Taking your product to market: Product Marketing 101
How Product Managers can raise their go-to-market game with Product Marketers.
In this first of a four-part series, I’ll outline how to collaborate with Product Marketing Management in launching a product to customers. In future blogs, we’ll take a look at how Product Managers can optimise how they work with finance, product operations and user experience (UX).
Product Management sits at the intersection of several teams within any business. This Venn diagram is typical of how Product Management intersects with other stakeholders:
But, that is a simplistic depiction of what Product Management involves, and the teams we work with to take product to market.
Product management lives at the intersection of business, technology, user experience (UX), and now, customer experience (CX). This important function plays a critical role in delivering products to meet customer needs and expectations, that new products and features have product-market fit, and that the product delivers results for the usiness [1]
[1] https://www.usertesting.com/blog/what-is-product-management
Typical Business skills:
- Strategic thinking — analyse market trends, customer needs and business objectives.
- Create roadmap and ruthless business prioritisation.
- Understand customers.
- Business acumen — understand key financial aspects of a company such Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), customer lifetime value (CLV), profit margin, budgets etc.
- Ability to innovate.
Typical UX principles:
- An understanding of UX principles, best practices and processes.
- A user-centric approach.
Typical Technology fundamentals:
- Understanding the latest technologies so they can interface with engineers and translate their vision into a real product using optimal technologies.
There are satellite areas around these main planets that Product Managers should know about — and be proficient with — to excel and distinguish themselves in what they do. They are:
1. Product Management Marketing (PMM) — how you launch product and features to customers to address their needs and deliver value to the user.
2. Finance — the impact of a product on company financials and return on product investment.
3. UX principles –experience, learnability, efficiency, memorability, errors, satisfaction.
4. Product Operations — improving processes, tools, data analytics and cross-functional collaboration to achieve outcomes.
Depending on your organisational structure, there may be other satellites such as project management, customer support, commercial teams, and marketing.
What is Product Marketing Management (PMM)?
Product Marketing resides in the Product Management or Marketing organisation of the business. A Product Marketer’s object is to articulate the value of the tool or feature in a way that resonates with the market. This includes crafting the messaging, go-to-market (GTM) launch, and promotion of a product.
Product Marketing Managers can also be involved in defining and sizing target markets and the audience for your product, get involved in discovery and inception, and represent the voice of the customer and commercial organisation They collaborate with other stakeholders including business development, marketing and sales. Other responsibilities include product positioning and sales enablement.[1]
[1] Wikipedia
Product Marketing Alliance’s 2023 State of Product Marketing report uncovered the most common tasks Product Marketers work on:
l Product positioning and messaging (90%)
- Managing product launches (87%)
- Creating sales collateral (81%)
- Storytelling (68%)
- Sales enablement (67%)
- Building personas (64%)
- Competitive intelligence (59%)
- Website management (58%)
- Customer segmentation (43%)
How can you collaborate more effectively with your Product Marketer and upskill yourself?
In my current company, I have a delightful PMM who collaborates with me from the moment an item is picked from the backlog until it goes live. We meet weekly and share updates on the feature, discuss early feedback, input on the product’s UX and customer value from the PMM.
As the feature gets close to release, all the release activities are planned to ensure that customers, users and customer facing teams are aware of the new feature. The launch plan can include enablement, email marketing, media and social media promotion depending on the impact of what we release to customers. Each company could have a different structure of how PMM interacts with PM.
If Product Managers work hard on their feature/product, nurturing it from conception to birth, but then the child is never taken outside to show to the family, or is shown only to a few family members, then the rest of the family will never know you had a baby. Consequently, no one will show up to see the baby and give them delightful gifts. Uncles and aunts will be deprived of seeing the baby grow, missing an important family experience.
I recommend that Product Managers stay two steps ahead in their PMM game with proper training and knowledge. This knowledge will help them immensely when working with Product Marketers. They can proactively have input into channels and strategies for the go-to-market plan. After all, it’s the Product Manager who has the most complete knowledge of the feature, as they were involved in every step of its development and have context from discussions with various development stakeholders. If they combine their PM skills with the fundamentals of PMM, they will be unbeatable. They can ask PMM the right questions to support a complete and comprehensive GTM strategy.
I am not suggesting that a Product Manager becomes an expert Product Marketer. Product Marketers are dedicated to honing their skills in the latest trends of Product Marketing, and Product Managers have their own full-time job to do. However, awareness of a few fundamentals of Product Marketing can go a long way for Product Managers. PMs can push the boundaries on ideas or processes that PMMs have and collaborate to come up with creative ways of promoting features/products. PMs will become active contributors to the marketing plan rather than passive bystanders.
Top five practical tips for Product Managers
1. Involve your Product Marketer as early as possible, even at ideation stage. This helps them understand your product vision early on and helps shape how they approach positioning and messaging your tool or feature. They can also provide a different perspective when it comes to UX design mock-ups and in-product copy.
2. Meet regularly. Your Product Marketer shouldn’t expect any surprise GTM launches late in the game — keep the lines of communication open.
3. Understand how your Product Marketing team operates. Who are they? What’s their process? What are their deliverables and their objectives? What can you expect from your Product Marketer and who is responsible for what when shipping your new feature or tool? In the company I work for, our Product Managers benefit from eLearning about our GTM process and operations, along with resources to help us partner with our Product Marketers.
4. Keep your audience — and users — at the forefront in your communication. Product Marketers and your joint audience (customers, users, commercial teams and others) are not engineers. Product Managers often have to translate complex, technical ideas to non-technical audience, so it’s critical that you relay what matters in way that resonates and is understandable. One way to tackle this in my company is through clearly documented handovers from Product to PMM, and the wider business, about what we’re launching, what problem it solves and for whom, features, benefits etc.
5. Involve customer voice to the conversation with your PMM. One way my team works with Product Marketing today is through focus groups and interviews with customers as we ideate and start building new tools and features. Your Product Marketer is there to facilitate that customer voice for both you and the product you’re building, and also for crafting their GTM messaging and launch plans.
Learn more
Here’s some suggestions to help you beef up your Product Marketing game.
- Here are some great blogs on what Product Marketing is and does:
What Does Product Marketing Do?
What Is Product Marketing in 2024? Step-by-Step Strategy Design
- Do a simple and easy certification
Free Certifications — Kellogg PMM Certification
Paid Certifications — Many courses from Udemy
- Follow some companies you look up to for their PMM strategies. I follow American Express Global Business Travel, Expedia, Salesforce and keep learning from their posts on LinkedIn and Instagram.
That’s it for part one of this series. I will see you in the second one that talks about how Product Managers can collaborate more effectively with Finance stakeholders.
