Product marketers: don’t forget to create.
Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.
Hello!
You might be thinking, “How come I’ve not seen any emails from JDP and Building Momentum lately?”
Well I went on a long holiday, came home, and struggled to get back into the groove with things again. But, I’ve recommitted to the core priorities that are important to me right now – this newsletter being one of them.
And, with that, let’s get back into a regular stream of product marketing concepts, advice, and stories!
Thanks for sticking with me – glad to have you on the journey.
JDP
P.S. From now, I’ll just be sending one post a week. You’ll find the same insights, tips, and frameworks – plus a few related articles or tweets that I found interesting – skip down to the end of the email for The Overview.
In this post:
Product marketers: Don’t forget to create.
It’s so easy to get lost in a world of research, strategizing, relationship building, engaging others, collecting feedback, analysing everything, reporting, testing, validating, planning, documenting, training…
I get it.
We’re good at these. We’re generally happy to spend time digging in, doing a better job than before, seeing what we can learn, looking for a silver bullet that will fix everything forever.
And it definitely is valuable work. Sometimes we do learn something that has an outsized impact on our go-to-market approach, changing the business forever.
But be honest; when was the last time that happened? Early-stage startups are most likely to pivot – but that insight isn’t going to come from siloed analysis. If you’re at a maturing business, new discoveries are rare. And sure, you can eek out optimizations from micro-work – but likely going to move your northstar needle.
Sometimes, the amount of energy we expend in our areas of expertise and the work we often enjoy the most doesn’t serve us – and our businesses – best.
Make your work tangible, by making something
Yes, we need to understand our customers and the market through research.
Yes, we need to build good, strong relationships that help us influence.
Yes, we need to engage our cross-functional teams to get buy-in and motivate.
Yes, we need to analyze data and insights to identify patterns and segments.
Yes, we need to create coordinated strategy that sets a long-term vision and our plan to get there.
But that shouldn’t come at the expense of creating.
Only when we create something do we put our strategy, our insight, our perspective into action. We form something out of nothing. Ideas become concrete, tangible, discussable.
We need to create great marketing material that speaks to how well we understand our customers, and reflects how we want to be strategically perceived in the world. Sometimes that’s a webpage, sometimes it’s a brochure, or an email campaign.
We need to create great buyer journey collateral that motivates and moves the needle. We understand the questions our customers have at each stage – we should answer them in the most engaging, convincing, differentiated way we can.
We need to create great customer experiences that engage, persuade, motivate, surprise, and delight.
Whether it’s a feature launch, a multi-channel marketing campaign, a new onboarding nurture sequence, sales tools, a PDF one-pager, or a sales talk track… we’re representing the business. We’re setting the standard for how we go out into the world, how we talk about our product and it’s value, how we differentiate.
And if we can’t do that to an extremely high standard, then how will everyone – from sales, marketing, and product teams, to customers – do the same?
Product marketing is strategy – but don’t forget to market your product
There’s also another ‘curse’ that affects ambitious product marketers. The more we spend on strategy and planning, we get a taste for not doing the work. “We’ll sort out execution once we’ve got all the information,” we think.
Well, that’s wrong. You’ll never have perfect information.
Product marketing is not a game of chess. You don’t get special moves.
Product marketers is checkers. The only way you will make progress is by moving forward, step-by-step.
As product marketers, we’ve got to market the product. And that means doing the work. Creating the collateral. Producing the webpage. Shipping the deck. Building the campaign. Every day.
So there you go. One tip, learnt the hard way, and shared so you don’t make the same mistake.
The Overview
More feedback is not better feedback
Click through to read the full tweet. Your biggest impact will not come from the research you do – it will be how you translate that research into action. Here’s my favorite snippet:
The alpha really comes from *translating that feedback to unique insights* and from *making creative choices* on
a) what problems to actually solve
b) what customers to prioritize
c) what features to build & not build
d) how the user experience works
e) how to market the product in a way that really resonates
Product-market fit is a journey, not a destination
Here’s an interesting article on First Round about how a company found product-market fit twice – first in B2C, then in B2B. Even though they had great demand from their B2C value proposition, the economics and level of investment required meant it wasn’t a smart move.
The era of subtle differentiation
Was Cash App unique? No. It was subtly different – being 2x better at 10 things, instead of 10x better at one thing.
In the early days of the Cash Card, people sometimes asked why anyone would choose the Cash Card over a BofA card (in a lot of cases they’d also ask why anyone would choose Cash App over Venmo). I thought a lot about how to answer this, and within the 10x model for differentiation [1] (which was dominant in 2015, and I think remains dominant in software industry narratives to this day). I didn’t have a good answer. My answer at the time was that we weren’t going to be 10x better at one thing, because it just wasn’t possible. But we could be 2x better at 10 things.
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