Archive for product manager
Habitats of the Product Marketing Manager
Posted by: | CommentsThose with the job title of ‘Product Marketing Manager’ live in a variety of organizational habitats. There are four that I see as recurring themes, each with its own challenges and opportunities. If you were to get a product marketing manager from one of each of these habitats to sit down and discuss their roles, they’d be amazed at how different they really are (even when their job descriptions are remarkably similar).
The Product Manager Product Marketing Manager
I actually lived this one but seems to be rare. It’s where the person with the job title of product marketing manager functions as a product manager. In this habitat the PMM is compelled to work closely with development and scramble to fulfill go-to-market (GTM) duties as they near a crisis stage. Confusion on their role is abundant. Development, Sales, Marcom and the management team see the PMM in entirely different ways.
The no Product Manager Product Marketing Manager
In this habitat there are no product managers and Development builds whatever they like. Product marketing managers wait gingerly for Development to throw products over the wall with instructions to take it to market. PMMs reverse engineer positioning from product features (afterall, why would anyone build a feature that no one needed? Seriously!), work with Marcom to get the ‘checklist’ of go-to-market deliverables completed, and declaring victory throws the deliverables over the wall to Sales.
The Sales Support Product Marketing Manager
This is the organization that sees product marketing managers as captive suppliers to the sales team. There are little to no strategic activities performed by the PMM. It’s a life of doing whatever Sales wants like building PowerPoint slides, writing one-off pieces of collateral, giving presentations and demos. Basically these PMMs function as sales engineers without being called sales engineers. They get lectured for not being strategic, but when they say ‘no’ to the sales team for tactical requests they are punished.
The Market-Driven Product Marketing Manager
In this habitat the product marketing manager coexists with product managers, where the roles of both are clearly defined. Product managers often are of the ‘technical product manager’ (TPM) variety with a heavier emphasis on working/coordinating with Development, being the experts on their products and using criteria. Product marketing managers are experts on their buyers and buying criteria, with a heavier emphasis on working with Marcom and Sales. In this habitat the PM owns the product strategy and the PMM owns the go-to-market strategy. Harmony (queue rainbows and unicorns).
Which habitat do you live in?
Lunch is an event. Product launch is a process.
Posted by: | CommentsToo often we think about product launch as an event. The magic product launch checklist is consulted. The ‘required’ deliverables are produced. Unfortunately the sales velocity that management expects doesn’t materialize.
The problem in this scenario is that a successful product launch isn’t an event where appetizers, entrees, and desserts are chosen from a fixed menu. What’s needed is a product launch process where the items on the menu are revealed based on the goals of the launch.
The Repeatable Product Launch Process delivered in the Pragmatic Marketing Product Launch Essentials seminar is one such process. Over the next few posts I will share the highlights of the methodology. If you lack a product launch process in your organization, the Repeatable Product Launch Process is a good starting point.
Repeatable Product Launch Process
The methodology is comprised of four phases. Each phase consists of two steps. The Repeatable Product Launch Process is a strategic approach to product launch that is based on achieving an outcome rather than producing a set of deliverables.
Organize Phase
Like any successful project a product launch needs to be anchored in goals. What do you want to accomplish with this product launch? Is it a revenue goal? Is is a customer retention goal? Are you entering a new market segment and are more concerned with awareness?
A clear product launch goal not only defines success, it aligns the entire product launch team. Hint: a goal of ‘sell as much as we can’ is not a goal, it’s a wish.
Once you have an agreement with your manager on the product launch goals it’s time to choose the launch strategies that will help you achieve the launch goals. The choice of the plural ‘launch strategies’ wasn’t a typo. In any given segment there are different buying groups that must be considered. These include our customers and those that are shopping right now to name a few.
For example, you may have a six month product launch revenue goal of $5M. The product is a new version of an existing product. You expect the bulk of the revenue to come from your installed base and the remainder to come from net new customers. Can you see how having a singular approach wouldn’t adequately serve both buying groups?
At the completion of the Organize Phase you would have established clear product launch goals and identified the product launch strategies to help you achieve those goals.
Next: Evaluate Phase
In the next installment I’ll discuss how the Evaluate Phase adds a sanity check to your launch goals and helps you reveal your organization’s product launch readiness weaknesses.
Do we really need a new definition of “marketing”
Posted by: | CommentsIn 2008 the American Marketing Association introduced a new definition for marketing. I found it in an article listed by BtoB Magazine in their 20 most popular stories of 2009. Intrigued and curious I wanted to know what I was missing. Afterall, in my role as an instructor with Pragmatic Marketing I’m teaching product marketing managers and product managers. Anything new in the marketing arena I should be keeping up with. Here is AMA’s new definition of marketing:
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
It will be used as the official definition of marketing in books and taught in university lecture halls nationwide, according to the AMA.
It read to me like the enterprise-class, mission-critical, scalable, state-of-the-art, easy-to-use, jargon that is often used in technology marketing. I imagined the series of endless conference calls and wrangling that led to the final wording, but also wondered “What problem was the AMA trying to solve with a new definition of marketing?”. Perhaps it had become outdated or stuffy. Could it be that the organization that should be the premier advocate for a market-driven approach were operating in an inside-out manner?
I read further and found AMA’s previous definition of marketing:
“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
It is, after all, three words shorter. I guess that’s good. At the end of the day I’m not sure that most of us would really notice much of a difference between the two definitions.
I think I’ll stick with Drucker:
“There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
—Peter Drucker
