Product Marketing learnings and stories
Here are the key takeaways from our seventh Product Stories meetup about product marketing management, hosted at Deezer. Jump back to this meetup by watching the recording and going through the main takeaways
After an insightful fireside chat about finding the market fit with Guillaume Montard, Arthur Rougier, and Maïa Metz, we were thrilled to touch on a new product management topic: Product Marketing.
We happily welcomed Anne Jouanjean — Head of Product Marketing and Communication (Deezer), Jonathan Costet — Head of Marketing (eFounders), and Dustin Coates — Voice Search Go-To-Market Lead (Algolia).
They took the stage to share their experiences and thoughts on the role&missions of the Product Marketing Manager from day one, their relationship with other teammates, and many more.
Here are some of the juiciest takeaways:
Of course, none of these are cold, hard, facts. Just several viewpoints.
The role of product marketing
Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market and overseeing its overall success. Product marketers are focused on understanding and marketing to customers. They drive demand and usage of the product, which often includes writing positioning and messaging.
Source: https://www.drift.com/blog/what-is-product-marketing
Even if the concept of product marketing may seem totally obvious, our guests emphasize the fact that product marketers wear a lot of different hats and their responsibilities are varied.
Indeed, they are at the intersection of different roles and almost every team of the company such as Product, Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, …
Communication is so incredibly important because you are touching on so many teams — Dustin
Anne explained that the product marketing team at Deezer, currently 4 employees, was created to reduce the lack of communication between Engineering, Product and Marketing teams.
But also to make sure no more feature is launched without a proper promotion plan (The product is key but the storytelling is God!). An important job considering the 200+ features in Deezer products.
In addition to external and internal communication, the product marketing team is often in charge of competitive research and collaterals creation. As Dustin said it’s really important that teams are fully aware and trained on the new product.
He and his team send an email every 2 weeks to nearly the whole company on what’s new, what’s going on with the voice and conversational search products. On a more regular basis (daily), they’re interacting with 10 to 100 people.
Jonathan completed the job description by explaining how important it is to focus on the story first at an early stage company (more on this topic via the link below 👇)
You can’t do everything at early stage. But everything you do should be done well — Jonathan
Projects and tasks organization in a product marketing team
No common pattern. Work can be split by product (Voice vs “traditional” search at Algolia), offers (e.g. Free, Family, Premium, … at Deezer) or not at all at the early stage because of the product simplicity.
How to keep consistency across communication
They all agreed on the importance of having product marketing collaterals such as feature descriptions (several lengths to adapt to the context) and positioning, glossary, brand guidelines, … to be used by other teams.
Having someone or a team dedicated to copywriting, not only for the product, is definitely an advantage for keeping a high level of consistency across the company.
Tools like Confluence, Slite or even Google Docs can be used to centralize this knowledge and easily share it when needed.
Building a new feature with customers
At an early stage, you’ve kind of a partnership with your few customers or beta testers, creating product marketing content and designing upcoming features with their help.
They feel like they have a tool that you almost custom-built for them.
It’s getting more complicated when you’ve 8000+ customers like Algolia.
Unless you narrowed down your focus to customers with needs specific enough so you can better know when your product development is successful but general enough to be interesting to other customers.
Here are some of the criteria shared by our guests to pick up these customers to design the next features with:
- relationship (a good one obviously ^^)
- dream customers — the one you’ll love to build your next feature with
- Make sure you’re not choosing customers you can’t build what they need because you’ll be losing time and never be really sure you reached your goal and succeeded
- Make sure they’re aligned with your product strategy and have the right mindset (co-building a feature is almost like a pact between you and your customer. Not the traditional seller-to-customer relationship)
- team resources (number of customers, project length, …)
- industry, company size, money raised, office’s locations, …
Got more questions for our speakers? Don’t hesitate to tweet them:
Many thanks to Deezer for hosting us and offering food & drink!
Big thank you to all of those came out too!
Be sure to follow us on Twitter, to join our community or above all to join us on the 22nd at Zenly 👇😉
