The Overview #77
? Hi, I’m James. Thanks for checking out Building Momentum: a newsletter to help startup founders and marketers accelerate SaaS growth through product marketing.
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In this post:
Top 100 Product Marketing Influencers
Thanks to everyone who nominated me. I highly recommend checking out the full list and following other smart product marketers to learn from!
Interested in the intersection of tech and media, and want to own PMM at a startup with great prospects?
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Know the animals you’re hunting
As I’ve said many, many times before – don’t be something for everyone, be the thing for someone. This post by VC Christoph Janz from 2019 still rings true – you likely have multiple groups of customers that all have very different stories. Check out this illustration with Christoph’s graphs and my commentary:
What would you do, in this situation? Take a big bet on a segment with fewer customers but higher ACV – or prioritise getting the high-volume-low-ACV business back into growth mode?
You track too many metrics
Most companies have far too many metrics. Companies might have a dozen dashboards, each with 4-5 metrics, leading to 50-100 metrics being tracked at any given time. With that many metrics, at any given time it’s likely that half of them are up and half of them are down. How do you know if you’re doing well?
100% agree with this post from Sean Byrnes. Even as product marketers – famous for NOT having well defined metrics! – we’re often asked to track our initiatives against multiple leading and lagging indicators.
I think it really depends whether you’re in a business and culture where metrics are used to guide success or to monitor performance. Both have very different implications on the number, discreteness, and importance of metrics in your work.
So what can we do instead? Sean recommends treating metrics as expensive – choose as few as possible that give you the right insights to make high-impact decisions.
Using data to make decisions is great, but metrics theater is not.
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