First Principles for Product Marketing 1
Of the sundry activities I pursue, only the vast minority earn me money. In our economy and culture, the exchange of currency is a sort of social proof: most people value money and assume that if someone is repeatedly given money to perform some service, then maybe they are good at it (or maybe they are good at bamboozling).
Among that vast minority are doing product marketing (my current role in Startup Land) and teaching product marketing (as an “Expert In Residence” for the Product Marketing Alliance).
What follows are some principles that I practice and teach. On the question of whether I’m a bamboozler, I’ll let you be the judge.
Principle Set 1: Figuring Out What to Do
As a product marketer, you can do a lot! Congratulations. Your diverse abilities are what make you, and the role you’ve chosen, interesting. The thorn to this rose (you’re the rose) and bud (the bud is the future impact you’ll have) is that now you have to get good at prioritization, a fraught and cognitively expensive exercise. These are a couple principles for figuring out what to do.
Principle: Find important, non-urgent work. Then do it
You’ve seen the 2 x 2 graph. It’s overdone. I’m going to overdo it a bit more.
Sorry for my handwriting.
Anyone can put out fires. Okay, not anyone, but it will always be easier to do the urgent things and rally teammates around the urgent things.
Think about fire drills (the metaphorical corporate-speak kind). Bad managers resort to “management by fire drill” because the only way they can get people moving in the same direction is by telling them the building is on fire and gesturing wildly at the fire extinguishers. There’s a reason that this is a common experience among the managed: it works, for a while. Then people get burnt out, and their will to do the little things well declines until they leave.
Not just anyone can put down their fire extinguisher, pick their head up, and ascertain what is actually important to the business. Product marketers have both a unique vantage point and a unique opportunity to do so. A unique awareness of a unique opportunity: I’d call that an obligation, or at least obligation-adjacent.
Your job isn’t to hit quota, optimize your CPC spend, or improve the product. Your job is all of those things, and in order to do your job, your job is to ignore the tempting Siren of Urgency and find what’s most important for unlocking and unblocking your team.
Principle: Complexity is your Bat-Signal
I know he didn’t come up with this line, but he’s the first person I heard it from. My dad used to say, in moments of mock exasperation, “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”
Don’t try this at work. If you’re a product marketer, your job is to understand stuff for other people. Treat opaqueness, confusion, or complexity as your Bat-Signal. (I’m more of a Spider-Man guy myself, but the Spider-Signal never really caught on).
If you don’t know where to start, try fiddling with the settings on your mental telescope with the “Zoom In / Zoom Out” method. Sometimes, zooming into a problem, getting down on your hands and knees, looking at it from 2 inches away, will reveal fundamental truths that have escaped others who only observed it from 5.08 to 6.46 feet away (I’m imagining a crystalline rock on the ground and estimating the range of heights among my coworkers).
Other times, you’ll gain more insight zooming out, placing a seemingly complex part in the broader context of its whole. For example, that thing that Product is doing only makes sense if you also understand what Customer Success and Sales are doing. Who understands the entire ecosystem across go-to-market and product and engineering? It’s you, beautiful you.
Simplicity from complexity can take a few forms. It could be an FAQ, could be some IFTTT (if this, then that) statements, could be an explainer content piece that helps your target audience feel that the world they live in makes a little more sense.
Some things are inherently complex. Maybe the universe is. I guess it depends on your vantage point. That’s the thing about product marketing: your vantage point, with line of sight to market and product, problem and solution, gives you unique power to understand what’s important to understand, for you and for your teammates.
In conclusion
Fight hard to escape the Urgency Treadmill. Find what’s important, not just what feels urgent.
Make everything you can — positioning, messaging, problem statements — simple. If something is complex to you, it’s complex to others, so just do us all a favor and simplify it.
Don’t forget to have fun out there.