Explore Careers: Learn what a role in Product Marketing Management involves. Discussion with a PMM @Microsoft
In this edition, we learn more about a role which is very popular among tech companies — Product Marketing Management. Our guest on the show is Vishal Srivastav, a Product Marketing Manager with Microsoft.
Here are our notes from the discussion with Vishal. Check out the podcast below if you prefer Audio instead:
Product marketing manager is a fairly popular position across a number of industries such as technology, retail, hospitality etc ‐ pretty much any company with a marketing function. Vishal currently works as product marketing manager with Microsoft in their office in Redmond.
Could you tell us a little about yourself?
I did my engineering from Delhi University starting in 2006 after which I joined Microsoft India in a product group. I was an engineer there for a few years, a role I enjoyed a lot. I’ve always wanted to work on hard problems and the role allowed me to do so. After a few years, I decided I wanted to switch. I still wanted to stay in the realm of technology but rather then developing technology itself. I wanted to work in figuring out what technology to develop. So I moved into a program management role. I worked on the office product for about 1.5 years. It was a great experience for me and I learnt a lot of things during this time, especially what all goes into being a program manager. After this, I wanted to study business and go to B‐school and learn skills within business and management as well. Before joining business school I had a small stint at a startup. During business school I explored a number of things. I focused on a few areas such as venture capitalism but realized I didn’t want to do this full time in the long term. So I came back to Microsoft, but this time in the role of a product marketing manager ‐ a role I’ve been in for around 1 year.
Tell us more about your decision to become a Product Marketing Manager?
I’ve always liked to build things and when one is building products, it’s very important to get all sides of the equation, which is what I think is kind of what I’m doing. I’m getting all the experiences keeping the product in the centre such as engineering, product management and now I’m focusing on marketing.
Is this a role specific to technology companies or it’s found other industries as well?
Not at all ‐ any industry which builds products would have a role similar to product marketing.
What does a Product Marketing Manager do?
So I don’t think there’s any one single definition of the role. However, at an overall level it is a marketing role ‐ divided between inbound and outbound. There are two aspects of marketing. The first is educating the customer and the second is attracting your target segment to generate “leads”. When you are looking at traffic, potential customers and leads coming in, it is known as inbound. Whenever you’re doing the former ‐ which is educating the customer it’s called outbound.
Product marketing is a sub‐segment of marketing where the focus is solely on the product and you think about what is the best way to position a product in the market. It involved developing a value proposition around it, choosing the right target customer segment for the product and the best messaging for the product so that it lands in the best way within your target segment as well as what your core points of difference are as compared to your competitors.
Could you try and structure what kind of different roles exist in marketing and where product marketing fits into it?
So like we discussed, there are aspects in marketing around inbound and outbound. Product marketing is more of an inbound function where one listens to all the signals from outside and then decides the value proposition, missing and then building all the marketing materials which can be used to tell your story to your customer. There are also roles which focus on monetization which basically try to figure out that given a product, what is the best way to monetize it. So what kind of price it should be at, what kind of licensing and promotions can be used to monetize it best. This is generally a more analytical and strategic role.
Now, on the outbound side you have a number of roles. A lot of marketing is done through campaigns, so there are a number of roles around communications, brand advertising and campaign management which could all be bundled into marketing communication. It would even include digital marketing, which is using digital channels to amplify your marketing message.
Could you talk about a project which you may have worked on over the last year?
Product marketing is more of an inbound role and so some of the things you do don’t fit in the traditional sense of what marketing is. I worked on a product to try and measure the active usage on my product. The product was a SAS application called CRM Online. Currently at Microsoft we’re undergoing a change in our business model due to which we are changing a number of our internal and external processes where we drive our workflows and actions from. Earlier we focused more on selling, whereas now we focus more on consumption of our platform. Consumption is more important than selling, because unless our consumers are using the product they do not have any incentive to renew the subscription. My work was in developing a metric for the business, something like a monthly/daily active usage metric for the entire business and then rolling it out for all of our sales channels who use the metric to see how well they are doing.
How long did it take you to do this?
So we took around 6 months to come up with the right definition, apply the right kind of business rules and bring it to level such that the metric is agreeable to all stakeholders, both internal and external. After rolling out, it’s more of an ongoing activity to keep updating it.
Do you work together in a team or are you working alone?
We’re always working on a team however generally these are not people that are reporting you ‐ most of the people I work with are very senior people that are experts in their own domains such as sales, engineering, operations and so on. These are the right stakeholders who can help one make the right decisions. So most of the job requires collaborating with a number of stakeholders.
What kind of activities do you do throughout the day as a PMM?
To make progress, one needs to constantly keep making decisions. Somebody in my role is generally the one driving these decisions by collecting inputs from different stakeholders, adding your own inputs and then pushing the decisions forwards. So a lot of it is driving meeting and creating a word product to communicate your vision and a plan to present to senior folks. So it’s a lot of meetings, communications, brain‐storming with all the stakeholders. There’s also a small amount of status reporting which needs to be done.
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Thank you for listening!
If you have any questions for Vishal or for us, or if you have any feedback or thoughts to share, email us at learneducatediscover@gmail.com. We will reply!! :)
