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product marketers aren't great at what they do. They are good at getting a lot of stuff done, but it's not always clear it's making a difference. The talent of the people in the role is also uneven, contributing to its reputation—somewhere between ho‐hum and occasionally great.

      Product marketing is not: managing a checklist of everything needed to get done for launch, project management, or just being a facilitator between product and sales. The classic understanding of product marketing is first you build a product, then bring it to market. The failure in this approach is companies just explain what their product does and why it's different and assume people care.

      Great product marketing requires understanding the market first. It pressure‐tests assumptions based on what the market tells you so you can adapt, position, and market into customers' true reality. It makes clear why your product matters and should be loved using customers' language, experience, and needs.

      The real indicators of successful product marketing are market adoption and momentum. But most people don't know what to look for or when is the right time to start doing product marketing.

Take Company Z. They're real, but I'm not using names so you can think about all the startup stories you know just like theirs. They were a brainchild of a team of PhDs who collectively had decades of expertise among them. After being selected as a finalist at a well‐respected technology competition, they decided it was time to bring their idea to market.

      Their technology was impressive. A prominent analyst wrote about its effectiveness, noting they had never seen anything like it. They showed a demonstration to a top C‐suite executive at a Fortune 100 company, and he said “This is amazing.” They got venture capital funding based on all this and were off to the races.

      Or so they thought.

      As is common at these early stages, one of their technical founders was the front man for everything: sales, product, marketing, people. But after six months of meetings with dozens of executives, they didn't have any buyers. So they stopped trying to pitch their product at every meeting and instead started asking every executive they met what their most pressing priorities were.

      It turned out the problem their technology solved didn't make the top‐five, and in some cases, even the top‐10 priorities. You might wonder why Company Z didn't start there, but remember, they got some early data points that made them think they were on a path to create something of value.

      The team realized with a little bit of rework, they could pivot their product into a more nimble solution to a problem that was much higher on these executives' priority list.

      Their new product intersected with a well‐established, decades‐old category with very mature incumbents. They created an easy‐to‐use setup that could much more quickly give teams answers. Armed with this new approach, Company Z created a demo that showed what their product could do. They figured since the product did so many things, they would show a demo. But this made them skip the crucial step of figuring out how to talk about what they did succinctly and why people should care.

Without the right mental anchors, prospective customers still struggled to understand why they should pay attention. Company Z asked, “Should we talk about the regulatory environment which makes what we do more relevant? Do we point out what's broken with the older, incumbent software even if we only do a piece of what they do much better?”

      Company Z tried to answer these questions by hiring salespeople to sell their product. Since they now had salespeople, they hired someone who could “generate demand” because the salespeople needed more names to call. This was a mistake. Without repeatable messages, the sales team couldn't effectively communicate the product's value. Despite a growing go‐to‐market team, very little changed. Less than a handful of customers signed on. At this point, nearly two years had gone by.

      Enter “Josie,” their newly hired director of product marketing. She positioned them into the existing category by carving out a niche they named that made their focus clear. Within three months, here's what happened:

       A white paper articulated what wasn't working with the existing category and introduced the need for the niche they had named. A prominent analyst company was so intrigued by this white paper, the analysts in the category all asked to be on a call to learn more.

       She created all new product collateral, bringing more consistency between the sales deck and the website so they all messaged the same thing everywhere customers looked.

       She partnered equally well with product and sales, working in lockstep adapting materials as frequently as was necessary. She was immediately seen as incredibly valuable by everyone in the small company.

       They declared and agreed on a marketing strategy. This meant even if Josie wasn't the one doing all the work, the rest of the team knew the ‘why’ behind everything they were doing in marketing.

Company Z eventually got some great customers and market momentum ... but way more slowly and painfully than was necessary. Had they brought in product marketing earlier, they could have discovered—and solved—go‐to‐market gaps sooner. Instead they spent a lot of time, money, and resources on things that weren't working.

      Marketing can be very esoteric to people who spend their lives building products. Product marketing creates the bones around which the body of marketing and sales work takes shape. This is why if you're a technology company and only have one person doing marketing, it should be a product marketer. It's simply how you'll get to your goals faster. But who does the work and how well they do it is more important than the work itself. If you're investing in creating great products, it's imperative to also invest in great product marketing.

Notes

      1 ¹ I've long been a fan of www.stratechery.com and recommend this resource to all product managers and product leaders.

      2 ² I often recommend the book http://leananalyticsbook.com/ to help the new PM learn more about which analytics are important to their type of product.

      CHAPTER 10

      The One‐on‐One

I'd be surprised if you haven't at least heard about the coaching technique known as the “one‐on‐one” (aka “1:1”) and you've probably experienced some version of it yourself. But judging from my discussions with countless product managers and product leaders, you may have never experienced this technique done well. Yet this is the foundation of coaching.

      As I (Marty) wrote this, I was trying to remember where I learned these points and the key people who influenced my views. After so many years, it's tough to say, but it represents the best of more than a dozen managers that helped me during my own development—either directly as my manager, or indirectly as a colleague that I learned from. Ben Horowitz is an example of the latter, as he made a big impression on me regarding this technique.

      This chapter is written for the manager of individual contributor product people. The people responsible for hiring and developing product managers, product designers, and engineers.

Keys to Effective One‐on‐Ones

      The Purpose

The primary purpose of the 1:1 is to help the product person develop and improve. Yes, you will get an update. Yes, you will be able to discuss work. But this is first and foremost about helping the person to first reach competence, and then to reach her potential. If you lose sight of the purpose, the real value of this session is quickly lost.

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