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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Serie: Silicon Valley Product Group
- Sprache: Englisch
Most tech companies get marketing wrong because they don't know how to do product marketing right. The next in the bestselling SVPG series, LOVED shows what leaders like Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, and Salesforce do well and how to apply it to transform product marketing at your company. The best products can still lose in the marketplace. Why? They are beaten by products with stronger product marketing. Good product marketing is the difference between "also-ran" products versus products that lead. And yet, product marketing is widely misunderstood. Although it includes segmenting customers, positioning your product, creating product collateral, and supporting sales teams, great product marketing achieves much more. It directs the best way to bring your product to market. It shapes what the world thinks about your product and category. It inspires others to tell your product's story. Part of the bestselling series including INSPIRED and EMPOWERED, LOVED explains the fundamentals of best-in-class product marketing for product teams, marketers, founders and any leader with a product and a vision. Sharing her personal stories as a former product and marketing leader at Microsoft and Netscape, and as an advisor to Silicon Valley startups, venture capitalist, and UC Berkeley engineering graduate school lecturer, Martina Lauchengco distills decades of lessons gleaned from working with hundreds of companies to make LOVED the definitive guide to modern product marketing. With dozens of stories from the trenches of market leaders as well as newer startups with products just beginning their journey, the book shows you: * the centrality of product marketing to any product's success * the key skills and actions required to do it well * the four fundamentals of product marketing and how to apply them * how to hire, lead, and organize product marketing * how product marketers optimize crucial collaboration with other functions * one-sheet frameworks, tools and agile marketing practices that help simplify and elevate product marketing LOVED is an invitation to rethink tired notions of product marketing and practice a more dynamic, customer and market-centric version that creates raving fans and helps products achieve their full market potential.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction: My Story
Getting Flamed by Bill Gates
Start with the End in Mind
The Barefoot Guy on the Cover of
Time
Markets Shape Success
How to Use This Book
Note
Part One: The Foundation: Understanding Product Marketing's Fundamentals
Chapter 1: When David Beats Goliath
What Is Product Marketing?
Why Product Marketing Matters Now
Where Product Marketing Fits
Chapter 2: The Fundamentals of Product Marketing
Fundamental 1. Ambassador: Connect Customer and Market Insights
Fundamental 2. Strategist: Direct Your Product's Go-to-Market
Fundamental 3. Storyteller: Shape How the World Thinks About Your Product
Fundamental 4. Evangelist: Enable Others to Tell the Story
Note
Chapter 3: Ambassador
Market Sensing
Third-Party Insights
The Competition
Ambassador of Insights
Chapter 4: Strategist
Key Terms
The Role of Marketing Strategies in Product Go-to-Market
How Company Maturity Evolves Product Go-to-Market
Chapter 5: Storyteller
Use Formulas as Input, Not Output
A Better Process
The Tendency to Be Overly Precise
Search Engine Optimization
Positioning = Your Actions + Others'
The Long Game
Chapter 6: Evangelist
Enabling Others
Evangelism vs. Promotion
Tailor Evangelism Tools to Your Product's GTM
Evangelism Is a Team Sport
Part Two: How to Do the Role: Who Should Do Product Marketing and How to Do It Well
Chapter 7: Strong Product Marketing
Key Skills of Strong Product Marketers
Key Responsibilities
Product Marketing Anti-Patterns
Chapter 8: How to Partner with Product Management
Beyond the Core Product Team
Set It Up for Success
Anti-Patterns, What Better Looks Like
Chapter 9: How to Partner with Marketing
Using the Right Marketing Mix
Set It Up for Success
Anti-Patterns, What Better Looks Like
Chapter 10: How to Partner with Sales
Balancing Urgent and Important
Set It Up for Success
Anti-Patterns, What Better Looks Like
Chapter 11: Discovering and Rediscovering Market Fit
The Market Side of Product/Market Fit
Probe Early, Probe Often
Additional Techniques to Understand Market Fit for Existing Products
Active Listening
Chapter 12: Product Marketing in the Age of Agile
Create a Release Scale
Agile Marketing
Chapter 13: The Metrics That Matter
Product Marketing Objectives
Metrics for Product Marketing
Practice Patience and Persistence
Part Three: Strategist: Guardrails and Levers: The Tools to Guide Product Go-to-Market Strategy
Chapter 14: When Strategy Guides Product Go-to-Market
Chapter 15: What the iPhone Shows Us About Adoption Life Cycles
Let's Talk Technology Adoption Life Cycle
Applying Life-Cycle Dynamics to Product Go-to-Market Actions
Be Thoughtful and Patient
Notes
Chapter 16: The Brand Lever
Brand in Tech
Product Scope Expands; Market Perception of Current Product Is Narrow
Brand Strategy Informs Product Go-to-Market Strategy
Leverage Existing Product-Brand Loyalty to Acquire New Audiences
Improve Ability to Penetrate a Market with a New Brand
Product Naming Is Brand Strategy
Note
Chapter 17: The Pricing Lever
Pricing Basics
Make Pricing Easy for Customers and Good for Business
What Drives Your Business?
Use Packaging for Customer Segments or Use Cases
Trends Shift Expectations of Value
Chapter 18: Marketing When It's Not About Product
Campaigns Beyond Product
Invest in the Emotionality of Your Brand
Improve Collaboration Between Marketing and Sales
Examine the Customer Journey
Enable Evangelism from Customers
Activate Your Community
Chapter 19: The One-Sheet Product Go-to-Market Canvas
Product Go-to-Market Canvas: Think Puzzle
PGTM Canvas in Action
Chapter 20: Understanding in Action
Early Stage
Scaling Stage
Mature Stage
Part Four: Storyteller: Clarity and Authenticity: The Process and Tools to Rethink Messaging
Chapter 21: Discover Your Position
Positioning Takes Time
Good Messaging Is Harder Than It Looks
Chapter 22: How to Listen and Connect
Listen and Learn
Choose Credibility and Clarity
CAST: A Simple Guide
Chapter 23: Understanding in Action
Netflix's DVD Days
As the Game Changed
Brand Leads the Message
Zendesk Anticipates What Customers Want to Know
Customer Outcomes Lead
Note
Chapter 24: The Balancing Act
Right Category: Create New or Redefine Existing?
Leveraging Product Managers
Leveraging Sales
Leveraging Search Trends and Techniques
It's a Balancing Act
Notes
Chapter 25: The One-Sheet Messaging Canvas
How It Works
The Messaging Canvas in Action
Part Five: Advanced Product Marketing and Leadership: How to Do and Lead It Better at Any Stage Company
Chapter 26: Leading and Transforming Product Marketing
Where Should Product Marketing Report?
Defining the Scope of the Role
The Importance of Inclusive Team Norms
Note
Chapter 27: How to Hire Strong Product Marketing Talent
Assessing the Skill Set
How to Assess Raw Ability versus Experience
Let Every Candidate Shine
Chapter 28: How to Guide a Product Marketing Career
Early Career: One to Five-ish Years
Mid-Level: Five to Twelve-ish Years
Senior: 10+ years
Chapter 29: Product Marketing by Stage
Early Stage: Ignition
Growth Stage: Rapid Rise
Mature Companies: Peak Burn
Adjust Scope to Stage
Chapter 30: Mature Company Inflection Points
“Traditional” Company Becomes a Tech-First Company
A Single-Product Company Becomes a Multi-Product Company
Moving from Product to Solution, Service, or Customer-Centric
International Expansion
Conclusion: What You Can Do Right Now
Appendix: Marketing Terms Explained
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 6
Table 6.1 Comparing typical product first methods with those that make it ea...
Chapter 17
Table 17.1 A guide to when and why for different packaging strategies
Chapter 19
Table 19.1 PGTM canvas work helps you stay customer-first, but know the diff...
Chapter 22
Table 22.1 A tale of two messaging styles.
Chapter 24
Table 24.1 Category kings exist in both scenarios.
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Whiteboard recreation.
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Release Scale example.
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 The classic technology adoption curve.
Figure 15.2 Growth stalled because existing customers weren't the best ones ...
Figure 15.3 Well-planned marketing strategies and tactics combined with stro...
Chapter 19
Figure 19.1 The Product Go-to-Market Canvas template with a productivity app...
Figure 19.2 The resulting PGTM working session with go-to-market teams.
Chapter 23
Figure 23.1 Netflix's website in 2009.
Figure 23.2 Netflix's website circa 2014.
Figure 23.3 Netflix's website around 2016.
Figure 23.4 Zendesk's website, circa 2010–2011.
Figure 23.5 Zendesk's early 2014 pre-IPO web page.
Figure 23.6 Zendesk's website in the initial post-IPO era.
Chapter 25
Figure 25.1 The blank One-Sheet Messaging Canvas that starts the process.
Figure 25.2 Early draft One-Sheet Messaging Canvas from IndexTank.
Guide
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Table of Contents
Introduction: My Story
Begin Reading
Conclusion: What You Can Do Right Now
Appendix: Marketing Terms Explained
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
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Praise for LOVED
“LOVED is a supremely practical book and a must-read for anyone wanting to do great product marketing. Martina's stories from the trenches bring everything to life. I'm telling everyone at my company to read it.”
—Sarah Bernard, CCO Greenhouse, former VP Product and Design, Jet.com
“The world is filled with great ideas and products that go nowhere. The difference between nowhere and greatness is product marketing, and Martina is the master. Every tech CEO needs to read this.”
—Amanda Richardson, CEO CoderPad, former VP Product, Chief Data, and Strategy Officer, HotelTonight
“I lived the difference great product marketing makes for a business. Martina's unique expertise on each function in a business makes her advice invaluable. LOVED is a book truly worthy of any shelf.”
—Leyla Seka, COO, Ironclad, former Partner, Operator Collective
The Silicon Valley Product Group Series
INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, 2nd Edition (Marty Cagan, 2017)
EMPOWERED: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Marty Cagan with Chris Jones, 2021)
LOVED: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products (Martina Lauchengco, 2022)
MARTINA LAUCHENGCOSilicon Valley Product Group
LOVED
HOW TO RETHINK MARKETING FOR TECH PRODUCTS
Copyright © 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available:ISBN: 9781119703648 (cloth)ISBN: 9781119704393 (ePDF)ISBN: 9781119704362 (ePub)
Author Photo: Courtesy of the Author; © Gary Wagner PhotosCover design: Paul McCarthy
To everyone who asked me to recommend a book on product marketing, this is for you.
And to Chris, Anya, and Taryn, thank you for supporting me while I wrote it.
All my royalties from this book are being donated to organizations supporting the advancement of women and underrepresented minorities in tech. Our world is better when tech products are built by the people they serve.
Foreword
In INSPIRED, I argued that the single most important concept in all of product is the concept of product/market fit.
For startups, achieving product/market fit, including and especially the go-to-market strategy for that product, is really the only thing that matters.
But the reward for reaching product/market fit is growth, and growth brings its own challenges.
Moreover, as the company grows, we typically evolve our product to address the needs of additional markets, and usually we soon begin work on new products as well, so the critical concepts of product/market fit and growth remain at the heart of product work for the life of a technology-powered company.
INSPIRED described the techniques we use to discover a product that is valuable, usable, feasible, and viable, and the book discussed how this requires an intense collaboration between product management, product design, and engineering.
But while discovering a winning solution may be necessary, it is not sufficient.
We have all seen countless examples of products that go nowhere because:
the product doesn't address real customer needs
or, there aren't enough customers with those needs
or, those customers do exist, but not enough of them learn your product exists
or even if they do find you, they don't see how what you provide aligns with their needs
To avoid this fate, as the name implies, there is another dimension to product/market fit, and that is the market.
When we talk about a winning product, we are referring to a strong solution for a specific market.
A product manager's partner in achieving product/market fit and getting this product to market is the product marketer.
While the product manager focuses primarily on the product side of the equation, the product marketer focuses primarily on the market side, including the go-to-market strategy.
But it's important to realize that pursuing the product and pursuing the market are not independent activities. They are happening in parallel, and they are very much intertwined.
Which is why the product manager/product marketer partnership is so important to get right.
I have always visualized this partnership as the product manager working with the product marketer to triangulate on product/market fit.
And once we achieve product/market fit, and our focus moves to growth, the collaboration of product and product marketing becomes the key to that growth.
While the product marketing role has existed for many years, for technology-powered products and services, with the pace of innovation and with very crowded competitive landscapes, it is especially challenging, and more important than ever.
At a strong tech-powered product company, the product marketer helps to answer some very fundamental questions essential for a product's eventual success:
Determining the best ways to reach the target customer
How and when the customer will be able to learn your product exists
How to position your product so the customer knows how to think about your product
How to message the value so that it resonates with the customer's underlying needs
How the customer can evaluate your product
Who and how the customer will make a buying decision
Finally, if you've done your job well and the customer loves your product, how they can tell their friends and colleagues how much they love your product
Many experienced product leaders will tell you that getting the go-to-market right is as tough as discovering a successful product.
In truth, in our books and articles to date, we know we have focused primarily on the product side of the equation.
That's mainly a result of our product bias. We know there are examples of products that succeeded despite weak product marketing, but great product marketing can't overcome a bad product.
However, in our increasingly competitive reality, in order to succeed, we need both strong products and strong product marketing to succeed.
Which is why I'm happy to tell you about this new book.
Martina has had a remarkable career, with many years of experience at top tech companies, most notably Microsoft and Netscape Communications, covering not just product marketing, but also product management and corporate marketing. She is, I believe, uniquely suited to write this book.
Martina has worked for, and been coached by, several of our industry's most accomplished technology and marketing leaders. As a long-time SVPG Partner, venture capitalist, and UC Berkeley Lecturer, she has been advising, coaching, and teaching literally hundreds of companies and countless product marketers on the critical topic of product marketing.
In some cases, especially at early-stage startups, the product manager may need to cover the product marketing role as well. In other cases, others in the marketing organization may need to cover the role.
Whether you are coming from the product side or the marketing side, you are much more likely to succeed if you have a solid understanding of product marketing.
It is the goal of the Silicon Valley Product Group series of books to share the best practices of the top product companies, and this is an important addition, addressing a long-underserved need.
And our intention is that this is just the start. We plan to do more going forward, sharing more of the best practices and techniques that help product teams and product marketing to collaborate effectively and successfully.
Marty Cagan
November 2021
Introduction: My Story
Getting Flamed by Bill Gates
When Blue walked through my door, I knew it couldn't be good. The only other time the Word Business Unit manager sat down in my office was back when he was doing his whistle-stop get-to-know-you tour. He got right to the point.
“I just got an email from Bill Gates. It said, ‘Word for Mac is depressing Microsoft's stock price. Fix it.’ So, I'm here to ask, what are we doing?”
I was a young product manager for Word for the Mac, and it was the first time I'd been trusted with a major product. A few months earlier, the newest version of Word for Windows released, delivering against a strategic plan that was years in the making. Up to that point, the Windows and Mac versions had different code bases, features, and release cycles. This new version used a single code base for both, meaning for the first time, the two would have the same features and ship simultaneously.
But the Mac version was late—very late. Each day it slipped past the Windows release was viewed as a public failure. We rushed to get the product done, deciding its new features were worth a hit in the product's performance.
Mac users HATED it. It was so slow that in their eyes it felt barely usable. And they missed their more Mac-centric features.
Back then, Word and Excel were the most significant productivity products on the Mac. Apple was a beleaguered company, and if Word didn't work well, there was real fear in the Mac community that it could be the death knell of Apple.
Newsgroups spewed vitriolic hate at Microsoft. When I posted to earnestly defend our decisions, they directed that hatefulness at me. I would sometimes end my days in tears, wondering, “Don't people realize I'm a person?”
The only way to “fix it” was to improve performance and the features Mac users cared about most. We released a significant update along with a discount voucher and a letter from me apologizing to every registered Mac user.
It was a humbling experience. But it taught me an important lesson: the market determines the value of a strategy. And even at a company as good at strategy as Microsoft, things can still go really wrong when a product goes to market.
Start with the End in Mind
Although it didn't get everything right all the time, Microsoft did do a lot of things right much of the time. Working there was like going to the university of software because you got to see so many products succeed and fail in so many different markets. In every case, Microsoft lived by the disciplined application of objectives, strategy, and tactics, always starting with the end in mind. Beginning my career there deeply shaped me.
Every move, even small ones, mapped to Microsoft's strategic objectives. I arrived at Microsoft just as it was preparing to launch the first integrated version of the now ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite. In all our product collateral, we removed mentions of “desktop productivity applications”—the old category name—and instead used “integrated office suites.” Ever playing the long game, it was part of shifting the category, reinforcing the notion that Office was the standard-bearer.
I watched how a systematic approach of combining great products with equally great market strategy killed our two biggest competitors at the time: WordPerfect for word processing and Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheets. Just a few years prior, these best-of-breed competitors seemed untouchable. Their failure lay in focusing on features versus building and marketing a bigger vision.
I was a product manager on the Office team when a small pocket of the industry was starting to focus on a relatively new thing called the World Wide Web.
The company that was changing the game, however, wasn't Microsoft. It was Netscape, the originator of the commercial Internet browser. Its threat was so significant, Bill Gates sent an email to the entire company saying no other competitors mattered right now.
That email came just after I had accepted a job as a product manager at Netscape. Understandably, I was asked to pack up and leave the Microsoft campus immediately.
The Barefoot Guy on the Cover of Time
My parents could not comprehend why I would leave the storied Microsoft to join a company whose founder, Marc Andreessen, was featured on the cover of Time magazine barefoot, sitting on a gold-gilded throne.
I arrived expecting an equally strategic adversary to Microsoft, one playing chess a few moves ahead. But if Microsoft was the command-and-control–style dad, then Netscape was the laissez-faire, chain-smoking uncle. New products or programs were cooked up overnight and announced in a press release. Teams scrambled to make them a reality. There was no formal launch process or standard way of doing anything. It was complete and total culture shock.
But it was where I first experienced the foundation of how modern product teams operate. I bounced back and forth between leading product management and product marketing teams. It let me work with many different empowered engineers who were allowed to experiment and innovate.
Traditional go-to-market was bypassed, distributing over the Internet directly to customers—a completely novel concept at the time. “Products” had public, not closed, betas—again, a totally new idea back then—and were released with minimum functionality that met just enough market demand to create early evangelism as much as they crowd-sourced quality.
Despite all I knew about the value of strategy, Netscape was where I learned that free-range discovery could inspire innovation no one could foresee, at equally unforeseen market velocity. It was a much more dynamic model of company building with higher highs and lower lows.
It was also where I saw how innovative ideas can give birth to new startups.
Markets Shape Success
Ben Horowitz was the most revered executive at Netscape when he chose to co-found a then-new startup called Loudcloud (later Opsware) with Marc Andreessen, Tim Howes, and Insik Rhee. It was the world's first Internet infrastructure-as-a-service company long before the world had a framework to understand it.
Back in 1999, it was a radically new idea and not at all clear that by 2021 95% of Internet data center load would be for cloud traffic.1 While the vision was there, the services required and architecture of Internet infrastructure at the time—no matter how much our software automated—was too expensive to deliver in a cost-effective way.
I got schooled on the limits of company and category creation while leading marketing and being Ben's chief of staff. I learned my own professional limitations, facing the pain of what felt like failure (more on that later). I also learned that the greatest minds, vision, and plans aren't enough if all the right market elements aren't in place.
How to Use This Book
In my post-Loudcloud years, I started doing product marketing advising. I taught workshops for companies like Google and Atlassian and created a class on marketing and product management for engineering grad students at UC Berkeley. I practiced product marketing daily with early-stage startups at Costanoa Ventures and watched startups get acquired and IPO. I observed product marketing in action across hundreds of companies.
Through it all, I learned this: There is a stark contrast between how most companies do product marketing and how the best companies do it. It's largely because product marketing is misunderstood; it is the most foundational work required to market any tech product.
That's right: what you want most from marketing—a bigger pipeline, a loved brand—isn't just about doing more marketing, it's about doing better product marketing.
This book is an invitation to rethink tech marketing by understanding how much product marketing shapes the foundation on which the rest of marketing builds.
You'll need great people to do the job eventually, but strong product marketing can actually be done by whomever has the capability and mindset. It's why I wrote this book for anyone with product or marketing in their purview regardless of title.
In Part 1, you'll learn how a Midwestern code slinger beat a Silicon Valley icon by applying the fundamentals of product marketing. You'll then see each in action as I explain them in depth.
Part 2 explores the people and process parts. You'll learn the ideal profile for product marketers and how they partner best with other functions. I'll also cover crucial tasks and techniques—like how to discover market fit—important to succeed in the job.
Parts 3 and 4 go in-depth on the strategy and positioning work that's so critical and hard to do well. The tools I introduce in those sections have been used with every size and stage company, and they consistently provide a framework for improvement.
Part 5 focuses on the leadership and organizational challenges of product marketing: how to lead it, hire it, guide it, and adjust its purpose at different company stages and business inflection points.
There is one big assumption in everything I write: you can't succeed in go-to-market without a strong product. If you're not yet there, please read Marty Cagan's INSPIRED. It focuses on how to build products people love.
Then, when you're ready for your product to be loved by your market, read on.
Note
1
https://newsroom.cisco.com/press-release-content?type=webcontent&articleId=1908858
.
Part OneThe Foundation: Understanding Product Marketing's Fundamentals
Chapter 1When David Beats Goliath: Why Product Marketing Matters
Marco Arment had the Silicon Valley “It” factor. A prolific developer, he was the lead engineer and chief technology officer of Tumblr, a microblogging website that was sold to Yahoo for over $1 billion in cash. His blog was viewed more than 500,000 times a month, and he had a popular podcast before podcasts were a thing.
It's no wonder tech press were captivated by Instapaper, Marco's next creation after Tumblr. They talked about the app for saving web pages to read later as if it was the only one that did the job.
But around that same time, Nate Weiner, a self-taught code slinger from the Midwest, had seen the same problem. People saw articles in their social feeds or web pages and wanted to save and view them later. He created Read It Later to do just that.
With a dash of visual design from his girlfriend and some coding help from his twin, in just a couple of years, Read It Later was used by 3.5 million people—nearly triple the users of Instapaper—and had hundreds of rave reviews. Yet press talking about great productivity apps still only mentioned Instapaper.
Apple announced a feature called “Reading List” at its World Wide Developer Conference. It validated Nate's app but also prompted a brief Twitter storm, with some declaring game over for Read It Later.
Instapaper stayed its course, occasionally adding new features. Three years after he created it, Marco sold Instapaper to Betaworks. Growth languished. Eventually, what remained of the company bounced around in a game of musical owners.
In that same period of time, Read It Later rebranded as Pocket, won nearly every major app award, integrated into hundreds of apps, got multiple rounds of venture capital, and nailed every external marker of success. By the time Pocket was acquired by Mozilla, the makers of the Firefox browser, it had 20 million users.
How did Nate and his small team beat the Goliath reputation of Marco and Instapaper to win their category?
Despite none of them having the title “product marketer,” they collectively worked to shift focus from just building the product to a “product marketing” mindset.
This is just some of what they did:
Sharing data around shifting trends in consumer behavior.
From company blog posts with surprising factoids—for instance, of the thousand most saved videos, the median length was 30 minutes—to showing the press the rapid growth in saving items as mobile device use exploded, the team promoted a customer and market-centered point of view, not just one about their product.
Connecting their product's purpose with broader trends.
They started comparing what they did for web pages to similar shifts. Like how Dropbox changed file sharing or Netflix changed TV. They connected themselves to a much bigger “anytime, anywhere” megatrend, saying “we're the ones who are doing this for Internet content.” They also developed an API that let any app integrate their “save-for-later” functionality, making it an industry standard.
Rebranding from Read It Later to Pocket.
This was a strategic decision designed to help the world see Pocket as bigger than saving articles for later. Changing the product name when they released their 4.0 version was important to show some of their key differentiators—like the ability to save videos and images—and define what was important for products like theirs.
Making it free instead of $3.99.
It's hard to ask people to pay for something when they haven't yet experienced its value. The change was messaged in an authentic blog from its founder, where he also explained they were now a venture-backed startup. It helped cement the trusted relationship Nate had with Pocket's users despite big changes.
Sharing the “why” and advance access with influencers.
Before launching any new version, they made sure to give the most influential evangelists—press, pundits, superfans—the “why” behind the new enhancements, giving new features more meaning.
Like many who build products, Nate's initial instinct to beat Instapaper was to add more features and be the better product. While product enhancements were critically important (they did a major redesign along with the rebrand), without a market context that gave them meaning, it would have just been more feature noise in a world already drowning in apps. The natural inertia behind Instapaper would have kept it the industry's darling.
Pocket's story is like many others in tech. Competitors are bigger or better known. The product team is concerned the world hasn't heard of them nor do prospective customers understand what they've built or why it matters. The impulse is to build more product to show why it's better. And while you have to build good product, market traction—how every product's success is ultimately measured—requires equal, concerted effort on the market side. Specifically, who's the right market, the best ways to reach them, and who needs to say or do what for your product to be credible.
This is the job of product marketing.
What Is Product Marketing?
Product marketing's purpose is to drive product adoption by shaping market perception through strategic marketing activities that meet business goals.
The work is not optional. As the Pocket team discovered, if you don't position your product and act with clear purpose, competitors and market dynamics actively work against you.
Product marketing brings strategic intent and product insight to all market-facing activities. It coordinates a winning plan across the entire go-to-market engine (marketing and sales) and provides the foundational work for everything those teams need to succeed. It's necessary work for everything from hitting user goals to leading a category. If you look at the list of what Pocket did, everything framed why Pocket had value even when they weren't talking about their product.
The job also includes working with product teams to make better decisions affecting market adoption. This can range from prioritizing a feature to writing a piece of content that reframes a competitor. When Pocket wrote blogs about top saved videos, it highlighted saving videos—a feature Instapaper didn't have—and established what good products in the category do without talking about their product at all.
The work is both highly strategic and tactical. But it is far more than creating product collateral, doing sales enablement, or managing launches, a common misperception of the role. Unfortunately, for too many, this collection of tasks has become the role. These tasks are a function of the job being done; they don't define its purpose.
My hope in writing this book is to refocus product marketing around its purpose—leveraging product investments in a deliberate way so the go-to-market machinery can achieve a business's goals.
That requires clarifying what it means to do the job well.
It starts with the foundation of product marketing, which comes down to just four fundamentals from which all important work flows. They are:
Fundamental 1: Ambassador:
Connect Customer and Market Insights
Fundamental 2: Strategist:
Direct Your Product's Go-to-Market
Fundamental 3: Storyteller:
Shape How the World Thinks About Your Product
Fundamental 4: Evangelist:
Enable Others to Tell the Story
The rest of part 1 of this book explains these fundamentals in depth and how to do them better.
Why Product Marketing Matters Now
I'm intentionally using the function product marketing and not the role product marketer as I describe all this. As Nate and the team at Pocket showed, good product marketing can happen if capable individuals are willing to do the work. Nate and his team were exceptional at learning, and their willingness to apply product marketing fundamentals was outstanding.
Not every company has people willing or capable of doing this, but it does mean you can get product marketing done without the perfect team formation yet in place. This doesn't mean you shouldn't staff the role. Outcomes always improve with strong product marketers. It just removes excuses for not doing the work with who you have now.
Because the need for good product marketing has never been more urgent or important.
Modern development tools (open source, cloud everything) and methods mean every product landscape isn't just increasing. It's increasing at an increasing rate. For example, the marketing technology category had 150 companies in its first year and over 8,000 battling it out nine years later. The Apple App Store opened with 500 apps and now has over 5 million. There's the API economy, Web 3.0, the rise of product-led growth. Search engines and tech giants are the front door to customers discovering nearly all product information. Social media doesn't just influence points of view, it contains millions of influencers—at least 100× the number of journalists in the world.
Products make identical claims and have similar features. Pricing often doesn't help frame value—similar products can have very different prices for non-obvious reasons. Trusted relationships and word of mouth are more powerful than ever in influencing decision-making—even for major enterprise software. Imagine how difficult it is for any potential customer to navigate the modern decision landscape.
There is no way for a product to stand out and win unless its entire go-to-market engine is carefully coordinated and it holds a clear market position. That's product marketing.
Where Product Marketing Fits
There is a lot of confusion about the difference between marketing—the function at large—and product marketing, the specific role often part of the marketing organization.
The customer journey is never a straight line: They experience a problem, plunge into the information landscape, and may at some point come out with a hand up to try, buy, or enter a sales process.
The art of finding and reaching that customer on their journey with the right message at the right time so they are willing to consider a product is the job of marketing. The art of selling and converting a prospective buyer into a customer is the job of sales.
Modern marketing teams are filled with specialists who amplify messages, deploy campaigns, and manage and execute programs in their respective domains: demand generation, digital/web/search, advertising, social, content, influencer, community, analyst relations, marketing operations, public relations, marketing communications, brand, and events—many residing in a corporate marketing function. The range of marketing channels is so vast, I have a dedicated appendix at the back of the book defining them. The bigger the company, the more complex and layered marketing becomes.
Marketing specialists rely on product marketers to do their jobs well. Product marketers define what aspects of a product to promote, who to target, why target customers care, and which channels are most important. They are the bridge between the product organization and ensuring the actions from the go-to-market engine of marketing and sales result in business impact.
Part 2 of this book dives into the details of how product marketing interfaces with all its partner functions—product, marketing, and sales—and the best practices that make these partnerships effective. The rest of part 1 focuses on explaining the four fundamentals in more detail.
