JetBrains is Hiring Product Marketing Managers for GoLand and PhpStorm

I’m Andrey Cheptsov. I work at JetBrains as a product marketing specialist for IntelliJ IDEA and GoLand (our new IDE for Go). Officially, my position is called Product Marketing Manager. In a nutshell, I tell our users what the product team is doing and share the users’ feedback with the team. At the moment, we’re looking for two more people to be engaged with this job and to join the GoLand and PhpStorm teams correspondingly. To give a sense of what these people will be doing, in this post, I’ll briefly describe my work.

Before I do, a couple of words about JetBrains. We make smart tools for software development. The advanced static code analysis of our tools allows you to read and write code more efficiently. JetBrains is an international company with headquarters in Prague and major R&D centers in St. Petersburg and Munich. Every month, our tools are used by four million developers worldwide. It is particularly gratifying that many users choose our commercial products even where open source alternatives are available. This allows me to believe that our users appreciate what we do.

A photo of Maria Khalusova, a PMM for Upsource

Most of our tools are integrated development environments (IDEs). We support Java, PHP, Python, JavaScript, C#, SQL, and many other languages. Recently, thanks to the launch of GoLand, Go has been added to this list. Go is actively developing, and it threatens to squeeze out some popular languages, such as Java, Ruby, Python, and C/C ++. Although the GoLand team is made up of just three dedicated persons, and the product was launched a short while ago, GoLand already has sixty thousand users, and this number is growing rapidly. That is why the team needs an “allocated” Product Marketing Manager of their own.

My typical day at work, as a Product Marketing Manager, is as follows:

• I get to the office kitchen and make myself a latte
• As the coffee cools, I check the mail, reply to the letters and comments on YouTrack (YouTrack is our bug tracker for developers and, concurrently, a task management system) and on Zendesk (a centralized system where we receive all the letters from our users).
• I look through the unread messages on a dozen of Slack channels.
• The coffee is cold. It’s time to take a look at the new comments on the blog, on Twitter and Facebook and leave a reply to the most important ones. I forward some questions, that I cannot answer, to my colleagues: developers, QA engineers, usability engineers, support engineers, team leads, technical writers, developer advocates or anyone else on the team who might help.
• Today, we are releasing the new IntelliJ IDEA EAP build. I need to write a post about the major bug fixes, as well as the new features. To do it right, first of all, I need to collect information about them, which requires me to check the Confluence page where we accumulate release information, to look into the release notes and related YouTrack tasks, and, finally, to talk to developers and QA engineers from the product team, the SDK (our own version of JDK) and the platform. Once the info about the build is collected, I have to check the features in action, draw up a text, take screenshots and forward the text to be proofread by developers and copywriters (the copywriters help me recognize the “imperfections” of my English). If a feature does not work or I don’t like how it works, I report about it in detail on YouTrack. The blog post is ready! Now I just have to prepare the texts about the update for the IDE, the website and social media.
• I’ve published the blog post and updated the website (Git). I make sure that TeamCity (our Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery system) has verified that I haven’t broken anything. I click “Deploy”. Later, I’ll get back to the blog post, the tweet, and the Facebook post to look through the comments.
• Now it’s time to check the new documentation texts prepared by our technical writers. I try to provide them with meaningful feedback on the imperfections detected.
• I remember that some of the “old” documentation sections require to be checked. I open Google Analytics and create a heatmap analysis task. I leave data analytics for later.
• I receive several messages from a colleague working at the developer advocates team. I give her a call, and we discuss what content is relevant for the nearest future: videos or blog posts? I have to remember about the Tips of the Day to be posted on Twitter. I’ll have to take screenshots, prepare the texts and draw out the tweets.
• A coffee break. In the hall, I walk into another colleague, and we engage in a half hour long conversation about the improvements we made in the last release, and the ones planned for next month. We also discuss the users’ feedback, feature usage statistics and several ideas of how to make the features even better. I remind the colleague about a couple of major bugs which have been waiting to be fixed for several months already.
• What’s with the conferences? It looks like it’s worth drawing up a to-do list. What sponsorship package are we taking with us this year? Which conference cannot be missed and which may? Booth design needs to be coordinated. Who is going? I should remember to order the T-shirts of the new design that we developed together with the team a couple of months ago.
• I’m through with the conferences. Just in time for the daily standup meeting with the product team. The meeting takes 5–10 minutes. Employees from different offices, and some from home, take part in the meeting via Polycom (a solution we use for the videoconferencing). At the meeting, the team mates share what they have done today. I’ve accidentally learned a couple of interesting things. One of my colleagues is reworking an IDE interface element to speed up its performance and improve the way it looks. We should definitely go into more detail in Slack.
• After the meeting, I wouldn’t mind to have lunch. At lunch, I come across some of the colleagues from a “sibling” product team. We discuss what they’ve been up to and the latest news. The guys from PyCharm describe their trip to China and their visits to customer companies where they had a chance to talk to the IDE users. We discuss the tests which we have conducted to optimize our mailing strategies, new landing pages, documentation sections, and the webinars we’ve held. I make notes of what needs to be done for IntelliJ IDEA. I recall that I’ve had plans to set up automated email newsletter for GoLand. I’d better contact the email marketing team.
• I get back to my desk, check what’s new on Confluence. It turns out that a major IntelliJ IDEA update is right around the corner. It means that I need to collect all the necessary information, test the new features, and outline some further content to be published. It takes most of the day.
• In the late afternoon, I decide to switch to the Medium blog post that I’ve been planning to write for quite a while. This post will be about a new plugin which I’ve been working on independently in my free time. The post is almost ready and only requires some polishing. I guess, it could be published tomorrow.
• Before I leave, I remember about a phone meeting with the developers of a technology supported in our IDE. We discuss our plans and jot down the suggestions. Tomorrow, together with the team, we will consider which of the proposals could be implemented in the nearest release.
• It’s getting late. Time to go home!

Basically, that is how my typical work day looks like.

To summarize, at work I…

• write texts for our blog, website and social media;
• communicate with developers, QA engineers, support engineers, usability engineers, technical writers, marketing specialists, developer advocates, copywriters, the sales team and many other people;
• reply to users’ messages on social networks and YouTrack;
• prepare for and attend conferences and various events;
• help the team to rely on data during decision-making;
• help our users to enjoy the product;
• promote users’ interests in the team.

The team expects me to have a user-level understanding of the product, as well as the ability to…

• create much content about the product and related technologies;
• talk to users;
• read and write Go code;
• master new technologies;
• provide meaningful feedback;
• be persuasive and compelling when expressing my viewpoint;
• learn and grow.

If what I’ve just described has not left you completely aghast, if you are interested in programming and marketing, and if you wish to be actively involved in creating and promoting globally renowned products, send us your CV. I’ll be glad to answer any of your questions about this vacancy or how the JetBrains product teams work in the comments below.