The only two questions you need as a product marketer

Eureka! After a few weeks of consulting, I think I’ve cracked what Product Marketing is all about. Two incredibly simple questions - that are fiendishly difficult to answer.

Is Product Marketing easy?

This is something I’ve been asking myself lately.

Over the past few years, I’ve done my best to help raise the status of Product Marketing. I’ve tried to make the case that you can’t simply wake up one morning and decide that you are a product marketer. It is a craft, a discipline - like any of the important, essential roles in tech. Product Marketing must be learned. It’s a career. 

I’ve actually been told off before about putting it on too high a pedestal - for writing about Product Marketing as if it’s some kind of unattainable art form. So perhaps I can get a bit carried away? But I still believe Product Marketing isn’t a skill you can just pick up overnight. 

However, I’m now about to disagree with myself. Because, practically speaking, Product Marketing is very simple. 

As mentioned in the previous Product Marketer post, I’ve just started consulting with two different companies. And, with a few weeks under my belt, my initial theory is that being a product marketer can be boiled down to tackling two simple questions, again and again:

1. What is the pain or problem you can solve for your customers?

2. And how are you uniquely placed to solve this for them, compared to all alternatives?

That’s it. That’s all you need to think about. The only questions you need to answer as a PMM. Be it for a feature, a product, or reframing your overall company strategy. 

All roads lead back to these two questions, from competitive intelligence to how you bring a product to market. Nail these, and everything else comes into place much more easily.

The tricky bit? Answering them 🤦‍♂️.

And this is why Product Marketing should be held in an especially high regard. Because the journey of answering these two questions is an arduous one.

Something so simple can become complicated very quickly. Asking these two questions is like pulling at a thread that just keeps on unravelling more and more for you to answer. And obstacles appear from around every corner.

Tackling the big two questions

Here are just a few of the things you end up needing in your quest to get to the bottom of the two big questions.

Customer obsession. Pretty early on, you’ll find yourself asking ‘Who are we solving this problem for?’ and ‘How do we uniquely solve it for them?’ So it’s essential to know your customer(s) inside out. What does your Ideal Customer Profile look like at the company level? Who are the buyer personas? What motivates them? Who else is involved in the buying process? What does the customer journey look like? The list goes on for a while. But doing this foundational work is absolutely essential.

Knowing the competition. To be able to explain how you uniquely solve your customer’s problem, you need to know what else is out there. And if you really believe there is no one quite like you, then the competition is most likely ‘No solution’ i.e. inaction, sticking with the old way, the status quo - and that means you’re still up against something.

Product knowledge. You have to be able to go deep into the product. Know everything about it. And you then need to have the inner strictness to disregard about 90% of it. Because customers don’t want to hear about deep technical product knowledge or a 30-minute version of how it works. But you usually need to understand everything to know what to cut and make it simple.

Winning round your people. Sometimes the answer to the two questions can be pretty obvious, but it’s the people and processes you have to go through that make it tough. Everyone has an opinion on this stuff and senior stakeholders often want to give their input on the big questions. So taking your time to make sure everyone feels heard, and then finding an answer that makes everyone happy, is all part of the challenge. 

Experience. Building up that Product Marketing experience is what enables you to answer these two seemingly simple questions effectively. Knowing what information to disregard, which data points are credible, and how to get buy-in. These are the things you can only really master over time.

The list above might not even scrape the surface of how tricksome these simple two questions can be to answer. But if it hasn’t put you off, I’d recommend keeping them at the core of your Product Marketing tactics. 

Whether you’re launching a new feature or repositioning your broader product suite, keep coming back to them as a sense-check for whether you’re getting to the heart of what your customers need to know. 

Agree? Disagree?? Let me know…

Cheers! 👋