Messaging that Wins - Product Marketing Panel

and Super Cool Technology. You should see what's packed into that bike. Also, thank you to Sharebird for sponsoring. Sharebird is a platform that helps you find product marketing content to get better at your job, which is kind of what we're all here to do anyway. So, check out Sharebird. Very cool platform. And with that, I will turn it over to Ross to get the panel started. Ross B.: Awesome. Thanks, Eric. Quick mic check. Can everybody hear me? In the back, can you hear me? Fine. Acoustics? Okay. Do we turn it up a little bit? My name is Ross Overline. I'm a product marketing manager at a company called Five Stars here in San Francisco. A little bit about my background. I started a marketing and PR firm about six years ago out in the Midwest. Briefed in at an investment bank and decided that I'm way better at telling stories than at staring at spreadsheets, even though I still look at a lot of spreadsheets today as a marketer. I was at Twitter for about a year managing some of their consumer product marketing. And now, I'm running consumer marketing at Five Stars in our consumer PMM. So, we have Judy Wang with us, Kaitlyn, Sam Duboff. If you guys could all just do a quick 30 seconds about your background. Hi, everyone. First, I just want to say I'm so glad that there are food and drinks here because I think these things go so much better when the audience has food and all-you-can-drink beverages as well. I think I'm the only person of the panelists here who has the distinction of being unemployed right now. I just left Slack by choice about a week and a half ago. So, prior to my current unemployment where I like to sit around with my dog and watch quite a bit of Netflix, I would say, before that, I spent seven years at Facebook and Instagram working in different roles, product marketing at Instagram. And at Slack, I was actually the first full-time product marketer there, and I led our core product and international marketing teams. Cool. So, my name is Kaitlyn. I am a product marketing manager at LinkedIn. I lead product marketing for a group of products that we call our content experience. It includes our news feed, our content creations, when you publish or share something on LinkedIn, video, and search. I've been at LinkedIn for two years. Before that, I was at eBay for two years, also doing product marketing. And then, prior to that, I was doing totally different things. I was a general marketer for a Highland Capital portfolio company in Los Angeles. And prior to that, I was in finance. But product marketing is sort of the mix of business strategy and storytelling that I love. So, this is a fun place for me to be. Awesome. I'm Sam. Really happy to be here. I started my career... Is there a bit of an echo? No? Good. Sounds good to me. Cool. I started my career at Pepsi and at Starbucks as a brand manager. It was a lot cooler staying at work for Pepsi like three weeks ago. But pretend that's still like a cool job to have had. Then I went to business school and moved from CPG into tech. I worked with Ross at Twitter as a product marketer for our live and media video products. And then I lead product marketing now for Medium. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. So tonight, I'm sure as all of you are well aware, the topic is messaging. So, I think the first question that we've heard from some of our participants that are coming tonight is, how do you define messaging that wins? And what does that mean? So, I'm just curious, Judy, if you want to kind of kick us off with defining that. Yeah. So, I think from a product marketing perspective, the way that I really like to talk about it is, you've got engineers and designers who are really building the how of a product. And then you have product managers who are specifying like what the product does. And product marketing is really telling the story of so what. Why does it matter to that end user? A great example that I think really differentiates what great product marketing or just great marketing messaging, because remember messaging is everything that touches the end facing consumer. So, it could be if they're at an event you're hosting or they see somebody wearing a shirt or whatever it may be. I mean, all of that is messaging to the consumer because that's what they see as representing your brand. But to me, this is around like if you think of the iPhone, you know. You don't go out and say, oh, the iPhone 7 has a 12 megapixel primary camera. You come out with something like a shot in iPhone 7 campaign. and what makes them do something that's going to help them be a better version of themselves? So, I think of that question probably in a little bit more of a metrics-driven way. So, short term, simple answer would be depending on channel, looking at engagement rates or am I getting people to actually come through to the experience that I was trying to market to them. The ultimate goal for any messaging that I'm working on is downstream. So, if I get a really great open rate on an email and then I sort of had a really great tagline that ultimately didn't deliver in the product and I can't get you to engage and be a retained user, then I don't feel like my messaging was successful. In addition to those kind of metrics, the other thing that I pay a huge amount of attention to as a product marketer is things like complaints or questions that come into our feedback channel. There's nothing more telling than seeing a bunch of questions. So, I'm seeing a bunch of questions from our users that say, how do I do this? I'm not clear on what this means. I don't know how to use this part of the product. That's a really strong indicator to me that we're not messaging or explaining things in the right way. So, those are some of the things that I look at for great messaging. Yeah, I think part of the title that jumped out to me was WINS because it specifically speaks to setting a goal in advance. I think the biggest mistake I make as a product marketer is focusing too much on the sound bite and that kind of one-sentence key message and not enough up front on what the specific goal is, who you're trying to reach, and how you're going to reach them. So, the messaging can be fun. You can kind of spend all day thinking about that one-liner, what you kind of hope TechCrunch is going to write about you, or the title for your blog post. But the WINS part, to me, suggests having a clear goal up front with a really specific, clear target audience in mind. And then building in how you're going to reach people with that message so you're not just kind of talking to yourself in a vacuum. And then measuring all those things Caitlin's talking about. Do you guys, do you think of a success metric as the same as the product success metric? Or do you sometimes have a separate marketing, product marketing success metric? Yeah, as much as we can, we try to really have metrics that exist in marketing outside of what product's going to deliver. Both internally, as product marketers, we kind of work on showing our value internally to the company. But also, if you really want to know what kind of you're specifically delivering, if it's working or not, if you're doing the same metrics as product is, at the end of the day, it could just be a really sticky product that they did a great job with, and maybe a combination of the messaging. But we always try to find things kind of outside of the product experience itself and more on a campaign basis to kind of help show what we're specifically contributing. And then, to add to that, there's, I mean, the two have to be aligned. But you've got your launch metrics and your kind of ongoing marketing metrics. And then you also have product adoption metrics. And sometimes those aren't going to be necessarily the same if what you're building on the product side is something that's more integrated into a long-term kind of just heavier adoption or usage by a core group of people versus actually trying to drive new users to the product as well. How did you guys think about that at Slack? As a Slack user, I'm kind of a slave to whatever you guys message to me. So are you kind of looking at, I'm sure it's like a longer lead cycle for new users? Are you just looking at current users using it, the qualitative feedback? Yeah, I mean, to what both of you said, it has so much to do with the audience that you're trying to reach, the channel that you're using, and of course, what is it that you're actually talking about? So I think metrics is really an ongoing development. I mean, especially with Slack, when I left, we were, I mean, today, we're about three years old as a company. And so we're continuing to try to figure out, how do we move from this very organically driven early adopter stage into an early majority where the kind of awareness of even chat applications at work is much lower? Looking at what are the metrics that have traditionally driven people through the customer funnel, starting at creating a new team all the way to actually becoming a paid team and expanding. And really trying to understand what are the levers that are driving it and what channels we use to reach people are bringing in new customers versus reactivating trend teams. Sam, how do you define a medium? How does your team do the same? In terms of defining success? Yeah, I think for us on platforms, always the thing we care about most, and that's saying, we were talking earlier that Slack does so well. Thankfully, we're a publishing platform, which makes it really easy to reach our current users. So we have a medium publication called Three Minute Read. And the number one thing we care about most is the kind of feedback and engagement we get from our core users. and everything kind of circles out after that. We know we've done something wrong if we're not hearing much enthusiasm or excitement from our power writers, our power readers, the people who spend all day in the product. If they don't love it, that wider set of potential readers definitely won't love it. So we definitely do some kind of productized in-product messaging where you might get a push notification with an update or a prompt that we build into the app. What we care about most is the responses, the recommends. on the Medium posts we put on platform. So you seem to put this weight on product metrics first, right? Yeah, definitely, and a weight on kind of our core users first, making sure that they love it, and then sometimes we'll use, you know, Spotify, I think, does this particularly well, where you kind of use the testimonials and the love that they have from their core users to tell a story to that next set of users. For us, it's a small group of writers who, you know, create a vast amount of the stories that people read. So if we can get them really excited, get them using a new feature, that's often the easiest way to get other people to adopt it and to love it too. Even small features, we just did an update to what was really boring, a way to do image grids, multiple photos all together in a Medium post, and five of our kind of most popular photographers, each independently kind of picked up on it, and wrote a how-to post for us on how that works, and we had reached out to them individually beforehand. So we have the benefit of being a platform, so I know that's not as relevant for everyone, but for us, we always try to kind of empower those core users first. It begs this question, you know, you talk about what drives success, you talk about, you know, your users loving the messaging or loving a product, you know, kind of at a high level, what really goes in, what makes messaging that wins? Like, what makes great messaging, right? So I think first and foremost, it has to be authentic and has to be paid off in the product. And I would actually probably put paid off in the product as the number one thing. If you, you know, you can develop great messaging in a vacuum and figure out what people would like to hear and what they're going to get excited about, but ultimately, if you're not going to be able to pay it off in the product. So that relationship with, you know, your product stakeholder or your business unit manager, whoever it is, you know, thinking through the design of the product is crucial. And then the second thing I mentioned, authenticity. As much as possible, I try to, you know, do research if I can or read through verbatims of member feedback and use, at LinkedIn we call our users members, so sorry, just kind of knee jerk reaction, use the word members, and everybody's really quick. Use the words that we hear from them to try and explain the products so that we sound like real people. As much as possible. Interesting. Sam, I'm curious to throw you the same question. When we were working together at Twitter, as I've told you countless times, I always admired your positioning and messaging. I always thought you were one of the best writers we had. I'm curious. Yeah, I think the like three things that jumped out to me are focused on consistency, focus, and resonance. And specifically with consistency, it's about over time and across channels, something that, I fall victim to a lot, is kind of really changing up the messaging launch to launch, campaign to campaign, and you're not building over time, or you're kind of talking one way in email and another way on social. So the first thing is kind of really thinking longitudinally and kind of horizontally across your channels and not kind of losing focus and changing each time. The second focus is kind of both around being really specific in your target audience, but also as specific as possible in the benefit. Twitter allows that. We would end up landing on generic messaging, like now you can express yourself with X. And you kind of just fill in the blank of what that kind of X would be. So I always kind of try to push myself and product marketers I work with to go one level kind of more targeted in terms of who you're trying to reach and what you're trying to tell them. And then resonance is just that kind of intangible one that we could probably talk about for a full hour, and it's just kind of that magic thing. You kind of have identified a need, and you're able to communicate what your solution is to people in a way that clicks. And it's definitely the thing that's the hardest about product marketing. Any unique take on that, Judy? Yeah, well, I agree with a lot of what you both said. I think a couple other things. One, at Facebook, we always talk about how our customers are our best advocates, and I think that's true no matter what your product is. How can you highlight their stories, and how can you help showcase what they've been able to do with what your product is? That's a great way to show other customers and to actually help make it more realistic and more practical that this is success anyone can have with your product. And then the second thing is coming at it from a really human perspective. I know, Caitlin, I love that you talk about real people, because I think that is true no matter what you do and no matter what your product is and no matter who you're trying to reach. At Slack, our audience tends to be either at large enterprises, so the CIO there, or just engineers. You're not going to be able to serve people at SMBs who administrate the product, but at the end of the day, everybody is a person and they want to be talked to and treated that way. So be respectful of their time and tell them the truth. I love it. I love it. I love this idea of respecting the user's time. I think one thing that as much as I try to concern myself with respecting the user's time, really trying to pack as much as I possibly can into the one sentence, I oftentimes do orient myself around that one sentence. I think we've even seen frameworks where around that one sentence, you build out an entire messaging framework, right? So, difference in approach, but one thing I find really interesting is when building messaging, trying to respect my cross-functional stakeholders' time, right? And also making sure that my time doesn't get too sucked into it, right? Like, we don't get too strapped with it. So, I have a couple questions really pertaining to, like, building, creating messaging internally, how to get that through, right? I think the first is really around research. So, you know, we have, you know, a couple massive organizations, you know, here's startups here in the panel. I'm sure in the audience, there's a lot of people from LinkedIn, other large companies, some very small startups, probably some entrepreneurs even who are trying to start their own business right now. Can you guys, can each of you kind of dive into, like, in your organization, the size and scale you're at, like, what does the research process look like that informs your messaging? Yeah. It's always evolving because it's so dependent on the priorities and the actual resources you have in order to do these things. And I think they work best when you have... I think you have user research that's really focused on kind of the in-product behavior dynamics of how something is being used, whether the intention of the product you've built or the messaging that's in product is actually working for the user the way that they want to. And if it's not, are they still able to get the job that they want to do done? Or is it something that's a totally different use case that you didn't budget for? And how do you kind of weigh whether this thing is a better thing or you actually need to go back and redesign the product itself? And then on the product marketing side, depending on kind of how important the feature is and how much time you can spend on it, I think it's so important to understand the market, the audience that you're trying to reach, and then obviously, you know, what makes it competitively different from anything else out there. So what is it that you're asking the user to do in order to have to modify the behavior in order to do? So expanding, I think, a little bit on what you were saying, the bulk of the research we do is not standalone messaging research. It's product research. And that's ultimately what you're messaging. It's anchored in. So it's qualitative research first to understand what is the need or opportunity that we think we're addressing? How are we doing that uniquely? You know, what is the one thing that's really popping as we're talking to potential users? Maybe if there's time and resources, doing some quantitative research to back that up, which you can structure a lot more successfully if you have some good qualitative information to go off of. And then maybe. On top of that, kind of depending on how big the campaign is or how big the launch is, we might use either social or email to do a little bit of A-B testing of what the final sort of subject line or copy is going to land on. But ultimately, the bulk of it is anchored in the work you did to figure out what your product positioning is. And that should really be what's coming through. Yeah, I think for us, there's like best case and then realistic case. Sam, can you tell everyone? I kind of shot you a look when we started talking about research. Yeah, we were joking about research earlier because there's this gap between how we should do it and then what you end up doing at a small company. And that gap is feeling really, really wide lately. And so I'd say our kind of the realistic research that, you know, Medium's a 80-person company. And so we do a lot with a scrappy team. And so we really try to kind of learn and operationalize some scrappy feedback mechanisms that are pretty different than what we used to do. Sometimes at Pepsi or Starbucks. And kind of a few of the tactics we've used that have worked really well. The first is a Facebook group for power users. We have one for power writers and one for power readers. And there's like 150 people in each of them. And we're pretty kind of candid and open in them. We'll post like different prototypes and ask for feedback. We'll post like the copy for email and ask them what they think. Sometimes we'll be more specific. Sometimes, you know, what do you want to see next? And there's a bunch of people in the company who we've empowered to kind of go in and answer comments. And a lot of, especially our writers, will be excited when like a PM or a senior engineer goes in and is, you know, dialoguing with them back and forth. So we've kind of built that channel up over time. So we have an amazing response rate. And it's a really good gut check. So that's been a really good one. And the other is just building personal relationships with some of these key users. For me, that means our writers who we spend a lot of our time thinking about. Because when our writers are happy, everything falls into place. So there's like seven or eight of kind of our most popular writers who I've gotten to know personally. And so at this point, we can text, email. When I don't have time to do actual research like I'd like to, they're really helpful. And writers specifically are always happy to give you critical feedback, which is what you want. So I could talk about, you know, the perfect start to finish research project. But realistically, that's happening less and less frequently. So the more you can kind of operationalize some scrappy methods and begin to build a cadence around them, I personally found that really helpful. I'm actually going to do that at five stars in the next two weeks. That's a great idea. Do it. I'm being completely sincere. I think that's fabulous. We've been like laboring over how we can have a really, really quick feedback cycle. A Facebook group just seems so painless. A Slack channel would be great too. But we happen to do a Facebook group. I'm okay. Or a LinkedIn group. Slack is probably more painless. No one here works at Facebook, right? I'm actually in a Facebook group to that point for Everlane. And they use it a lot to kind of figure out what colors they should create like shoes or pants or shirts in. And it's pretty cool. If you want to check it out, I can invite you into it and see how they use it. I would love that. Anybody here, really. Okay. Let's swamp Everlane with 200 product marketers. Sam, kind of building up that point. You know, having worked at Twitter together. Another thing I think you did exceptionally well was, you know, manage stakeholders, right? I think you're easy to work with. I'm sure like the audience can immediately see that you're just very relatable. You're a really smart guy. All right. Building them up. Building them up here. You know? I feel like this is going to be a hard-hitting question. So, tell us your deepest, darkest secrets, Sam. I would love to ask all of you this too. How do you – there can be a lot of cooks in the kitchen when you're trying to build messaging. I think all of us as product marketers. There's incredibly cross-functional roles. I would argue one of the most cross-functional roles in a business, probably at par with a product manager's role. How do you get messaging through all that? Get input, get feedback, get buy-in, and actually deliver that in a timely fashion? Yeah. I think that's one of the hardest things. There's kind of an old joke that everyone thinks they're a marketer, and it's definitely true. And so, that's something we all have to manage every day. I don't know if we've gotten it perfect at Medium. And so, what we've done that's at least made the process a little easier is try to ground our messaging and insights as much as possible in the way we present it. So, for any kind of product launch, campaign, kind of marketing activation we're going to do, we present kind of like a two-by-two grid of key insights. And we'll break it up by audience, brand, competitive, and product. Then try to be really kind of – make some hard cuts and only include two or three, both bullets in each one. So, audience would be things about the specific user you're trying to reach and what you're solving for them. Brand are kind of those long lead kind of brand goals of what you're trying to communicate about your brand to users. Competitive is the competitive context of what to highlight or what people might compare this to. And then product is, oh, people might not like this. They'll probably be excited about this. This is why the product team built it. And we kind of have really tried to build awareness internally about kind of saying, And it's really great. If you practice a lot ofource versusuję is like so driving city encouraged me to increase access to this product. Cool. Great. Great. I definitely being perfectly honest a lot of the time you end up with too many cooks in the kitchen and You're making big changes a few days before an initiative goes live And product marketers are right at the middle of it. But the more you can kind of ground it and something concrete something strategic I think the more credibility you can have internally Caitlin Judy any thoughts here Yeah, you know I agree with what Sam says and I don't think there's any perfect way one thing that we did at slack that helped and it certainly varied by feature and it varies by the people that you're working with a bit is Upfront just defining what the roles and responsibilities are as the project moves forward I found at slack that I worked with p.m. Who had never worked with the PMM before so that was Really helpful context for them and understanding how I would be a partner to them for a launch And the other thing is I think just being really really clear with your point of view at Facebook We used to always say done is better than perfect And that really meant that if you were coming into a project and there was messaging being developed You should give your point of view if it's going to significantly change what the message is And if you just think we had it flat-out wrong But if there are words and you wanted to wordsmith you've got to trust the person who's actually owning that to do it Essentially just asking for the stakeholders trust Yeah, really kind of pushing a little bit like a gentle kind push back on that some feedback, right? Yeah, and I think that's just so important for any organization as they grow that quickly to get Right because you really have to treat the person who's owning that launch as the subject matter expertise and Everyone around them and above them is really there to empower them to do their work Yeah, so two things that That we try to do as consistently as possible. So We have a you know Kind of our brand personality that we use as marketers a little bit of what what you were alluding to and I think if you can nail down What are the things that are really important to your brand and be really clear about what things that are? Not important to your brand so at LinkedIn we feel like we should and can really own the word professional But that makes other words somewhat off-limits to us like fun or even humorous are things that you know, people will say oh this should be more fun than the messaging but Truthfully if we're not coming across as professional, it's not authentic to our brand So understanding like what can't you know? Where where are the things that you need to let go of and what are the things that you really need to be clear about? and then I would say you have to really put your foot down that you know people can give input on What the positioning is they can give input on? What is the value of this product? But at the but then you need to have one writer as much as possible because if you can hear multiple voices When a sentence is written by three or four people And those people can argue like I don't think that you've nailed What we're really providing to users or I don't think you've really nailed how we're better than the competition But if you think this word should be is and it's something else. I that's not really what's helpful so I Think I found for myself just kind of building on that is Pushing, you know pushing back gently, you know asking for asking for trust like kind of putting that lifeline out One thing I also learned from my old director at Twitter. I worked under Sam was earlier early and frequent, right? Like one thing that I found really successful effective in my job at five stars and at Twitter even more in a smaller company Is you know doing a quick draft and I don't even put a whole lot of thought into it Just go with my gut instinct do a quick draft and I send it to three or four key stakeholders Oftentimes my most local key stakeholders, right? Hey, which like one at a time what your input just throw me your ideas And oftentimes what I find is they actually have excellent input right and like and they kind of the amalgamation of all that You know with one voice turns out even better. Yeah, when's that one thought though is and I Maybe LinkedIn deals with this a little bit? but maybe you guys can speak to it is all of my stakeholders as am I and Silicon Valley tech professional and that is not who I'm speaking to a lot of the time So my stakeholders can give me really great feedback on what the language should be if we are talking to someone who lives in San Francisco and works in tech But you have to be really careful that They are not experts necessarily on who your actual users are and I am not even necessarily an expert on who the user is I have to go listen to them And and maybe do some research or or take a few calls with some of our users so it's really important to be able to push back and say here's who we're talking to and here's where our target is and Here's why you know that might not resonate with them. I Think it's an excellent point and sometimes gently reminding our stakeholders of that too Yeah, okay, like a lot of us actually may not be our own user, you know, hopefully we're all using our own products But I think it's an excellent point oftentimes even our design team will say hey, we're gonna go in the street and like do some user interviews Like you were you were about to go talk to the most technology forward group of consumers on earth arguably on earth or at least in the United States We should probably talk to someone in Miami and someone in New York where we're a national product, right? Like great example is we know better than this But I just did a research project where we made a mistake that we should have known better We put in the question. What do you the question was something like what do you think of these products? And the answer we kept getting back is what do you mean by products? LinkedIn is a website. It's not a set of products. Like what does that mean and we forget we work in tech like nobody thinks of what we do as products So it's something even as simple as that Forgetting like how people actually think of what we do. I Think doing a quick time check. I want to jump into Q&A next before we do that Can I just ask you each to share like your three kind of top tips key tips on how to develop and and ship? messaging that wins Yeah, so, um, I think of messaging that wins is like a little bit more broad than just I think of the product marketer's role as in the candidate world so we're gonna fall back to Facebook really quickly because most products would live to market, right? And then you would have more participants who, like what the people they might get from it to talk about what the ecosystem for that feature may look like, things like that. And then after you've launched and as you're continuing to educate the market on this new product, new feature, whatever it may be, you want to help distill that messaging. So you want to know what are the KPIs that you're tracking, the key performance indicators that you're tracking to, and also bring the kind of narrative around the qualitative feedback you're getting in from your customer-facing channels, whether that's social media, tickets you're getting in. But you want to actually help bring that back into the product and make them understand so that everyone who's helping to actually bring this to market has a good feel for what the customer is actually doing with it and understands the use cases that we're talking about. So I would actually reiterate three of the things that I've mentioned but that I think are really important to keep top of mind. So use real words, either words that you've heard directly from your users or that would make sense to you if someone just said them to you in a sentence. Try to have one person writing. And I think the most important thing is make sure the product delivers it. So all of your messaging should anchor back to ultimately what are we building, how is it valuable, and what does it actually mean for people? And it has to anchor back to the product. Yeah, kind of reiterating things that have come up already. The first kind of is to always ground in insights, to help people internally kind of know where you got to and why. And kind of help force yourself to have that discipline to remind yourself who your user is and what the goals are. The second is to be as focused as possible. Like the first time you do a product marketing brief, kind of ask yourself if you can go back and make it one step more focused in the audience and one step more focused in the messaging. And often when I do that exercise, I'll find it changes a lot about the strategy and what channels I might use. And the third is to try to build in creativity. I think the longer you stay at companies, the more you can kind of just start using the same messaging over and over. And so what we try to do is build into your product marketing process a forced creativity. So when we have key messages, we'll always write a safe version, a likely version, and a risky version. And it's surprising how often you'll end up using the risky version. You're kind of like nervous to put it down. It's like a little bit of a stretch. It feels like a little bit. Like a mess. It might alienate some folks. But that's usually where your best nugget is. So you can tell yourself to be creative, but it's better to build that into the process so you force it on yourself a little bit. I love that idea. That's really cool. Yeah. Do you have any risky ideas that you'd be willing to share with us? Not that I'm willing to share here. If you come up to me after, I have some good stories. I was going to ask the same question. I'm like, can we get a sneak peek? Well, great. Thank you so much, guys. I think we'll just... Maybe a quick round of applause for our panel, just for somebody who's in place. And now we'll open it up to Q&A. So we have someone in the center on both wings. If anyone has a question. I saw a hand right there go up immediately against the window. It's like Alex has it. And if you want to just say your name and where you work. I'm Darshita, and I work at Jive Software, which is actually like two blocks away. You guys talked. We talked a lot about the part with product marketing of when a product is ready and you're taking it to market. But another part of product marketing is really influencing the product roadmap. And I would love to hear some tips or best practices on how you do that with your product manager. Any of you want to take this one? Yes. This is one of my favorite topics and a super important role of the product marketer. So I don't know. I don't know how to do that without research. So I think that figuring out how to get in front of users, even if you do it in a super scrappy way. I think the secret to influencing product development or product roadmap is earning the trust that you really know the user. So doing your homework to understand the competitive set, know how your product could be playing in the market, what is going to resonate with users. And then what I do. I think the key is to sort of tactically is try to get ahead of the planning process by always having kind of my top five list of either needs or opportunities, either major pain points that I think are going on with our users or opportunities that I'm seeing that I can sort of keep reminding the product team about. And then as we get closer to the point where we do quarterly planning, where we're actually going to plan for the next quarter what that sprint is going to look like, we have those on hand. And people have been hearing about it. And then the final step would be if you can actually get the product team to map their ideas back to what you think the needs and opportunities are, then I think you've really come full circle. I am somewhat successful with that. So it's aspirational, but those are my goals. Yeah, I think two things that come to mind. One's more tactical. One's more philosophical. The tactical one is any kind of product marketing brief or document I make. And you put kind of like an FAQ or a risk and consideration section and just try to flag what kind of like likely feedback you might hear from the community would be and what your response would be or the strategy. And it helps make things feel a little bit less emotional and a bit more objective. So if there's kind of questions or worries you have about the product roadmap, you can kind of frame it there in terms of what you might hear from users as a result and kind of work with the PM or design and engineering to kind of talk about. How you could address that question and maybe change the product rather than making it about opinion. And that kind of leads into the second, which is just being patient. I found to be the most important thing when you start a new company and role. It just takes a long time, like Caitlin saying, to build that trust. And I think once you've been somewhere for for long enough, it starts to happen more naturally. It definitely takes a few months to build that relationship and earn that trust internally. Yeah. Two things. One, at a company level, we implemented a customer feedback session at Slack across the entire company. So all engineers, all engineering managers, all design managers and all product managers would come together quarterly with a session led by product marketing where all the customer facing representatives. So our head of customer experience, one of our sales folks, our head of DevRel, those types of people came and talked about the customer feedback. The role of product marketing in doing that was really identifying the top issues across all customer facing channels. And helping tell the narrative of why this matters to products. So, for example, on the, in CE, they saw that like X percent, a very significant percentage of tickets were just people who had trouble logging into Slack because they couldn't find their password. They didn't get the magic link. They typed their email in wrong, things like that. And so on the surface level, that sounds like a very administrative thing. But how do we bring that into what we're hearing from teams on user education where we know that teams are having trouble activating? Because they don't know how to get past this barrier of actually spending a significant time sending messages in Slack. And how do you tell the story of that to everybody across the company so that the roadmaps across teams are integrated and well aligned? And then I think personally in a PMM to PMM relationship, trust is so important. I also think doing a post launch summary and kind of continuing to bring that back to PMs depending on how large of a feature it is and whether or not it's something you want to continue to evolve is also critical. Because then you can be the voice of the customer. You can tell them, you know, this is what we're hearing. This is what we're hearing from customers on the sales side or the type of tickets we're seeing where people have confusion in using this. Or these are the metrics we're seeing around how many people actually use this every day. That's excellent. I think one small tip that I'll add on is that one thing I often find is underestimated is just a relationship, like a personal relationship. If you haven't read it, there's a book called Radical Candor that Kim Scott just published, which I just finished reading. It's absolutely fantastic. Talks about the importance of building personal relationships with your stakeholders. So one thing I've done, you know, with any product manager. I know. I work with is get coffee. And the first meeting we have is ask a lot of questions. Just chat, learn about them on a personal level. And while I'm maintaining professionalism and being an expert, doing my homework, always coming armed with insights. I know some of the things you mentioned. Also being a human with them, too. Building that trust. Right? I think that leads to trust as well. Another question. Right here. Sorry. Hey, how's it going? I'm Chris with. Vivid Vision. This microphone is weird. I have a really quick question. I was wondering if you guys have experience with a big funding announcement or a big product launch and how you deal with the press or members of the media and what your strategies are, what your experiences are. Thanks. PR tips. Yeah. Quite a few having been at Facebook, Instagram and Slack. I would say, you know. We've always had at those companies. We've always had the benefit of having really stellar PR people. But the role of product marketing is working in working with them is understanding, you know, the kind of press that we want to target, whether it's specific industry press or if it's kind of broader. We want to go mainstream and we want to be in USA Today or something like that. The thing that we find that is really helpful is having those one liners because you want to always get at what the headline is. We we did a lot of like ad week prep with Cheryl. And actually, that was like one of the most valuable things I've ever learned from her is what is the headline that you want? Because people will remember 10% of what you say. They will remember pretty much just the headline of the article, even if they even make it past the headline. And so what is what are the headlines you want? How will you tell that story? And I think surfacing customer stories is one of the best ways to do it because then you get your customers to talk about you on your behalf. So so honestly, I have fantastic PR partners. And so I can tell you a little bit about what I do. This is difficult talktion and experiences aboutker経. Eer, a Haranpure owner from Africa. are very interested in this type of story, has been kind of digging on this type of trend happening in tech. So here's how I want to position it for them. So I think having that relationship with reporters, knowing what they care about, knowing what stories they're interested in. And then we typically do special events for press, like inviting them to do a demo day or get maybe whitelisted access to a product ahead of time, and trying to understand what their feedback is going to be. I love the advice of, you know what you want the headline to be. Sometimes they write something that you didn't want them to write, but if you can at least sort of understand what their pushback or what their feedback is going to be, you can get ahead of it. So those are some of the tactics we use. I think that covers it. Hi. Hi. I'm Steve with Guru. We are a knowledge management solution, and one of the challenges I have in our messaging is we basically sell like four different solutions. So it's very easy, I think, to do a lot of very specific research and build out the messaging for each of those, but how do I roll that up into top-line messaging? Right now I'm kind of taking like a minimalistic approach and just trying to let people self-identify and pick their path, and then tell that story that's specific to them. But do you have any tips on how to do that? that sells so many different solutions? Hey, let me plug this would be a great question. Yeah. It's product suite. It's not an easy question. I don't know. I mean, we still talk about this a lot at LinkedIn. You know, we have people who use us for job seeking. We have people who use us for researching other people. We have people who come because they want to just like check out what their network is up to. And we still kind of struggle with what's that overall message. Honestly, it comes down to really good targeting and to figuring out where you're going to reach. And so for the overall message, we've tried to kind of tie it into like, what do we think is the uber goal of a user? So for us, it's like advance your career. And we've used taglines like you can connect to opportunity using LinkedIn, or you're closer than you think to your next opportunity. So something a little bit overarching. I also think if your audience is, if you're trying to tell the story of your company, maybe your audience is not so much a user, but like a tech. And that might be a different story about your company than what you would want the overarching message to be for a user. So I guess the first thing I would really pressure test is do you need an overarching message for your user? Or can you do targeted messaging based on what you think they want? And can your overarching message be more a corporate story? But if you do need an overarching message, then you're kind of trying to figure out like, what is that value that it all ladders up to? ATUL MAHADANI Yeah, I think, I don't know how big or small you guys are, but I'm a big believer in small. Well this might not be as relevant, but maybe there's still some ways to implement, kind of like how can you use an organizational design to help be a forcing function for a focused by audience? So at Medium and at Twitter, it was the same. We were kind of organized by audience. So we have people focusing on writers, on readers, on publishers, on advertisers. and kind of to that end by having a product marketer focused on each they can really get to know that user and that group of people and be the voice and advocate for making it authentic for that group for a smaller company maybe it's about having separate processes or separate meetings where you have that hat on so you're not trying to do it all at once but rather just focusing at one at a time and optimizing for what that audience wants rather than focusing on being really consistent across audiences especially if one group might not even see what you're showing to the other so what are forcing functions for yourself to kind of really put just one audience hat on and focus on just that audience and do what's right for them I would add as long as you feel like the four different products are complementary and additive to the end user experience then there is absolutely a way to tie that messaging together and it's really about focusing on what is it that they want to do what is the job that they want to do with the solution set that they could buy an example would be at Facebook so at Facebook and Instagram I worked on the advertising side of the business and there's absolutely two distinct audiences there's media buyers and people who buy ads and then there's users and actually what's interesting about internet advertising is that they're often like dichotomies because users hate the ads they see whereas advertisers so the messaging doesn't work if you try to tie those things together but on the ad side we had many different ad products and you could buy all of them and they would do different things to help you drive ROI for your business and that was really the heart of what we were trying to do with ads it's build a leading class ad products that would give your business ROI and help you reach new consumers that would buy more of your products so I think being able to say that and tie that together is something that you guys can do and that's why we're getting close to 7.30 so how about three more questions and if you can just direct it to one person on the panel so we can get three more quick nuggets here Hi I'm Elsa from AOBiome we're a startup biotech company I have a question for Judy for example you mentioned before the Facebook power user but if we want to test like a messaging for launching to people that are actually not familiar with our product or brands how would you recommend to reach out to them with like limited resources? Yeah that's a great question at Slack actually before I left we were doing something kind of similar in terms of actually working to internationalize our product and reach people who had never seen Slack because it wasn't in their language let alone heard of it I think a lot of that is about taking like a test and iterate approach so you have theories of who your audiences are you've built personas you have some understanding of who kind of the first wave of people who've adopted your product are and what brought them in and then how can you continue to surface those benefits to that next set of users that you want to reach and what are the right channels where they spend their time that you'll be able to reach them I think we had a question right here before Derek you want to put the mic over here? I'll certainly do that I'll call Mike Hi I'm Dion and I'm also transitioning like Judy so I'm spending a lot of time watching Netflix The Get Down is a great show by the way You should trade show tips No exactly yeah The question I have is not for any one particular member although you asked us to but how do you guys handle Me Too messaging especially when you're in very competitive spaces and you hit you know you have a home run something that really resonates and all of a sudden it starts to sound like everyone else it kind of speaks to your point I think Sam where you mentioned having that riskier option to start to branch away from your core messaging but how do you guys think about you know dealing with the Me Too positioning but also being very true to your brand and staying with your consistent messaging Sam do you want to take that one? Yeah I mean I think more and more you're seeing people being willing to just acknowledge the Me Too and then explain why it makes sense for you and obviously Instagram stories is probably the cleanest example of that where instead of pretending it wasn't a Me Too product they just like said it got it out of the way and then made it better and better every week and I think there's a great lesson in that which is don't focus on the launch moment where you're going to get some snide remarks about if it's copying other products or where the inspiration might be from acknowledge that even if it makes sense but then just kind of focus on week after week making it better and having a clear point of view of why your product's different for us we launched a mobile storytelling product called Series that kind of on its face could feel like Snapchat and that's like a hot story to say right now so kind of in our launch video we kind of like you know with a wink acknowledge that we were sure as we grouped in with some Snapchat stories and Instagram stories but we tried to go really hard on kind of two key points of differentiation and then we've been updating the product every week since we launched so even if you kind of save some of the updates that you want to add to the product that really highlight the differentiation just get the launch out of the way and then the more you can kind of add features that really speak to that differentiation the users who care will start to notice that but I don't think we're in a world anymore where you can pretend you're not borrowing from other companies so sometimes it's probably just best to acknowledge it and then know internally why you're doing this and what's different about it How about we'll let can we actually get one more question from the audience for you Caitlin before we wrap up Oh okay can I add one thing Actually yeah go ahead super quickly I'm getting pressure from all my co-hosts too Okay sorry I'm making you jump super high Make your way up I agree with that I'll also add that that explanation of what you do differently is more for the press and it's more for the Silicon Valley bubble I'm not sure that users care So it's important to check yourself on like do I need to be telling the story to users right now or are they just like this makes sense Yeah I've seen this before Great Last one Alright Matt from Salesforce You kind of touched on this Sam when you talked about your 4x2 and you mentioned competitive and this also dovetails with the last question but I'm curious how you approach competitive intel since that often gets lumped in with product marketing and specifically how that impacts your messaging Does that trickle into that at all and what is the proper approach to take when using that intelligence Sam do you want to kick it off Caitlin do you want to wrap us up Sure Are you kicking it off Yeah I feel like I've talked about competition a bunch now so if you want to take it No I was waiting for you to answer that Oh I'll go then I think like the number one thing I'd say is using all of your competitors as often as possible I think there's often like a Silicon Valley mentality of like dogfooding your own product and this hyper focus on that loyalty When I was at Pepsi there was kind of always these like funny stories about interns who got fired for bringing like you know diet coke into a meeting and you know that kind of mentality maybe is okay for a CPG product but in tech I think as much as you can be a power user of all your competitors and specifically look at their product marketing Share that with the team Share that with the PM Like don't be afraid to like use those products as even more than your own I've learned a lot from that You often can see things that are doing differently You can understand your own advantages a lot better and you might get some good inspiration too Okay good Okay so I totally agree with You have to be using your competitors products and there is some weird old school mentality of like loyalty but I think most people acknowledge you have to know your competitors really well I think it's a core part of the product marketing skill set So the way I think about it is the product marketer has to own product market fit Have to own the responsibility for Do we know our audience? Do we understand what they need? And Are we building the right thing for them? And are we taking it to market the right way? And competitive The competitive set is a key part of that So I consider understanding the competitive set and knowing how they're positioning and how we're going to position it a key part of the product marketer role Awesome Well thanks so much One more hand for our panel guys Alright Co-host Alex will close us out I'm going to close it out here Well hey really grateful guys Thank you for shedding some great wisdom for all of us Real quick if you're looking to get a new role in product marketing Definitely check out Slack, LinkedIn, Medium, their websites Or come talk to the panelists They're going to be up here for kind of the rest of the event If you have questions for them And can we get a round of applause for Ross here as moderating? I asked him if he got a haircut for the event And he said no But I don't believe him I think he's trying to say that I'm usually sloppy I don't know if I should take that Can you go ahead and take your phone out If you have your phone with you Real quick our hashtag is SFProdMarketing for this event So if you had a chance to tweet any great notes If you haven't go ahead and do that But also go to meetup.com Our next event is posted And just like this event you guys sold it out Our next event is coming up on June 20th And it's I have to look up the title It's on there James what's the title? Oh how to prioritize when everything is important So who here has like only one thing to do in product marketing And nothing else and it's really easy Alright so go ahead and RZ it out there And you can be our SVP for that event Before tickets sell out It's on meetup.com right now Alright awesome LinkedIn thank you for hosting this event So we're really grateful for you guys as well So we'll give them a quick round of applause And if you walked in here and you did not sign in At the very end we had a lot of people So we had trouble getting everyone to sign in Please sign in on your way out So please sign out Lastly Sharebird which is my company And 23 which is in the back I want to thank the sponsors We'll have the event video on both sites So if you have your phone out Go to sharebird.com and 23.net And you'll see some great content Alright guys with that said We're going to network until 8 o'clock And then we'll have to wrap it up But thanks again Have a really great weekend Bye