: What the iPhone Shows Us About Adoption Life Cycles

online backup company

discovered paid radio host endorsements (a more modern equivalent is podcasts) worked particularly well

was becoming too expensive to rely on to grow

shocked to learn it skewed old—senior citizen old—in retrospect, not surprising given their heavy reliance on radio.

These customers were easy to retain but did nothing to help the business grow. There was no word of mouth

The company had to completely overhaul their marketing activities and focus more on channels that brought in customers who talked about products with others

found their product's sweet spot was not 20-somethings who spent a lot of time on social media. Rather, it was people in their early 30s who listened to NPR (National Public Radio) and felt they had more to lose—family photos or an archive of work

Let's Talk Technology Adoption Life Cycle

The mistakes I see most often are when teams believe they're moving through the adopter segments faster than they really are, or they don't realize their initial market segments don't set them up well for the next stage of growth.

Chapter 16: The Brand Lever: It's Not What You Think

Chapter 17: The Pricing Lever: It's about Perceived Value

Chapter 18: Marketing When It's Not About Product

world events should have a massive impact on how we market. And they have nothing to do with your product

all companies experience times when they must maintain marketing momentum without anything significant from product. This feels scary because in tech, we're used to focusing on new being what sells.

Nothing in this chapter is the sole domain of product marketing

Campaigns Beyond Product

Marketing is constantly running campaigns. It's a good practice to not make them all about product. Focus instead on what specific audiences care about or company-level momentum

Invest in the Emotionality of Your Brand

Brand is about what people aspire to be—a good mom, a capable leader, an innovator, eternally young—and the best ones make us feel good about ourselves.

The emotional aspects of brand are often underinvested in by technology companies

Improve Collaboration Between Marketing and Sales

Examine the Customer Journey

In the early days of Peloton, they famously focused on in-mall pods

This let prospective buyers use the product

But just as important: it let Peloton engage in direct conversations with customers and understand their target market.

So much of people's consideration of a product happens in a blended way—dominated by online but offline too. People have conversations with others they know. Often, people might not even know they're in the market until they see or experience something

Enable Evangelism from Customers

enabling evangelism from existing customers often maps to customer referral programs on a lot of teams. Do better.

Marketing to customers begins by making them successful using your product

Customers want to feel like they're in a trusted relationship with companies

Activate Your Community

Community means many things, but at its core, it's about scaling evangelism

How Modern Hire Acted Swiftly to Create a Customer-Centric Coordinated Campaign

Everything was customer-centric

They chose to emphasize the perception of value when everyone else in the category went to a free trial

Chapter 19: The One-Sheet Product Go-to-Market Canvas

Three hours later, they emerged with a product go-to-market canvas now owned by product marketing

This chapter introduces you to the one-sheet product go-to-market canvas John used to drive this alignment across product and go-to-market functions

Product Go-to-Market Canvas: Think Puzzle

I created the product go-to-market Canvas (Figure 19.1) to make planning much easier for go-to-market and product teams (Roadmap?)

Make It Customer First!

You can do all the “right” things but still not achieve your goals despite the effort. What often separates a really good product go-to-market canvas from others is how well you're mapping actions to your customer's world

PGTM Canvas in Action

Let's dive into the details of that initial product go-to-market kickoff with all of Bandwidth's teams

One thing it's not is a complete marketing plan

Chapter 20: Understanding in Action: Real Marketing Plans

Part Four: Storyteller: Clarity and Authenticity: The Process and Tools to Rethink Messaging

Chapter 21: Discover Your Position

You're looking for gaps in market understanding so you know what your messaging must bridge

Positioning and messaging work best when part of a bigger story. It gives people more reasons to believe

Positioning Takes Time

Positioning always starts with elements of messaging, but it's made real through the combination of all the activities reinforcing a bigger story

Good Messaging Is Harder Than It Looks

Chapter 22: How to Listen and Connect: Expensify and Concur

Chapter 23: Understanding in Action: Netflix and Zendesk

Chapter 24: The Balancing Act: Right Message, Right Time

Chapter 25: The One-Sheet Messaging Canvas

The product marketer was an individual contributor in a process filled with more senior leaders. Because all the input came from leaders above his level, he felt their ideas had tacit approval. He did his best to smooth out transitions between ideas, but one by one, he integrated them

This collaboration-to-mediocrity is all too common

As I've talked about throughout part 4, strong messaging comes from a strong process. This chapter's One-Sheet Messaging Canvas was designed as the collection point for that process and becomes the artifact for final messaging when done.

How It Works

The One-Sheet Messaging Canvas separates messaging elements into individual building blocks

Don't fill it out like a form (Figure 25.1). At the start, document ideas worth testing. Then test, probe, and let it be a hot mess while ideas are refined with teams.

Step 1: Decide on your most important Customer Segments and shape messaging around them

Step 2: Come up with “starter” messaging and key support messages.

These pillars create the frame into which everything else falls.

Step 3: List areas of value in customer friendly language under each pillar

Step 4: Designate messages as appropriate for specific audiences

Step 5: Provide evidence

Step 6: Test it with customers in the intended mediums (email, website, presentation).

Step 7: Refine

The Messaging Canvas in Action

Part Five: Advanced Product Marketing and Leadership: How to Do and Lead It Better at Any Stage Company

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Conclusion: What You Can Do Right Now