How many of you get this question a lot.
What is it you say you do here.
I got this question every single time a new v.p.
of product candidate came in to interview segment
every single time they asked me this question.
I'm sure you get it a lot. It's not
surprising because as product marketers,
we can fill the space between marketing product,
and sales we can live anywhere in that space.
So it's not surprising people want to know where particularly
are you right now.
In my opinion product marketers are
like superheroes we can swoop in to solve
a bunch of different business problems
whether it's top of the funnel with acquisition
bottom funnel retention we can help make sure the product
roadmap is going to actually resonate with the market.
There's so many things we can do based on our deep knowledge
of the customer.
I think this is a good thing and to be effective as a product
marketer at a very fast growing company that's
scaling over time.
I think the key is not to try to do all those things at once
but to focus on what you're doing and change over time.
Your focus as your company needs change
to focus really on what is the business problem
that the whole company has.
And to dive in and solve that one and then adapt
when that change that problem is solved ensure that your job is
to find the gap as a product marketer or product marketing
leader to hear what's not getting done that you could
go in and add value.
That's the thesis of my talk to introduce myself
after ray did a little bit.
My name's Diana Smith and I lead the product marketing team
at segment.
When I first joined segment I went to the marketing team
meeting.
I looked around and I was the only one there.
I was the first marketer about five years ago
and had grown the company.
Today we have no well.
Now when I walk into our lunch room
I hardly know anyone we're close to 500 people now.
And for those of you just a little background on segment
and what we do we provide customer data
infrastructure that helps companies
clean collect and control their data.
So this means that instead of integrating
lots of different tools you might
want to use for marketing automation analytics
data warehousing pando speaking earlier.
Instead of integrating them all one by one
you could use segment to collect your data once and integrate
all these different tools and also make sure
that data is clean and correct.
That's just a little bit about us.
And over time from being the first marketer
segment to now leading a team of close to nine product marketers
I've learned a lot and I'm excited to share with you
the lessons along that journey.
First is finding a gap.
How do you find where you're going to focus on.
Second is knowing your customers.
And third is loving yourself perhaps or most intuitive
lesson of the day.
But I promise it's important and we'll get there later.
Finding a gap when you think about your strategy
as a PNM or PNM leader, you have to think
about what's not getting done.
If you're at a high growth growing company
there's probably a ton that's not
getting done you really tripping over low hanging fruit all over
the halls.
You know this might be the product team is actually acting
more like engineering managers.
They're not thinking a lot about the customer.
And if there's a real market for what they're building that might be
the gap.
The gap might be that the marketing team has no idea what
to write in their campaigns.
They don't know what's going to resonate with the market.
There's a lot of different gaps that could be there
and then also you want to layer that on what's
the top need for your organization.
What is the biggest challenge.
Is it growing top line revenue and top line leads.
Maybe you have a churn issue.
Whatever that core business problem is your entire company
is facing.
That's what product marketing should
be focused on in an ideal world you're sitting perfectly
in this Venn diagram times 3 is still called the Venn diagram I
think so you're perfectly in between marketing and product,
and sales.
This is just never going to be the case in a better sense.
You want to be deliberate about where in this Venn diagram
you're focused you know where are your appendages sticking
out.
I like to think of it as an amoeba.
This is what the internet gave me for amoeba.
So let you enjoy that.
And you want to be deliberate about where
it is you're focusing here for some examples
top of the funnel.
If that's the biggest issue user acquisition
you want to be really focused on your messaging and positioning
when someone hits your site.
How are they going to know why they should buy your product.
You might not be focused on validation
who are customers who can have that social proof
for your product.
Maybe the problem is with sales and they
don't know how to go to the market and sell your product.
They're being killed by competitors.
You would be focusing on something different.
If that was your biggest issue so
walk us through how this changed at different times at segment
so that you can understand why we changed focus
and just give you a template of how
this could be done somewhere.
And the main message is it's OK to shift.
It's OK to change as time goes on.
So early days in the series a when I was always the only one
around on the marketing team.
The main thing we're trying to do is get people to pay us not.
Not many startups think about that.
You know these days is out of style.
I'm seeing in the ideas but we want open source product
and we were trying to get people to buy a hosted version
which meant that we had to figure out how do we
get these people to pay for the hosted version.
What are the features that are going to make people want to pay.
We already had a lot of interest from a niche audience
of developers from the Hacker News community
the Y Combinator community so that wasn't as much of an issue
and we didn't have product managers at the time.
We just had engineers so as kind of playing that person
as well trying to make sure that we weren't just building
for ourselves that we're building for a clearer audience.
Fast forward to Series B. Our main issue was tapping out
of that initial very tech forward reads the same stuff
kind of audience and we had to look at that chart
and make it keep going up and to the right.
This meant that the shift for what product marketing needed
to focus on was education.
How do we help people know that this product which previously
didn't exist and there wasn't really anything
like it on the market that if you
had a problem similar to this that it
could be solved the software.
This is when we found out that to write deep technical content
in our position it was really good to have
product marketers focused on that
because to get anyone in editorials.
It's a bit more difficult for them
to get deep into the product.
So this is where we focus in our key metric was top line
sign UPS.
How are educational programs.
We're driving into content and nursery
into top of the funnel the sales team is still pretty small
intestine.
They all fit and we were still in one office.
We had an explainer globally and they were learning through us
Moses sales enablement was not an issue at this time.
When we moved on to series c that's
when our investors said OK.
You've proved that you can grow and scale really quickly.
Now show us that you can become a multi product organization
that you can generate higher deal
sizes for each for each deal and by selling
new products into your base.
At this point product marketing sort of
focus really closely on aligning with the product team
incubating and launching and enabling
the team to sell new products.
Fast forward to today.
A big the biggest issue we have is enabling the sales
team to be really effective in terms of we're
hitting our top of funnel lead numbers
but we're having trouble making sure
that we're turning those into revenue at the same rate
that we want because we've hired so many people
and we need to go back to the basics of figuring out
how do we simplify the message across all of our products.
How do we make sure it's very clear
what the message should be to the self-service segment
versus the enterprise segment.
And that's where we're focused a lot today so whatever
it is that you're focusing on.
I mean you do have to do a few different things as a product
marketer but my recommendation would
be to try to make your metric and your North Star as
close to the biggest company need as possible
and then communicate your focus especially
if it's changing when you're so cross-functional in nature.
If you don't tell folks what you're doing now
and if that might be different than what you were doing before and the why
the why is so important
they won't be able to fill those gaps either.
The second lesson is knowing your customer.
This may sound obvious to all of you in the room all you
product marketers but I think it's
so important because knowing your customers.
The only way that you're going to drive credibility and value
no matter where it is that you're focusing you
know any of those options I recommended before.
And you need to constantly be curious and refine
your understanding of your customer their problems
the alternatives they have in the market.
This will help you build red messaging that actually
resonates that they can connect with will help you influence
the product roadmap if that's something you're having trouble
doing to get that seat at the table
and will also help your market your greater marketing team
develop effective campaigns.
There are so many tools at your disposal
to know your customer better.
My favorite is just talking to them.
Customer interviews figuring out what it is
you're trying to learn.
Setting up an interview program riding along on deals
really getting a direct customer expertise.
I also love to recommend starting with existing data
sets that you have at your company.
You know somebody is probably collecting
NPR s there's a treasure trove of information
in those comments.
Some will make you sad but you know they're very interesting.
You might have a lot of close won and loss
analysis in Salesforce.
You can analyze.
You could talk to analysts you could do competitive research.
There's so many different things you
can do to know your customers.
It's really important to prioritize doing
that even if you feel like you have a lot of other things
you need to do.
It's not enough to know your customers
and have all these insights swimming around in your head.
You need to synthesize and prioritize
what's the most important thing.
What's the most important thing to know about our customers.
And what's the most important aspect to make
to product for example, if everything's on fire.
Not nothing is on fire as a product manager or the people
are trying to work with.
They have so much data that's coming at them every day.
You have to empathize with them and know
that the value you bring is if it's the clearest
and most concise stack ranked recommendations based on all
of your customer analysis.
So I'd really recommend you think about
how do you synthesize that research that you've done
and then iterate not just on the product.
There's probably things that you learn
there is going to have impact for marketing.
Maybe there's a message you're sharing out into the market.
That's not resonating.
Maybe there's an objection that the sales team
is getting a lot day.
You could probably address with a little different approach.
So make sure that you're not just giving these insights
back to product but you're also taking a look in the mirror and
how could we do better based on what
we've learned our third lesson.
The one you may be most curious about
love yourself and I'll be more specific.
Love your lanky awkward teenage self.
This was a recommendation or came about from an event where
I heard one of our investor speaking his name is Ali Ragoni
and he is a partner at Y Combinator.
He mentioned that startups are like awkward teenagers.
They're growing faster in some areas and slower in other areas
and this creates growing pains.
But some places might be more mature than other places.
And that's totally OK.
That's totally normal and there's never
going to be a time where you could cover everything that's
going on that you can you know boil
that you can manage all the potential things
that you could do and you just have
to be OK with that at a high growth company
that some things are going to be going better than others.
What I've learned to embrace this craziness of growth
is a few things.
One that giving clear ownership over the most important things
is going to help your team focus.
Then you want to watch out for the orphans.
What are the things you're saying no to time and time
again.
Write them down and third then no org structure
is perfect so don't spend too much time agonizing over that.
And I'll give you some examples.
So throughout the time that segment
different things have been clear.
Owners when I started as a first marketer,
I was mostly focused on mission positioning.
In some case studies anything that wasn't completely on fire
was an orphan.
As we got bigger we started to have some lights
specialization in the product marketing team
where some people own different features
they had metrics associated with that feature
whether it's revenue or a lead generation.
And then they had a minor you know
their major was a features a minor was in something sales
enablement related something like
competitive or sales content.
At that point we realized a.r. and PR was becoming an orphan.
We were we were doing it.
I was doing it not very well.
And we realized that was actually
something super important to drive
our growth into the enterprise.
And that was something we had to focus on hiring next.
So essentially, I say this to say
when you're doing your best at the high growth company,
you need to ruthlessly prioritize what's
the most important thing.
And if you try to do everything.
You're not going to do anything well just take
note of what those things are that you
can't do and whether or not they're really
going to make a big impact if you could hire someone
to do them.
Another lesson I heard learn the hard way
is that when you're trying to adopt these new orphans
and you're trying to grow as fast as possible
you might want to rush your hiring process.
I definitely recommend against this.
You want to make sure that you're truly
assessing if the candidates are going
to be a good fit for your culture
and have the experience that you need.
Pink flags will turn into red flags
later in the hiring process.
So don't hire too quickly.
The orphan can be an orphan for a little bit
longer because we'll take you more time
to adjust your team if you don't pay more
attention in the beginning of the hiring process getting
to the organizational structure
I've had so many conversations with different product marketing
leaders about this.
What's yours like what's mine like what's the pros and cons.
There is no perfect situation here
and that's OK if you organized by product line.
This is very common.
You're going to have a great relationship with the product
team.
There's going to be 1 PM to another PM
and they'll have a great relationship
to influence the roadmap.
The problem is you may not be as good at doing cross product
messaging across all your product lines
you need to make sure somebody is thinking about that.
The flip side is true if you line by customer segment
you may be really close to sales.
They may feel really prepared but you
may lose a little bit of your influence on the product side.
And then another common structure
is go to market where you have people
more like solutions oriented folks and then inbound product
marketing oriented folks.
The great thing about this is that you
can cover more of the spectrum of the scope of what
product marketing can do.
But the con is that you might have to double up
on resources for some things or some folks
may be in the solution side may lose
a bit of the technical product knowledge
and that that may need to be addressed as well.
So this is to say a line based on what's most important.
But don't spend too much of your effort really
worrying about the product structure you can change it.
If the needs change and that's most of the lessons
I want to share with you today.
Just to recap focus on where your gaps are.
As a company they communicate what
that focus is second know your customer better
than anyone else.
This is how you're going to add value and provide insights
no matter where it is you're focused
on the many potential things you could
be focused on as a product marketer and third know
that some things will grow faster than others.
Some things you're not going to go to get to.
That's OK.
That's what makes working at a fast growing company fun.
And that's why I for one like working
at a company like segment thank you so much for your time.
This has been an episode of scaling product marketing
at a high growth startup.
I want to leave you with one quote from one of our customers
the CTO of glossy which is a hip makeup company, for those
of you who don't know he said we like
to do pain driven development where there is pain.
We fix it.
Leave you with that.
And one last thing because I can't help it.
I'm a marketer.
We have our big user conference next week.
If you are really interested in thinking
about how data can help you improve your customer
experience or you have product managers or analysts
that want to learn about this.
Feel free to come to our event next week
right here in San Francisco all about data.
Thank you.