Product Marketing 101 with Google Product Marketing Manager

one of the hardest things about being a products marketer is hi I'm Henry and I'm here with Mike and Mike is my former boss at Google and he taught me everything about product marketing super

excited to have you here great speaker I would love to learn more about your approach to product marketing what is product marketing yeah yeah hapc so I

joined Google back in 2002 so quite a while say I've worked in product marketing for maybe 15 years now say it's something which I thought about

quite a lot and I think that you know one question that occurs to me is why is it not just marketing why is it product marketing what's his special word in front of it and you know over the years

I've come to think that having already worked in software and digital for a long time a product in that space is very much like a building which is constantly under construction it's never

quite finished there's always improvements that could be made to it and I think that what separates products marketing from other kinds of marketing is that as a pmm you're always going to

be coming back to that product you're going to be looking at new features you're going to be thinking about how those features evolved the products how they may be expanded the products for a

new audience which need to go after or just how they generally improve the product and made it better modernized it and so you need to go back to your existing user base and explain

how it's worked so I think it's very much a process of constantly refining your messaging and positioning about the product all with the goal of trying to

increase your user base what would you say are the primary responsibilities of our PMF I think it depends on where you are in the products that you're working

on and I generally see perhaps marketing working across three different cycles I'm saying the first one is pre-launch and so if you're lucky enough to be a

startup or a company you have just about to launch your products then as a pmm you really get the chance to help to evolve the products you help to define

what it's going to be in terms of maybe some of the features and functionality does it matter the audience that's intended for and so in that phase there's going to be a lot of

research richer pmm can add to the process which you can then take back to the product team and say well when we tested this version of the product we got these responses from these users and

it would be great if you could refine this or maybe that feature was wasn't a hit with the users and so you need to really evaluate you know what you're trying to do with the particular product and so I think marketing has really

pivotal role in that particular stage and helping to shape the experience I think the second phase is when it comes to growth so you've already launched and you're building your user base and for

me that's when the PMM really needs to listen to what the feedback is from an expanded set of users and if you have a digital product which with large scale

then you can really get feedback from a lot of users in a short amount of time being a Google have been really fortunate and that we lot of our products have had large user bases so

it's been really easy to gather information and then iterate on it and so I think that's really critical aspects as well being able to turn that feedback into useful insights for the

rest of the team and then I think the third area is when you get into product maturity and in that stage you can be dealing with a lot of competition as well so there'll be other entrants to

the market so how did you continue to keep your products fresh top of mind for users and reminding them that it's best-in-class what they want to do

across these different phases are their teams that you consistently work with yeah and say say say one of the things I really love about product marketing is quite often you're gonna be in a

cross-functional team and you often be at the center of that team and you get to see all different aspects of how the products is being put together and then how its marketed and promoted on top of

that as well so you can a product are going to be really big stakeholders you with them you can help define what the product is who the audience is as well and then you're gonna work a lot with

the sales team as well if that's part of the strategy for go to market for that product and have a sales team then you'll work for them on what we call sales enablement so making sure that they are equipped with

the right kind of collateral and positioning and sales pitches let's go out and sell the product to particular customer base you want to reach there's the legal team you have to work with

there's the PR team or analysts relations team if you look to amplify your message across those particular people in the ecosystem so it's a really

broad set of people and then also I should mention the customers of course because as a good marketer you should also be listening so the customers doing focus groups with them and really

understand what they think about the products so I really love being at the center of that and I think that as a PMM quite often you're going to be working

more with other teams across the company you work with then you may be with your own marketing team but I think that's a healthy thing because it helps you to acquire knowledge very quickly and then you should bring that back to your team

and share those experiences of working on that particular product oh I write to top two or three stakeholders that you work more closely with the top ones the tall ones I work more closely with all the top ones that

I listen to that's just kidding I hint it all of them of course and but I find that you know you really need to focus on working place with the product team because

they're gonna be so integral to everything which happens with the lifetime of that product and it can really make or break the success that

products if you go back to the product team with a suggestion about how things could be different based on an insight which you've derived from customer research then that can

really send a product on an upward trend and then also I really listen to the sales team as well I've been fortunate to work with lots and lots of great

salespeople and because they're on the front line they get these customer responses objections to the products very fresh and you're able to take those

and bring those back into your overall messaging for the product as well and hopefully refine it address any concerns that people have do you ever see friction

between product and sales um I would say does happen it happens at any company and you know I think that what happens

is the product team will go out and invent something sells team will be taking it to market and quite often if

that product is successful then you're gonna have lots of customers beating down your door and only do they want to buy your products but they also want to change it as well because they've got

particular needs and use cases that have to be addressed and so the sell team being a good account managers should then take that feedback to the product

team and the sell team will say well I need you to build this feature and then will they increase our user base by X percent and the product team will say well that's not our roadmap and for

another two quarters and so you can't anything about in the meantime so I think that's where the friction is but I think a lot of that can be managed positively with the customer you have to build roadmaps you have to keep them

constantly informed of what's coming you have to retake that time to validate that their feature suggestion is good not just for them but for the whole product as well so I think when you have

those moments of conflict it actually they can be healthy and contribute to a better product overall as a PMM yeah you're kind of bombarded by requests from the sales team to create collateral

and as sometimes the product team needs your input on the product roadmap how do you balance the two so I think you have to keep in mind what is best for the product overall

and don't get distracted by invitations to work on something which aren't gonna make a material impact they're great for the products so the start of the year he should have clearly defined goals of

where you want the product to be no the start of the year you may begin with 10,000 users and your goal may be to get to a hundred thousand users and between now and the start of the year you have

to identify one of those high growth opportunities and focus on those don't get distracted by lots of other smaller projects which will take up your time they won't have a material impact on the

outcome it's also really important to say no to people as well there could be hundreds of projects which get sent you away but it's really important to filter out the ones which

are not going to be impactful so be prepared to push back and say nice people it's okay to do that because you want to help the business manners goals what do you think is the hardest part about being a PMO one of the hardest

things about being a product marketer is differentiating your products from those in the market a lot of the products which are launched these days they can

be very similar or if you have a very unique and fresh product it's not very long before a competitor comes along you know I think it used to be maybe you'd have a lead run of maybe a year to 18

months before there'd be an entrant in the market nowadays of all the the talent there is and understanding of the space it's much quicker to order

competing products I'd say within my three to six months depending on the resources of your competitors of course and so you really have to make the most of that lead time you get and

differentiate your products quite often competitors will come after you with very similar messaging so you have to stay to - what makes your products different and special and and repeat

that and so the customers you clearly understand that difference and then you can measure that as well three surveys and trackers as well to make sure that

you're nailing those particular points of your message that you want customers to grasp I speak in our messaging what are some best practices a couple of

things to bear in mind first of all be truthful they make claims about your products which you can't support because you're gonna get called out for it the end of the day you have to earn the

trust of your users I think it's very important to do that I really believe in the rule of three as well so I think people find it hard to retain more than

three things about your products particularly when you've got your products and then there's maybe three or four other competitors and if they're all quite similar than going for

anything more than three particular key points about your products there's gonna be really hard for the the intended customer to try and retain I'm actually coming round now to a rule of one as well

and it's because there's so much noise in the market now sometimes I think if you're really good at that one thing then just focus on that until you have that point of differentiation versus

your competitors in terms of go to my kid whether it was a simple framework that you've seen work I think you really to understand the products because you need to be able to understand what sets

it apart from competitors I think you really to understand who your audience is maybe there's a particular demographic you're going after maybe there's another kind of way that

you're segmenting your audience Reed appends on what the product is but you really have to have them in mind and as you're writing your messaging make sure that you're writing it for them because those are the ones it needs to resonate

with and then I think you need to have a really good process for making sure that your messaging gets distributed into the market you'll think about your full

marketing plan what are the right events to be at what is your PR strategy if you're gonna be running advertising campaigns then what channel to use is it

billboard is it digital etc so I think you should all only need to come together in a full plan now kind of going back to you how did you become a product marketer I didn't begin my

career as a product marketer I began as an account manager at Google and what I really found was customers would talk to me about the product and they would say

well it'd be great if it could do this and I'd be like well actually no you're right maybe there's a way to do that and so I started to have conversations with the product team and bring these insights to them and then from that

point this became more of a natural transition to think more about well rather than selling the product to customers directly how about if I took a

step back and helped create some of the positioning and framework like based on the feedback that we got from the

products and then use that to enable the sell teams have better conversation with customers so I gradually found myself getting closer to the product team and so eventually just made sense to me to

move into a products marketing role and the swipe done ever since and over the years have you seen the PMM ball involved yeah definitely I think that it

has evolved when says necessarily become harder because I think it's always been hard I think that as a pmm you also need to function as a growth marketer as well

and I think that the holy grail of products marketing and the reason why we do it is to acquire users for your products that's why I spend so much time

finding out who the audience is refining the messaging making sure that you've got a really crisp and clear pitch and I think that it's great to launch a products but you also need to think

about what is that sustained growth as well and how can you continue to retell that story to your audience to increase adoption what would you say are the most important qualities of a good product

marketer so I think you have to be really flexible and you have to be able to recognize when an approach that you've taken what the team has taken

there's not working out I think it's important that you recognize signals early on that your strategy may not be working and then be prepared to change

it and I think it's okay to test different things in order to find something that works I think it's really important to be a good communicator at all levels in your team as well and

across different functions for example the worst beats someone in the product team is different how I speak to you someone in a legal team or in the sales

team and so I try and tailor my my words my pitch to each particular audience because I understand how they respond to certain things and well their particular

view of the world is so I try and add a bit of finesse to that and then I think the third thing is you really need to be in tune with the data and the metrics around what you're doing as well because

they're going to be the measure of your success I would say don't get bogged down in too many metrics pick one or two which are going to be the guiding principles for your products and the

true definition of success and then focus on those everything else is going to be secondary and is nice to know but you always going to have the one or two most important metrics they're gonna make the difference well Mike thank you so much for sharing your

knowledge about product marketing it's good to be here Henry [Music]