Five essential reads for product marketers
Forming habits can be tough. What I find even tougher is falling out of a habit. Exercise, sleep routines, and yes - writing. When I get out of a rhythm I can find it really difficult to get back into.
So apologies for anyone who’s been missing the Product Marketer’s posts these past few weeks. I promise to get better!
Today’s post is a simple one to get you inspired on a Tuesday morning. Here’s five posts that have changed the way I think about product marketing. Give them a read and let me know how you found them.
We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
This is a product marketing classic. Slack’s founder Stewart Butterfield sent out a note to his team ahead of the soft launch for what would become one of the most successful products of the 21st century.
There’s so much to take away from this post, from the challenges of creating a new product category to the candidness and transparency of Butterfield’s leadership throughout the memo (I think every CEO should send a note like this ahead of a big launch.) But, for me, the biggest learning is that we as product marketers should always remember to talk about outcomes - not features or ‘how it works’ - when it comes to communicating products.
Superhuman’s PMF Survey
When Superhuman conducted their first Product Market Fit survey, the team discovered a new way to think about their core customer - and a totally different approach to product prioritisation.
I’ve regularly used the PMF survey format ever since reading this post by Rahul Vohra, the founder and CEO of Superhuman, and recommend you do too!
A new way to define product marketing
This highlight from the MKT1 team’s Substack tackles a hot topic in the world of product marketing: every company wanting a product marketer but not quite knowing what that actually means.
In this post, you’ll find a new way of thinking about and defining product marketing, along with a handy spreadsheet that should be useful to any first-time PMMs, or anyone currently setting up a new product marketing function at their company.
How to market the Job to be Done
Intercom was one of the first SaaS companies to get product marketing right. Key to its success was working out how to take all of the insights the company had picked up via Jobs to be Done research and turning that into an executable marketing plan.
In this post, product marketing veteran Matt Hodges talks about how he and the team went about it.
How to Differentiate
A few weeks ago, I went on the Mind the Gap podcast to talk about all things product marketing, but we found ourselves going deep on the topic of message-based differentiation (as opposed to feature-based.)
But the person I’ve always looked to on this topic is Peep Laja, the founder of Wynter, who has long championed the need for companies to think well beyond what your next feature is going to be. In this post he talks about the huge challenge of differentiation and gives a few actionable tips for getting started with his alternative approach.
Thanks so much for reading and, if you found it useful, please pass on to any product marketing folks in your life!
Cheers 👋
Rory
Thanks for the shoutout!