How did YOU get into Product Marketing?

I'm hosting a session at the Silicon Valley Product Camp on 24-March, entitled "How to Break Into Product Management and Product Marketing" and I'd like your input (and some voting help, too!).  Neither Product Marketing nor Product Management are degreed or certificated disciplines which begs the question: How do you become one? 

This became an obvious question to me during last year's Product Camp when I was approached by an attendee looking for advice on how to get a product management job.  I mentored him over a period of weeks, helping him update his resume to better reflect his PM skills and experience, how to work with recruiters, etc.  He eventually landed a PM gig a few months later and is happy in his new role.  This got me thinking about all the other attendees looking to get into the profession, my own circuitous path and those of some others I know.

My Own (Brief) Story

Not to bore anyone too much, but here's my own story.  For years I thought that I was a sales guy, though I hated cold calling and sucked at hard-core negotiation.  What I found, though, was I was good at channel sales - where you get people who don't work for you to work for you - and creating the marketing and sales materials my channel partners needed to be successful.  I knew that's what they needed because I often created my own materials when I was selling.

My last year carrying a quota was eventful.  They raised my quota 3 (!) times during the year and I was still 180% of the final number.  After the third quarter in a row coming home from Urgent Care with bronchitis, my wife said very clearly, "Don't get me wrong.  I love the money but I'd much rather have you around to spend it with me."  Quite fortuitously, the company shut down the channel role I had and moved me into a role they called Solutions Architect.  I wound up doing all sorts of Product Marketing stuff for a very technical team and discovered that was really my calling.  I've been doing it ever since.

Another Story

Another very effective product marketer whom I had the pleasure to work with had a different route to the profession.  When I first met her she was in the training group of a software company I joined.  She spent most of her time writing sales training materials, working closely with the PMM group and eventually creating new materials on her own.  She was an elementary school teacher by trade who moved into training when her job got cut.  She also found her calling in product marketing and is now doing well at a large media company in their interactive division.

Your Stories, Please

So now it's your turn.  Please tell me how you got into product marketing or product management and what skills or experience helped you make the jump.  I plan to use this as background information and advice for my session attendees. (If it gets enough votes. Hint, hint!)

Thanks!

I'm Bad at Marketing

Civil War-era Secret Code Quilt

I had the pleasure of chatting at length with a new-ish family friend a few weeks ago.  She co-owns the local fabric/quilting shop where we live and my wife teaches a bobbin lace making class there on Tuesdays.  She and her business partner bought it just over a year ago and have worked hard at making it a going concern. 

Never one to miss the opportunity to learn about a new business and how other folks do marketing, I started asking her about buyers, merchandizing and the like.  She told me about some recent experiences with a sliding discount sale where you got a deeper discount the later in the day.  One frequent customer (who only bought things on sale) came in when the discount hit 35% saying she couldn't stay away any longer.  She was also surprised to find that they had the most traffic and sales when the discount was at 25% and sales all but died after 35%.  They decided to skip the sliding discount scheme and stick with a flat 25% discount for future sales and not worry about their cheap - but vocal - one-off customers.

She also told me about how the people who don't want a thing to do with sewing, needles and fabric but still need to fix something won't buy or look at anything else no matter where the 'easy seam & hem repair' kits are located.  She tried having this display in the depths of the store to encourage them to look around but it didn't make any difference so they moved it near the door and cash stand for convenience.  They are also planning a series of how to do emergency clothing repair classes for those people who need to fix something but lack the skills, desire or equipment for serious sewing or quilting.

Another thing they've done is to have local artists display their fabric creations in a gallery area of the store.  They've sold one high-end quilt to a passerby and are developing a clientele who look forward to each new opening.

They also have a theme fabric each month where customers make a lap quilt, placemat, etc. incorporating that fabric, display the results in the store and have customers vote on them.  They now regularly have more than 20 people making items for the contest.

When I asked her about other marketing she had done all she could talk about were the ads and emails they run and how poor or untrackable the results were.  She shrugged and said, "I'm bad at marketing." Hmm.  She's spot on in analyzing buying patterns, is tuned into buyer personas and has adjusted her inventory, discounting and display strategies accordingly, she's targeted non-quilting people with the artist gallery and trying new things to attract and retain different personas.  Sounds pretty marketing-attuned to me.  I then asked what she thought marketing was.  Her answer surprised me.

"Marketing is all the things you say and do to get someone to buy."

In a way she is right but not by only thinking of marketing in the Kottler, interrupt, shouting billboards and obnoxious emails way of doing things.  She was completely unaware that the personas she described, analyzing the data, testing and adjusting new things is all marketing - and that she's very good at it. 

I suggested she and her business partner write down everything they know about different types of customers to see if there are any they aren't serving well, what types of things they respond to, where they go for information to solve problems, etc.  She now keeps a small notebook near each cash register where they jot down notes on how new customers heard about them, what other things customers may be looking for, what projects or events they have coming up, etc. so they can keep refining their marketing spend.  It's too early to see any results yet but she is a lot more confident in herself and their marketing acumen.

Key Take-Aways:

• Marketing is more than the things you say and do to get someone to buy - it's all the stuff you know about what to say, who to say it to, when to say it and where to say it.
• You may be developing personas and don't know it.  Step back and write down what you know about your customers or their buying patterns. Continually ask them questions.

Grey-Haired Product Management

Or more correctly: Product Management for Grey-Haired Users

I've twice recently been reminded how precious the gift of sight is.  Thanks to laser spot welding I can still see but it is now more challenging spending long periods in front of a computer. <gory details over a beer if you like>

My desk at work has a nifty 22 inch flat monitor for when my laptop is docked.  Even though this monitor is big, I have lowered the resolution a notch to make everything larger, despite the reading correction I have in my glasses. <insert joke about old guys here, if you dare> 

The laptop has a 13 inch screen.  I set the resolution to a larger display when I am undocked but it apparently doesn't believe I really mean it.  Every time I open the lid to start using it, up pops a little reminder telling me that the resolution I have chosen is not optimal.  I don't care about optimal for IT, I care about optimal for ME.  Every once in a while it takes matters into its own hands and changes it to what it (or some young whippersnapper PM) thinks it should be, despite my protestations.

A User-based Product Management View

This is not going to be another rant about Microsoft or Lenovo, however.  Instead, let's look at this from the user persona standpoint to see how the user experience (UX) might be different and differentiated.

In its current iteration, the UX is unpleasant and a nuisance, especially after it changes the settings I want.  The settings were created with the display in mind, not the user.  Who doesn't want the highest resolution, sharpest detail, etc.?  Well, me and anyone else with glasses and a reading correction who does not want tension headaches from squinting all day long, that's who.

My reading correction is +1.75. My wife's is +2.25.  I know other people whose corrections range from +1.00 to +3.00.  All the screen resolution settings are based on pixel count.  As a result, us non-prefectly-sighted folks have to use trial and error guessing which resolution will be the easiest to read.  And we have to remember what it was when the computer overrides the choice and sets it back to "optimal."

The recommended distance from the monitor or laptop screen is a fairly constant 3 feet (1 metre).  Wouldn't it make more sense to have the screen resolution setting recommendations "optimized" for whatever correction the user may have?

Sample set up process:

1. Do you wear glasses?
2. If yes, do you have a reading correction?
3. If yes, what is it? (present a slider with different corrections)
4. Click Okay

The UX takes into account a large and growing user base and presents the solution on their terms and in their language.  A laptop vendor who did it this way would have a nice differentiator and a supportable reason to claim they understand their customers.

What other marketing and positioning opportunities are you missing because you are thinking of the hardware and not the users?

Key Take-Aways:

• If you allow 'customization' to your products, at least have the courtesy of allowing your users to mean it.  Don't override those settings even if they aren't optimal to you.
• Have you considered ALL the use cases and ALL the users in your product design?  Who are you missing?
• Old folks will happily give their money to a vendor who treats them with respect.

Up Next: Crossing the Departmental Chasm: Thinking it Through

The Value of Knowing Who Cares: A Quick Case Study

Hello again!  It's been a while since I last posted <insert litany of lame excuses/valid reasons here> but I'm back.  For now.  Really.

"If you don't know where you're going, you will wind up someplace else."

My friend Larry McKeogh wrote a blog in response to my August 25 Product Management Talk on eliminating MABUSHI from your marketing. Larry's point is that knowing who the most important customer is and what is driving them goes beyond the product launch phase.  He's right.  In fact, knowing who cares and why that's important to them is the core premise of your product feature set, your messaging, your go to market, your collateral strategy, etc.  That information should live with all stakeholders for the entire product lifecycle so that anybody can use it when they need it.  If you don't have it, then someone may have to resort to MABUSHI to make a dealine.

A Short Case Study

I had started a new position at a company that had seen a lot of changes just before I joined.  A new ancillary product was launching within a week and I was asked to put together a datasheet for it.  I asked Product Management for insight and background and got the use cases right away.  They were easy enough to understand but I wanted to know the business drivers for the customers.  That's when I discovered that previous PMs either didn't document that information or never gathered it in the first place.  Like I said, there had been a lot of changes.  It was shipping that Friday so there was no time to talk to customers to develop persona information.  The field and our customers needed something quickly.  This was the first time I had to write something about a product I didn't know and before I had a chance to talk to any customers or prospects.

Rather than write up some cool-sounding gobbledygook that no one would read or understand I pidgeonholed the interim PM for an hour.  He finally decided on five points that "resonated with customers" when he spoke to them about it.  At least there was SOME market validation in what he said.  The datasheet went out on time but I did go back and update it later - after I had validated it with real customers. 

Key Take-Aways:

• If everyone knows Why We Are Doing This and For Whom, then anybody can easily step in and create something relevant.
• Write it down and keep it where everyone can find it.

Next Up: Grey-Haired Product Management

Cough, Cough - MABUSHI in the Consumer Package Goods Space

WARNING: This is a Grumpy-gram.  This kind of MABUSHI is yet another example of how marketers get lumped into the slimeball, low-life, scourge of the earth category.

Two weeks ago my son brought home a nasty summer cold and couldn't sleep at night.  Off to the medicine chest to see what we had.  He was in Cub Scout camp all day long so he needed to sleep at night.  The selection at right is what we had.  I settled on the Children's Tylenol in the end because it was multi-symptom and he got the rest he needed.

What got my blood boiling was the deception in the packaging.  The contents of over the counter cold remedies are all the same (read the labels) so the CPG companies spend a lot of time and money on brand awareness and perceived value - and I'm okay with that.

What I'm not okay is with this garbage, especially from Delsym:

 Big package.  "New Family Size" All implying that I'm going to get more for my money.  What I got was a box that takes up twice the cupboard space and a single fluid ounce more than the Tylenol.  One OUNCE!

Anyone with kids knows that one more ounce is not going to provide much more value as you can blow through a bottle in a few days.  I wonder what the Product Manager and Product Marketing Manager were thinking when they proposed new tooling to build the bigger box, rejiggering the production line to handle the bigger bottle and then requiring their channel to fundamentally change their shelving to accommodate this deception.  I don't know but it leaves me with a bad impression of Delsym.  I'll just stick with the house brand generic stuff from here on.

As marketers, we need to call "Hogwash!" (or your other favorite invective) when we see things like this proposed and kill them off before they see the light of day.

Do you have any examples like this you'd like to share?  As the CPG space is too easy of a target, I'm most interested in FISERV, hi-tech and other areas.

Key Take Away:

• Ensure the value delivered matches the value promised.

Please join me Monday, 8-August at 4PM PDT on the Global Product Management Talk tweetup.  I'll be going through these questions and looking for your input.  Let's elminate MABUSHI.

• What are the two must-ask questions in your PMM toolkit?
• What techniques do you use to understand the value chain?
• When is your sales team a customer/persona and when are they a partner?
• What makes your sales tools REALLY effective and how do you measure that? 
• What self-checks do you use to eliminate MABUSHI?
• What are your favorite examples of bad product marketing?

Time to Change the Channel?

I saw a message today from one of my LinkedIn groups pointing to a McKinsey report by Richard Rumelt talking about how bad strategy is starting to run rampant in business. It's a great read for anybody developing product, company or go to market strategy.  I especially liked the example of International Harvester not identifying it's own strengths and weaknesses in its strategic plan.  The report even comes with a diagnostic kit to help determine if your strategy is on the right track. Yes, you do have to register with McKinsey to get it but the free reports make it well worth it. 

It got me thinking about a conversation I had last with the Sales Engineering director at an accounting software company regarding their plans for growth and competing in a fragmented market.  A big part of their growth strategy is dependent upon leveraging channel partners/resellers.  He was lamenting the fact that his biggest hindrance to channel growth was the cost of enabling resellers. 

Accounting software is a complex beastie and you typically have to have debits and credits in your DNA to be able to sell and support it effectively.  State of the Art Software (now Sage) brilliantly pioneered the use of CPAs as resellers back in the early 1980's and the model is still in use today.  Any number of accounting vendors compete for the attention and love of CPA firms and private practioners.  Some firms are big enough to have practices around several different vendors, many are lifestyle businesses where the owner looks to employ no more than 30 people or so and complains when anything interferes with his regular Thursday golf game.

It's those lifestyle firms my acquaintance was complaining about because he claimed they cost the same to enable as the larger firms but are only going to produce 10% to 20% of revenue as the big firms in a year.  I pointed out that more and more we are known by the networks/communities we belong to rather than the business we work for and perhaps there were communities out there they could turn into profitable and cheaper partner networks.  He seemed to be stuck in thinking the current model was the only model, both in the channel itself and how they enabled their partners because he wasn't receptive to that thought. 

We didn't have time to discuss it further but I came away with a bunch of questions for him that may help him find ways to change his channel:

• Who else other than CPAs or CPA firms have the expertise, contacts and interest in selling accounting software?  Where do they congregate?  What are their needs (what would they want to get out a partnership)?  What would they need to be successful?
• In your market segments, where else do your buyer personas go for advice?  Who do they trust and why?  What kind of advice do they need?
• When was the last time you took a microscope and scalpel to your partner plan and enablement systems?  Do your tiers or segments still make sense?  Which segments are you missing?  What tools are useful?  What do you need?  What do partners REALLY need from your program in terms or resources, materials, etc.?
• What assumptions about partnering have you validated recently?  How many do you really need?  Do you have the right tiers?  Do need more or fewer?  How can you automate the acquisition and enablement of your partners?  Which existing partners are paying their way?  How many are resource-drains and why haven't you dumped them?  Do you have a plan or procedure for dumping them?  Why not?

A lot of these questions are really for your channel folks but are also core to what us product marketers should be doing.  Our responsibility is to ensure we have the right channels and tools to reach the customers we want.   If you're not thinking this way, your strategy may be flawed.  If you're not regularly asking these questions your channels are not running optimally.

Key Take-aways:

• Always question the value and efficiency of your systems.
• Regularly review the assumptions that went into your plans and validate them 
• Be open to accepting that your assumptions may be wrong or things may have changed to make them no longer valid.
• If your channel isn't right, change it.

Next Up: Another Grumpy-gram for our Consumer Packaged Goods brethren

Product Marketing Is For the Birds

Completely coincidentally, Josh Duncan wrote a blog yesterday about Product Launches over on his A Random Jog blog.  No, we didn't plan it but he did ask my opinion before he posted it.

My 9 year old son is a budding birdwatcher and last Christmas we got him a squirrel-proof feeder and 30 pounds of bird feed (Ace Hardware was having a sale).   The feed was general purpose but appropriate for the birds in our area.  The feeder has this clever mechanism on it so that birds of most size can feed on it but the weight of a heavier squirrel closes off the feeding ports.  This was a major item in the MRD because the squirrels in the neighborhood make a good living off acorns and other people's bird feeders so we weren't keen to contribute to their weight problems.

With such a deep and broad target market waking us up every morning, the TAM was vast and attracting buyers was going to be easy.  Afterall, the other players in the market (our neighbors) had plenty of buyers so it wasn't going to take much for us to establish a presence and attract our share.

Product launch went smoothly.  We hung the feeder on our nice, sunny and protected-from-the-neighborhood-cats patio and waited for the birds to arrive.  My son had visions of cardinals, tanagers and all manner of exotic or rarely seen birds flocking to our patio.  Nothing.

We waited some more, trying to socialize the concept of patience to our son.  And waited.  Maybe there was something wrong with the launch plan.

We checked the MRD and read the documentation on the bag of seeds again.  Yup, good for jays, finches, chickadees, wrens and all manner of local songbirds.

No birds.

Thinking it was a QA issue, we checked the feed itself.  With the rain we've had this year (twice the normal rate) the seeds may have gone moldy.  Nope, seeds were dry and fine.  QA recertified.

No birds.

Maybe the feeder was too close to the house making the birds shy.  Nope.  Feeder package said our positioning was right.

Still no birds.  More patience discussions.

A little Internet research gave up a tidbit that it sometimes takes birds up to a year to find a feeder and get used to it.  Whew!  The launch plan was sound and the product requirements were right for the buyer persona - just the timing assumptions were off.

Finally, after nearly four months a pair of Western Scrub Jays built a nest in the pear tree next to the porch and started helping themselves.  First to visit was Mr. Jay.  Two or three times a day he would flit in, grab some seed and take off.  Mrs. Jay would show once a day.  Then they started showing up more frequently as evidenced by the spillage all over the patio.

Then something interesting happened: they changed their buying patterns.  Mr Jay shows up frequently, grabs beakfulls of seed, dumps them on the patio then takes off.  Mrs. Jay delicately takes a few seeds at a time and leaves for a while.  When they come back they go down to the patio and eat the spilled seeds, flitting here and there taking one seed at a time.

I got tired of having seed all over my patio so to improve my customers' UX I swept the spilled seed into a pile right below the feeder.  If it was in a pile, they wouldn't have to hop all over the place to eat.  That was the assumption.

Mrs. Jay, as you can see, is content to sit in the pile of seeds and eat her fill in one spot.  Mr. Jay, however, still prefers to chase all over the patio picking up individual seeds he dumped on the ground during a previous visit.

The other buyers in the neighborhood?  Haven't seen a one yet.  Maybe I'll start a social media campaign and encourage Mr & Mrs Jay to start tweeting about it...




Key Take-Aways:

• Sometimes it does take a while to get results, even though everything else was done right.  And even when there's lots of buyers around.
• Even though they receive the same value, sometimes your customer's buy differently and sometimes they don't respond to an improved UX
• Not all your personas are going to buy at the same time
• Some buyers are tidy buyers, some are messy.  To get one sometimes you have to allow both.

Next up: Is it time to change the channel?