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So, most people reading this aren't looking for the marketing section. But I wanted to point something out I see all the time. Take a look at the roles under CM

by cm2012 5y ago

So, most people reading this aren't looking for the marketing section. But I wanted to point something out I see all the time. Take a look at the roles under CMO at a 125 person company: -- CMO (15) Director, Product Marketing, plus 3 PMMs (4) Director, Demand Gen, plus 3 marketers (4) Director, Sales Enablement, plus 2 marketers (3) Director, Brand Marketing (3) PR & Analyst Relations (1-2) Events/Community (1) -- What I posit is that Product Marketing is useless as a position and should be eliminated most of the time. The role ends up being: - Jane Doe is the Product Marketer for product X. She's responsible for growing it as much as possible. - She works with Anne X. in demand gen to make ads to promote the product to new customers. - She works with Hillary Y. in email marketing to cross promote to existing customers - She works with tech to do landing page/funnel testing. However what I find is that the role just adds friction and useless tests to show value. Let the subject matter experts (in demand gen, email, website testing) create the plan for each product holistically. Product Marketers are dead weight 80% of the time. I would only say this anonymously but its true. Source: I'm a marketing consultant that has worked with dozens of fast growing SaaS companies.

kchl 5y ago
I see in your profile that you focus on Facebook and Google ads. If this is your context for product marketing, it’s totally understandable to see them as dead weight. If you’re meeting with B2B product marketers for paid display ads, you’re already dealing with a dysfunctional marketing org (perhaps part of why they brought you in as a consultant!). In an ideal world, demand gen and content already have messaging guidance, target segments and titles and their pain points from product marketing (and field marketing for regional guidance), and can just run with it except for perhaps a once over from product marketing on some initial copy for accuracy or tone. Otherwise, product marketing has their hands full researching customers along side PMs, writing more specialized content that’s harder to outsource, or building and delivering sales enablement. Essentially, they’re making sure you’re targeting the right folks at the right time, prepping sales dev to receive those folks, and working with sales on scalable motions to close them. There’s no reason product marketing should be weighing in on the nuances of how demand gen is being executed. Short version: there’s lots of facets to marketing, a good org keeps people focused where they’re needed based on their expertise.
- arbitrary_name 5y ago
  So, I'm working in FAANG after time in strategy consulting, and I run a product ops and content dev team. I'm really interested in marketing and marketing 'strategy'. Any ideas on how to build knowledge and credibility in order to move into the space more directly?
  - kchl 5y ago
    All opinions of course, but based on a few years of working in GTM for businesses selling enterprise cloud infrastructure and developer solutions. YMMV if you’re shooting for B2C or even B2B2C, or anything else without a direct sales motion, as that’s not really my area of expertise. Also, “product ops and content dev” is an unusual combination - I’ve never seen that under one umbrella before. Part 0: ask yourself if product marketing is actually what you want to do. It is (as you can see) a widely misunderstood role. There may be some other facet of marketing that’s more appealing - demand-gen is a challenging area on its own, as is partner GTM, or branding. If you’re looking for strategy, you may really be searching for a corp dev, product strategy, market research, or chief of staff role. No way to really know except to talk to folks in those roles and check out some job descriptions in your target industry (seriously, the only thing that really galls me when I get asked for career advice is when I inquire “consumer marketing or enterprise / B2B?” and the person shrugs…these are wildly different marketing roles and I wouldn’t dream of weighing in on a consumer marketing job search). Assuming you’re still interested in B2B product marketing: Part 1 is get as close to the customer as you can. The goal is to know the market (this includes competitors) and the customer as well as possible. Every single product marketer I know is sitting in on sales or customer success calls, doing research interviews with existing customers, investigating prospects we lost, and talking to people for whom the product is never even under consideration. If in a time crunch, sales people - particularly sales engineers and your top sellers - will do, but eventually you want to follow that up with more robust research designed with product management and demand-gen, as sales will only capture bottom of funnel info secondhand for you. In your role, it sounds like you can ask for 30 mins to talk to a sales leader or top seller under the guise of serving the customer better as part of product ops or content, and go from there. Part 2 is build some content that demonstrates specialized knowledge. The goal here is to take that knowledge from Part 1 and demonstrate that you can actually turn it into something that can support other teams, at scale. The scale part is important - sales or content marketing can deliver content, too, but normally they’re looking to product marketing for anchor content to customize for a particular customer, or a webinar, or an article. No, creating this stuff is not ‘strategy’, but if you didn’t come from sales, you’re already fighting a credibility gap, and no one likes working with a product marketer who can’t make a deck, write a decently technical white paper or blog post, assemble a messaging document, or design and build a sales enablement curriculum. It’s best if you can demo your own product - and the less technical it is, the more you’ll be expected to do it. For example, analytics or productivity solutions would likely be within a non-technical product marketer’s capabilities, while something like a managed database or DevOps tools requiring integrations with a wide set of solutions means being able to work with a PM, technical marketing, or sales engineer. Check out a release blog or an overview video from a product you’re interested in doing marketing for to get an idea of what to expect. The good news is if you have what I think is required of strategy consultants, you’re probably already a strong writer, good at boiling down market analyses down to the essentials depending on audience, and experienced with building and speaking to a good storytelling deck. Hiring managers will ask for work samples.
jollybean 5y ago
I'm sorry I think you've confused the Product Marketing role with something else. PM's role is not to run campaigns, either brand or 'demand gen'. That's regular operational marketing. Product Marketing's job is to define the Product for the appropriate segments in terms of messaging, features, pricing. Then, outbound, they will provide the overall strategy for the various campaigns. So part 1: They know the market well. Who uses it, why, what their needs are. They'll sit in on sales calls i.e. should be one of the primary conduits into the company from them. They'll do market research, understanding pricing trends. They'll generally do some kind of segmentation, even if crude. Part 2: Direct product activities in this regard i.e. 'Each nation has different regulatory apparatus re: this feature so we need to break it down'. Or, even though our software has nothing to do with security, this specific issue is a problem and we need to have XYZ feature even if it's perfunctory. Part 3: For everything outbound, they'll be setting the messaging and the strategy. 'What groups are we targeting' and 'What those groups need to hear'. Probably putting together the 'baseline copy' and materials. The 'Marketing Ops' shouldn't be making a whole lot of those decisions on their own. They should be taking that from the PM and then deciding which channels to push their budget into. There's quite a lot of overlap in terms of customer relationship and product features, as the Product Manager also does this, but I usually think of PM's as satisfying satisfying specific customer requests, having a broader vision for the architecture that goes beyond any segment needs. The Product Marketing team is the one that says 'We'll be selling in 5 tranches with these features at this price'. The Product Manager cares less about that deliniation and more about the product as whole including internal architecture.
- redwood 5y ago
  The line between product management and product marketing is definitely a gray zone and really depends on the organization, but rather than saying product managers are more focused in the architecture I think a fundamental difference is that they tend to be working much more closely with the engineers via a constant back-and-forth developing a shared understanding of what's possible, trade-offs, roadmap planning etc. Pricing is another one that in some organizations is product management led and in others product marketing.
  - 5y ago
redwood 5y ago
Product marketing is an essential role for centralizing outbound go-to-market strategy, not only in terms of positioning for the outside world but also in terms of keeping sellers, marketers, and execs aligned. I suspect these particular areas in which you feel they are at deadweight may be missing much of their focus or you've experienced an organization that is misusing this role.
- Dwolb 5y ago
  Right… in B2B they can help align basically the entire revenue funnel. OP’s view is a bit myopic.
- cm2012 5y ago
  There are some really great answers to my comment here! I'm delighted. So here's the thing - I get the desired purpose of the role of centralizing GTM strategy. But in practice product managers are too far removed from the customer to be useful 80% of the time. Basically I find that tactics that work for a given business should drive strategy more than vise-versa. This is a very unpopular opinion for sure. In the end, messaging and positioning don't exist in a vacuum. The market responds to what it responds to. But because product marketers are too far removed from the stress of actually making messaging turn into revenue, they just don't have the skillset to be useful. I wish product marketers could make positioning that actually works. But what happens is they make positioning that doesn't appeal to customers, and sales and demand gen pick up the slack and now have two jobs - to actually use messaging that gets results, and to make a middle manager happy with some data that helps them make useless reports upstream.
  - redwood 5y ago
    Frankly it sounds like you have organizational or cultural problems or perhaps just the wrong set of people with the wrong set of expectations.
  - lukestevens 5y ago
    I don't know, it sounds like you've got a pretty myopic view of marketing if you think FB/PPC ads ('tactics that work') are what should drive strategy. Combine that with experience with PMMs who are too far removed from the customer (!) and I can see why you think product marketing is pointless. From the other side of the B2B marketing fence, I see demand gen burning loads of cash on "high converting", highly "tested" ads that look great in reports, except that those leads never turn into customers, because the PPC marketers never track their revenue that far, and those lowest common denominator leads aren't a great fit for many B2B products anyway. I suspect that if your argument is "Well, they should build the product that those leads want" I can see why (a) that view would indeed be unpopular, and (b) why you would be in conflict with product marketers who want leads that match the positioning, not positioning that matches the leads. When all you've got is a hammer...

by cm2012 5y ago

kchl 5y ago

I see in your profile that you focus on Facebook and Google ads. If this is your context for product marketing, it’s totally understandable to see them as dead weight. If you’re meeting with B2B product marketers for paid display ads, you’re already dealing with a dysfunctional marketing org (perhaps part of why they brought you in as a consultant!). In an ideal world, demand gen and content already have messaging guidance, target segments and titles and their pain points from product marketing (and field marketing for regional guidance), and can just run with it except for perhaps a once over from product marketing on some initial copy for accuracy or tone. Otherwise, product marketing has their hands full researching customers along side PMs, writing more specialized content that’s harder to outsource, or building and delivering sales enablement. Essentially, they’re making sure you’re targeting the right folks at the right time, prepping sales dev to receive those folks, and working with sales on scalable motions to close them. There’s no reason product marketing should be weighing in on the nuances of how demand gen is being executed. Short version: there’s lots of facets to marketing, a good org keeps people focused where they’re needed based on their expertise.

arbitrary_name 5y ago
So, I'm working in FAANG after time in strategy consulting, and I run a product ops and content dev team. I'm really interested in marketing and marketing 'strategy'. Any ideas on how to build knowledge and credibility in order to move into the space more directly?
- kchl 5y ago
  All opinions of course, but based on a few years of working in GTM for businesses selling enterprise cloud infrastructure and developer solutions. YMMV if you’re shooting for B2C or even B2B2C, or anything else without a direct sales motion, as that’s not really my area of expertise. Also, “product ops and content dev” is an unusual combination - I’ve never seen that under one umbrella before. Part 0: ask yourself if product marketing is actually what you want to do. It is (as you can see) a widely misunderstood role. There may be some other facet of marketing that’s more appealing - demand-gen is a challenging area on its own, as is partner GTM, or branding. If you’re looking for strategy, you may really be searching for a corp dev, product strategy, market research, or chief of staff role. No way to really know except to talk to folks in those roles and check out some job descriptions in your target industry (seriously, the only thing that really galls me when I get asked for career advice is when I inquire “consumer marketing or enterprise / B2B?” and the person shrugs…these are wildly different marketing roles and I wouldn’t dream of weighing in on a consumer marketing job search). Assuming you’re still interested in B2B product marketing: Part 1 is get as close to the customer as you can. The goal is to know the market (this includes competitors) and the customer as well as possible. Every single product marketer I know is sitting in on sales or customer success calls, doing research interviews with existing customers, investigating prospects we lost, and talking to people for whom the product is never even under consideration. If in a time crunch, sales people - particularly sales engineers and your top sellers - will do, but eventually you want to follow that up with more robust research designed with product management and demand-gen, as sales will only capture bottom of funnel info secondhand for you. In your role, it sounds like you can ask for 30 mins to talk to a sales leader or top seller under the guise of serving the customer better as part of product ops or content, and go from there. Part 2 is build some content that demonstrates specialized knowledge. The goal here is to take that knowledge from Part 1 and demonstrate that you can actually turn it into something that can support other teams, at scale. The scale part is important - sales or content marketing can deliver content, too, but normally they’re looking to product marketing for anchor content to customize for a particular customer, or a webinar, or an article. No, creating this stuff is not ‘strategy’, but if you didn’t come from sales, you’re already fighting a credibility gap, and no one likes working with a product marketer who can’t make a deck, write a decently technical white paper or blog post, assemble a messaging document, or design and build a sales enablement curriculum. It’s best if you can demo your own product - and the less technical it is, the more you’ll be expected to do it. For example, analytics or productivity solutions would likely be within a non-technical product marketer’s capabilities, while something like a managed database or DevOps tools requiring integrations with a wide set of solutions means being able to work with a PM, technical marketing, or sales engineer. Check out a release blog or an overview video from a product you’re interested in doing marketing for to get an idea of what to expect. The good news is if you have what I think is required of strategy consultants, you’re probably already a strong writer, good at boiling down market analyses down to the essentials depending on audience, and experienced with building and speaking to a good storytelling deck. Hiring managers will ask for work samples.

jollybean 5y ago

I'm sorry I think you've confused the Product Marketing role with something else. PM's role is not to run campaigns, either brand or 'demand gen'. That's regular operational marketing. Product Marketing's job is to define the Product for the appropriate segments in terms of messaging, features, pricing. Then, outbound, they will provide the overall strategy for the various campaigns. So part 1: They know the market well. Who uses it, why, what their needs are. They'll sit in on sales calls i.e. should be one of the primary conduits into the company from them. They'll do market research, understanding pricing trends. They'll generally do some kind of segmentation, even if crude. Part 2: Direct product activities in this regard i.e. 'Each nation has different regulatory apparatus re: this feature so we need to break it down'. Or, even though our software has nothing to do with security, this specific issue is a problem and we need to have XYZ feature even if it's perfunctory. Part 3: For everything outbound, they'll be setting the messaging and the strategy. 'What groups are we targeting' and 'What those groups need to hear'. Probably putting together the 'baseline copy' and materials. The 'Marketing Ops' shouldn't be making a whole lot of those decisions on their own. They should be taking that from the PM and then deciding which channels to push their budget into. There's quite a lot of overlap in terms of customer relationship and product features, as the Product Manager also does this, but I usually think of PM's as satisfying satisfying specific customer requests, having a broader vision for the architecture that goes beyond any segment needs. The Product Marketing team is the one that says 'We'll be selling in 5 tranches with these features at this price'. The Product Manager cares less about that deliniation and more about the product as whole including internal architecture.

redwood 5y ago
The line between product management and product marketing is definitely a gray zone and really depends on the organization, but rather than saying product managers are more focused in the architecture I think a fundamental difference is that they tend to be working much more closely with the engineers via a constant back-and-forth developing a shared understanding of what's possible, trade-offs, roadmap planning etc. Pricing is another one that in some organizations is product management led and in others product marketing.
- 5y ago

redwood 5y ago

Product marketing is an essential role for centralizing outbound go-to-market strategy, not only in terms of positioning for the outside world but also in terms of keeping sellers, marketers, and execs aligned. I suspect these particular areas in which you feel they are at deadweight may be missing much of their focus or you've experienced an organization that is misusing this role.

Dwolb 5y ago
Right… in B2B they can help align basically the entire revenue funnel. OP’s view is a bit myopic.
cm2012 5y ago
There are some really great answers to my comment here! I'm delighted. So here's the thing - I get the desired purpose of the role of centralizing GTM strategy. But in practice product managers are too far removed from the customer to be useful 80% of the time. Basically I find that tactics that work for a given business should drive strategy more than vise-versa. This is a very unpopular opinion for sure. In the end, messaging and positioning don't exist in a vacuum. The market responds to what it responds to. But because product marketers are too far removed from the stress of actually making messaging turn into revenue, they just don't have the skillset to be useful. I wish product marketers could make positioning that actually works. But what happens is they make positioning that doesn't appeal to customers, and sales and demand gen pick up the slack and now have two jobs - to actually use messaging that gets results, and to make a middle manager happy with some data that helps them make useless reports upstream.
- redwood 5y ago
  Frankly it sounds like you have organizational or cultural problems or perhaps just the wrong set of people with the wrong set of expectations.
- lukestevens 5y ago
  I don't know, it sounds like you've got a pretty myopic view of marketing if you think FB/PPC ads ('tactics that work') are what should drive strategy. Combine that with experience with PMMs who are too far removed from the customer (!) and I can see why you think product marketing is pointless. From the other side of the B2B marketing fence, I see demand gen burning loads of cash on "high converting", highly "tested" ads that look great in reports, except that those leads never turn into customers, because the PPC marketers never track their revenue that far, and those lowest common denominator leads aren't a great fit for many B2B products anyway. I suspect that if your argument is "Well, they should build the product that those leads want" I can see why (a) that view would indeed be unpopular, and (b) why you would be in conflict with product marketers who want leads that match the positioning, not positioning that matches the leads. When all you've got is a hammer...