Balancing Strategy and Execution — Support is the Foundation
The common advice seems trivial. Spend 80% of your time on execution, and 20% on strategy. However, the reality is something that can take a lifetime of experience to balance well.
The challenge is that it is a falsehood to think you can do these two things independent of each other.
The Chicken or the Egg?
Strategy and execution can be a bit of a “chicken before the egg” kind of problem. You need to execute to understand reality enough in order to do strategy. However you need some strategic thinking or planning so that you don’t execute poorly.
This “what comes first” issue is the first problem. Iterating more incrementally helps solve this problem. I like to call it Agile Product Marketing. But this only scratches the surface. Working iteratively between the new product launch strategy and the pitch deck for the new product helps keep some balance between the two. But there is an underlying problem.
Growing and Harvesting
Digging deeper, is it really strategy vs. execution? Or something else? Often times, the underlying balance is really growing vs. harvesting. The company depends on your output, but teams that only focus on the output run out of good ways to contribute. In product marketing, this problem shows up in several ways. It might be a customer segmentation strategy deck that looks polished, but no one executes on it because it’s too academic. Or, it’s authoring a whitepaper that makes the demand gen team happy, but doesn’t drive any qualified opportunities and no one on the sales team shares it with prospects.
Product marketing teams are often accused of creating marketing “fluff” that never gets used by the field, and is maybe click bait at best. Great product marketing teams create things that become a centerpiece of the sales process or drive real business opportunities.
This is a very hard problem to solve.
One approach is to thoroughly research everything you work on. You could meet with 30 sales reps and customers to research their thinking every time you embark on a project. Or, conduct extensive market research that costs tens of thousands of dollars. Sometimes these approaches to “growing your knowledge” are necessary. For large, high impact, high risk projects, dedicated research might be worth the investment.
However, if you take this approach to “growing” for everything you do, you will become highly inefficient and be a huge tax on the organization. But if you don’t grow your knowledge enough, and harvest too soon, your crop will be worthless.
How do you get to the point where you can produce things like this of high value? And, how do you consistently produce output, strategic or tactical, and do it efficiently?
The difference is that great product marketers make enough small investments across the organization over time that they become ingrained in the flow of knowledge in an organization.
Support is the Foundation
Within the “Strategy, Content, Support” framework, Support is the foundation to everything. By doing the best job possible at supporting other teams across sales, marketing, operations and product, a product marketing team can be both more efficient and create highly valuable content and strategy work.
This does not mean saying yes to everything. Nor does it mean doing things exactly the way they are requested. But you need to address every request and be a partner in helping to solve them. Sometimes that just means giving someone an alternate solution. Sometimes it means being hands on. The end result regardless is that you help reduce friction for the organization.
Prioritizing support is counterintuitive for many people. Some think of support as a flat out tax on a product marketing team. Some think of it as something valuable to do, but it needs to be limited and reigned in.
What the naysayers ignore, is that great support gives others a reason to give you their time. And, it gives you first-hand knowledge about customers, competitors and even your own product. This is how you grow your crop over time. Making consistent investments in supporting others earns you credibility, and makes it much easier to create valuable output. Harvesting becomes easy, and your output is loved.
It doesn’t matter if your company is tiny or huge. A product marketing team that does not start with being “part of the team” rather than a side function will never make a large impact.
But What About Strategy vs. Execution?
It might feel like we’ve wandered a little from the original question of this post. How do you balance strategy and execution?
Balancing strategy and execution is sometimes confused with balancing knowledge-gathering and output. Both strategy work and execution work have knowledge-gathering requirements and output.
Once you put support at the foundation, and solve how you efficiently manage knowledge-gathering, you can then decide how much strategy work to do vs. content work. This depends on what the organization needs at the time. Balance there is important as well.
The End Result: Be an Intelligence Hub
Some people think of product marketing as somewhat of a “general manager” role. Product marketers should certainly be focused holistically on how to drive the business and on business metrics. However the cross-functional nature of how they operate means that they rarely have any direct control over the organization.
To have power and influence, product marketing teams must become an intelligence hub for the organization. It’s more like leading a group of people through the jungle, rather than being an airplane pilot. Product marketers can lead, but the people you lead have the power to not follow if they choose. A higher authority (i.e. the CEO) can force down decisions, but over time that is a detriment to collaboration.
Starting with support enables you to become an intelligence hub. This creates the most efficient product marketing teams, than can then focus on both strategy and content projects as they determine most important to drive the business. Ultimately, a strong foundation of supporting other teams makes it easy for product marketing to handle the balance between strategy and execution.
