Hi everyone! My name is @NatashaKatson, and I am a Product Marketing Manager. PMM is still not very popular, but a fantastic role! I want to have a channel where PMMs can share their experience with each other. Welcome to pmmunderhood! 🥳

Shared twitter accounts work pretty well to exchange knowledge. This account can be attractive to anyone related to product development or wonders what PMMs do.

If you are not familiar with the shared account rules or want to participate, here is an overview:

There are a lot of PMMs, so I hope that this community will grow. Please email me at pmmunderhood@gmail.com if you want to participate!

The idea behind the shared account is the following. Each host has a week to post tweets about their experience. It’s similar to “ask-me-anything” on Reddit. It gives you an ability to read and discuss various topics weekly with different authors. Here are some other benefits:

Shared twitter accounts are popular among the Russian community, but there are also a few international accounts. Some examples include @jsunderhood (frontend), @catunderhood (cats), @produnderhood (product management).

Of course, it’s not easy to start a shared account from scratch. I’ll be the first to start and will begin in a week or two. In the meantime, I’m looking for authors 🤝🙏👋

While I'm actively looking for authors, let's keep this account live :) Funny question, but do you know what do Product Marketing Managers do?

#ProductMarketing #productmanagement

Hello!
I realize that not everyone is familiar with the shared accounts and what the author of the week can cover. Like I previously mentioned, you can talk about anything related to your experience in product marketing. You can post 10 or 50 tweets a day; it’s up to you.

I’ll start my week today so that you can check how to use the account. Please note, this is the first time for me too. 🙂🥶

Here is my plan for this week.

Monday: Who is a Product Marketing Manager?
Tuesday: External product promotion.
Wednesday: Working with feedback.
Thursday: Product onboarding.
Friday: Product releases.
Saturday: A unicorn’s mental health.
Sunday: Reasons for being a PMM.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions during this week. I’ll be happy to answer them. #productmarketing #productmanagement

Before I start, let me share my background. Before I became a PMM, I worked as a marketing and project manager in various tech companies. I loved marketing, and even when I became a project manager, I spent 20% of my time on marketing-related projects.

I then realized that I wanted to combine marketing and product management, and decided to look for Product Marketing positions. I always liked JetBrains products, so I was thrilled when I joined the company.

There are a lot of different definitions for the Product Marketing Manager role. But here is how I usually describe it for those who are not familiar with it. PMM is a person who is responsible for both external product promotion and working on product internally.

External - ads, content marketing, working with the community; in other words, everything that promotes your product. Internal - onboarding, product tips, product analysis, feedback analysis, roadmap, etc.

PMM is responsible for a go-to-market, positioning, pricing, releases, no time to get bored!

Do you know that they call PMMs unicorns? I think it’s because PMMs have a variety of responsibilities and sometimes only magic can help 😂 pic.twitter.com/yYTFGGrwFV

PMMs responsibilities differ in different companies. In some companies, you would do more traditional marketing; in others, you would participate in product development more.

PMM can be a part of a product team (which is very cool if you ask me), but sometimes a PMM works in a separate marketing team and only occasionally gets close to the product.

Of course, to do product marketing, you should not only understand marketing but also understand the product field. Soft skills are fundamental. PMM coordinates a tremendous number of tasks and works with different departments.

And, you need to be on the same page with the developers. As a PMM, you don’t assign tasks to the developers, but you should know how to motivate your team and let them know that it’s crucial to work on specific features sooner rather than later.

Until recently, there was no community for PMMs, but last year @PMMalliance and brough PMMs from different parts of the world together. I think it’s essential to share the experience and learn new things, so I highly recommend the community.

What can you learn and which courses you can take? @PMMalliance has this cool course that covers most of the areas where a PMM is involved: bit.ly/3cSo1U2

A few years ago, JetBrains had a summer school about being a PMM. I also highly recommend it. Although it’s in Russian, the slides are in English: github.com/paullarionov/j…

Well, today is over. Tomorrow I’ll talk about external promotion. Ask your questions and share the tweets, lets bring more product-related folks to this account :) pic.twitter.com/UAqLSkn5wI

Morning! As I mentioned yesterday, PMM is responsible for external product promotion. And today I'm happy to talk about it. There are many online channels: display ads, paid search, social media (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook), video ads, podcasts, etc.

Offline: conferences, billboards, print media. There are more of them, but these are the most popular, at least in my area. What other channels do you have in mind?

In Europe, I didn’t see a lot (or any at this point) billboards for B2B products, while in San Francisco or Silicon Valley, it’s hard not to notice them. Monday, Slack, HR-related tools, Twillio, and many more. If you need to cover that audience, just keep it in mind.

Here is an article (it's pretty old though) about billboards of Silicon Valley: wired.com/2016/05/okay-d…

Paid ads. My favorite from the conversion perspective is search advertising. The competition here can be tremendous, and the ads can be very costly. It might sound obvious, but it’s important to have a relevant landing page for your message.

For example, here is a case that I remember. A company “A” advertised a page with the competitors’ comparison for different tools. You could see that ad if you Googled the product “A” competitors. But they forgot one tiny thing.

They didn’t have all the competitors that they’ve advertised. So the message said, “Compare product A with product B and see how product A is better” but they didn’t have product B on the landing page at all.
Don’t do that. You’ll pay for clicks, but you’ll lose your leads.

From my experience, the conversion rate from banner ads is much lower compared to paid search, but banners work great for visibility, which can bring customers later. Captain Obvious reminds you - do not forget to add your product (and sometimes your company) logo on the banner.

Together with the designers, we worked on very different campaigns: prepared customized banners for both themed campaigns and general ones. Themed campaigns worked better most of the time.

What are the themed campaigns? For example, I once prepared a campaign dedicated to game developers. We used pixel style graphics on the landing page and all the related marketing assets.

We also added a game on the page, and if a user won it, they would get a discount code. It helped us to spread the page in the community. The campaign worked pretty well; I later promoted that mini-game when I talked to game developers at the conferences:) pic.twitter.com/uNlSWH5Znz

What about organic traffic? People look for products in search engines. That’s why it’s important to prepare relevant content and post it in your blog. I’m not a big fan of SEO optimized content. It’s usually obvious that the text is published only for the search engine.

I tried to optimized my posts following all the "rules". I used the most popular words and phrases but tried to keep the text the same, so it wouldn’t look like a robot wrote it 🤖Can’t say that the results were great, but it was worth trying.

A webinar is another great format for promoting your product to new users or promoting new features to existing users. Of course, the webinar coverage is less than the ads. Usually, to guess the number of participants, I divide the number of registered users by two.

Promote your webinar by email, on social media, your website, and your blog. I like webinars because this format is informative, and you can get feedback right away.

After the webinar, you have a lot of content to promote. Prepare a blog post with a video, its transcription, and the Q&A section. You can send the email with the link to the blog post as a follow-up and promote it in your social media for those who missed it.

Conferences - do we even remember what offline conferences are? 😿 With the new reality, we have an option to participate in online events but to be honest, they are slightly different from offline events, and here is why.

There are several reasons to participate in conferences. Some companies want to promote their products or services; others want to get feedback. Feedback is essential not only from the product perspective, but it also motivates you as a part of the product team.

When you meet a person at the booth, you can start the conversation right away, be it an existing or potential customer. You can show a demo, answer the questions, share some product tips. That personal touch sometimes works better than any ad.

Now when the Apple event is over, we can get back to talking about conferences. 🙂

Here is a checklist of useful things to have at the booth:

📓Product Leaflets (printed or digital). A landing page can serve as a digital leaflet. You can show it on your iPad and share QR codes at your booth.

🎁Swag is usually very popular at events. It might be a bit expensive and not very environmentally friendly to produce, but people typically want to bring something from the event: pop-sockets, hats, socks, yo-yo’s (and people love to bring those to their kids).

📺Product videos or overviews on the TV. If you have a TV set at your booth, you would want to attract people to stop by, or they can simply watch a product video while you are busy talking to others (that happens).

Product demo videos usually work well, but if you have a cool video ad that you can run on your TV - you can also use it. Don’t forget to add subtitles to your video - there is no sound on the TV at the booth (if there was sound, everyone would go insane because of the noise).

❔Surveys are great. You can then analyze your booth visitors later and send them relevant follow-ups (if they gave consent for communications, of course).

🔥Product demos. Prepare your equipment, make sure the Wi-Fi works well (it’s usually an issue at the conferences), and show your product’s demo. You can announce the demo in advance using your social media channels or a newsletter by the organizers to get more stop by the booth.

🕴️You can scan badges to get the leads and send them follow-ups later.

It would be interesting to learn what others tried at the conferences. If you have anything to share - please do. In the meantime, we'll all wait for offline events to be back. 🙏

My two cents about online conferences. We tried them as well this year (what choice do we have, right?) but I have mixed feelings about them. Digital booths don't work the same way. People rarely “stop by” to ask questions or start the conversation.

But, product demos and talks work pretty well. If you do a demo or a talk, ask the organizers to have a separate room where participants can ask questions and talk to you.

As a swag, once we prepared digital stickers for Telegram, and organizers promoted them in the conference participants’ follow-up email. They didn’t go viral, but people are still using them occasionally.

I tried to cover some of the channels today; of course, there are many more of them. I honestly can talk about it all for a week (but don't worry, I won't. I have other topics to cover 😉).

Hi! Today, I’ll talk about various channels for getting feedback. In my plan for the week, I announced that I would talk about working with feedback, but I actually want to cover the channels (sorry about that).

There are a lot of different ways to get feedback about your product: public reviews, comments on social media or blogs, feedback forms, tickets in Zendesk, internal feedback, public issue trackers.

Public issue tracker lets you check the most wanted features, pain points, bug reports. Last year, I wrote an article about the advantages and disadvantages of having a public tracker: bit.ly/31q4jeR

To summarize the post, public trackers are great, but you have to invest your time to sort out the requests. Sometimes you have to admit that you'll never implement the feature, and it takes the courage to close the request (especially when the feature has tons of votes).

Do you use public trackers in your company? If you do, who handles the requests?

Another great thing is internal marketing. Of course, it depends on your company and if your colleagues use your product inside the company. But if they do (and that’s my case), don’t forget about them.

We have a dedicated channel for our product; our colleagues can use it for questions about the product. I also use this channel to occasionally post tips and tricks.

If your colleagues use your product, roll out new features internally before they go public. If the feature is huge - I usually prepare an internal blog post dedicated to it. Sometimes I use this content later for external posts.

Feedback from colleagues is usually very valuable (although it can be bias sometimes). But it let you fix issues before the feature goes public.

Customer interviews are also great for getting feedback. The problem here is to schedule the interviews with your customers, not all of them are ready to talk.

Check your user base, find active customers, gently ask them if they agree for an interview, prepare questions, and proceed. Would be great if developers or a product manager can join the interview.

Ask similar questions, or you won’t be able to analyze the results later. You want to know the good and negative things about your product, so be prepared for all kinds of feedback.

By the way, do you interview your customers? Does a PMM or a Product manager talk to customers?

Research why did your customers leave you. It’s important not to get stuck in the bubble of your perfect product (even if it’s perfect). We have to admit, some users leave us, and we need to know why.

It depends on how do your users leave: sometimes they need to uninstall the product; for cloud products, they might want to ask you to remove the data from your cloud, or they just disappear.

If they uninstall the product - you can add a form that will appear after they uninstall it and ask for reasons to leave. If they contact your support - make sure your colleagues ask them for a reason in the ticket. But usually, users just leave.

If they gave consent to contact them, don’t hesitate to prepare a short survey and ask them for their reason. Sometimes they miss some features which are on their way to the release. In this case, I would also contact those users and tell them about it.

So you got the feedback, what to do next? Of course, share it with your team. It can be a separate presentation for your team after the customer interviews, and you can share the summary from other resources once in a few weeks.

In the teams where I worked, feedback about specific features usually just went directly to the feature owner. Anyway, my goal as a PMM is to ensure that the team considers that feedback, take those features into development, or include them in the roadmap.

So I've been talking about feedback for the whole day. Could you please share your feedback here? :) Do you find this content useful? Do you learn anything new? Do you read it? 🥲
Your feedback is very appreciated! 😇pic.twitter.com/LEyvVhUlrTT

By the way, this is me giving a talk today at the online event in my sweatpants (spotted by my husband). See, working from home is not that bad! 😂 pic.twitter.com/Cq2XAL2NkU

Today, I want to discuss what you, as a PMM, can do for your product. Unfortunately, not all PMMs can influence their product development; I'm glad I can (that's why I like to be a part of the product team).

Here are a few things that come to mind that a PMM can improve:

I’ll start with the product onboarding. Onboarding new users can play a significant role in user flow and helps to increase customer lifetime value and reduce the churn rate. When do you need onboarding? If you ask me - always 🙃

I think it’s always important to educate users and demonstrate the product’s value from the first steps. Where to start? It depends on the tool, I worked on onboarding experience years ago for a complex fintech tool, and I’ve done it for my product recently.

Both times the first step was to define and segment the audience. For example, team collaboration tools usually have admins who try the product and end-users who join the existing product. Of course, the onboarding experience should be different for them.

Next - define the features set that you want to highlight for each category. You also need to determine how and where to promote those features and in which order.

Choose the tools that you want to use to archive your goals. For example, I don’t want a user to enter an empty product. In this case, I can add a wizard with some related questions and, based on the answers, show the data inside the product.

Product tours can help your user navigate inside the product. Product tours contain some essential tips about certain parts of the UI. Highlight only important things that bring value to your user.

It’s important to mention that onboarding should help your user; it should not annoy them. Some products have a complex and long onboarding, which I usually just want to drop as a user. I prefer to have a skip option everywhere. Cut your user some slack. They will be grateful.

Add tooltips for important parts of the UI. It’s not really a part of the onboarding, but you want to make sure that when a user tries your product for the first time, they can quickly navigate around it.

Analyze, analyze everything. What if most of your users skip everything you prepared for them? Maybe you should change the flow, or change the tips, or remove some part of your onboarding at all.

Another important thing that a PMM should be involved in is a registration flow. Why is it important? Well, we spend money on promoting our products; of course, we need to make sure that the registration flow works well.

The best way is to cut steps to get into your product to a minimum. For example, a user registers on the website, gets into the product immediately, and confirms the email later any day. If you do that, make sure to add a reminder inside the product to confirm the email.

The pros of this flow - there is only 1 step to get into the product. The con - it’s not always secure to do that. Alright, let's say you want your user to confirm the registration first. Make sure the email that you send looks nice and has all the correct information.

After the user clicks on the link inside the email, they should easily get into the product. Do not ask about the same things twice. You know the user's email already, prefill it in login form and so on.

Registration flow plays a significant part of the user funnel. Make sure it works well, and don’t lose your users on this funnel step.

A few words about highlighting new features inside the product. What do PMMs usually do when we have new features? We write release notes, we promote features on social media and the website, send emails.

But there are so many products out there, and all of them care about each feature and promote their benefits. Customers can’t read it all, so sometimes they don’t even know about functionality that boosts their productivity.

I think it’s essential to highlight new features inside the product. I like how it's done in Google Docs. They either have a “new” label next to the feature name or add colored dots next to it. Sometimes they post tips; I think it depends if the feature is significant or not. pic.twitter.com/2yKBrk843u

This is an example of how @Grammarly highlights new features. Of course, I wouldn’t have noticed the feature if it wasn’t for that banner inside their product. pic.twitter.com/GcHAJyrrSP

Today is Friday, and it’s time to talk about the thing that you should NOT do on Friday - product releases 🔥. To be honest, I am a big fan of releases; they are harsh, they can be messed up, but are fun and drive you in different ways.

After the release, whether it’s a new version or a brand-new product - the feeling is just great. Releases are good for the products in general. The release announcements are a great way to create buzz around the product.

But the preparation might not be so exciting :) I’ll talk about releasing a new version of the product today.

The checklist for the release is pretty much the same all the time. I usually use a workflow in YouTrack (which is a project management tool), which helps me handle all the tasks.

Basically, I create one main issue for the release, add responsible teammates for the various activities, deadline, and YouTrack automatically creates all the tasks with the descriptions, assigned to responsible people with specific deadlines.

Not everyone uses this workflow, but my motto is what can be automated should be automated. That’s why I invested a day or two once, prepared that workflow, and now don’t spend time creating issues for each release.

What’s a general checklist for the release? Of course, it depends on the product. But I would highlight the following preparations:
1⃣Website update: content and screenshots.

2⃣Product announcements for various channels (assuming you already know those channels because you use them each time. Investigate new channels if necessary).
3⃣Release newsletter.
4⃣Localization for all the materials.
5⃣Banners and other marketing assets.

6⃣Update sales materials.
7⃣Make sure the documentation is updated.
8⃣In-product tips or other ways to deliver new features.
9⃣Announcements for social media.

Other activities might include updating or preparing new videos, webinars, and so on.

A few words about screenshots. I don’t think that anyone except those who work on them ever thinks about how product screenshots are prepared for marketing materials. And it is a big deal to prepare them :) You need to have a demo version of your product with made-up data.

New features should be available there before the release, of course. I remember how it was exciting to prepare the data for the Chats feature; making up fake conversations was so much fun :D

How do I choose what to promote in which channels? I usually just use common sense 😏. But generally, I follow a few rules. In the blog post, I cover it all, how users can benefit from the release, write about use cases and features.

In the newsletter, I usually cover top features and share the link to the blog post. I try to keep emails short and simple. Posts on social media usually depend on the channel. For Linkedin, I would use one messaging, for Twitter another, etc.

Overall the logic is pretty much the same - feature the main benefits and share the link to the blog. After the release is done, time to manage the feedback from all of those channels.

Answer the comments, share the feedback with the product/engineering team, and don’t leave your users alone with your product's new version.
If you have any secrets on successful releases, please share them 🙏

Today is Saturday, so I won’t write much; we all need some rest. I want to share some thoughts about the unicorn’s mental health. I love being a PMM, but sometimes I get veery tired.

I recently visited a webinar about PMMs, and they said there “Product marketing is good for you if you like to say “fuck” all the time during the day”.
Other options are if you like to talk to a psychiatrist, take antidepressants, and crash objects 😂

This video actually describes PMM’s mental health pretty well 😂 pic.twitter.com/6IDZDp7uHf

We communicate a lot: within the team, with other teams, we connect people with each other, we talk to current and potential customers. While this is all very exciting and a huge part of our job, sometimes it can be exhausting.

Back when we worked at the offices (those were good days), I listened to podcasts while driving to work. But I could never listen to anything but some calm music after work. I couldn’t talk to anyone; I just needed some alone time, at least for 40 minutes.

Sometimes I thought my head would just blow from all discussions. Did it ever happen to you? For some reason, I don’t feel this while working at home that often, even though the number of discussions increased.

When you are a PMM, you should always be aware of everything: public comments; company, product, marketing teams news; competitors’ news; all kind of news, and decisions. It’s great if teammates post important decisions in some knowledge base and share them.

But if they don’t, you have to check messages in the internal chat all the time. Once I realized that I would lose it, I decided to turn off the notifications for all the work-related channels after 8 pm. It works well so far!

Perfectionism is another issue among PMMs. Everything that we publish is public, so basically, it should be perfect: banners, content, screenshots. If you make a mistake - the Internet remembers everything! P.S. And you can’t edit the tweets 😭

Speaking about mistakes, here is a story that happened to me. To shake up the interest in a new product release, we decided to post teasers on different channels about the upcoming announcement.

It all went well, we got positive feedback on Twitter, people tried to guess which product was going to be released. And we decided to post the same announcement in a local community.

We knew that the audience there was very picky, but other channels worked well, so we decided to go with it. I published a short post...and I got all the hate available in that community. They would call me names, added dislikes and wrote tons of negative comments.

That evening I went to try my wedding dress on, and I remember standing in that dress crying my heart out. I didn’t really deal with that kind of hate before, so I wasn’t mentally ready. But things happen. And it's a part of the job too.

By the way, it all went well after the actual release announcement, and there was a lot of traffic from that particular channel. Lesson learned - this channel should never be used for such teasers. But mentally, it took me a few weeks to move on.

But there are also positive things. PMMs also get all the joy! At the conferences, we listen to positive feedback from real customers, talk to customers online, and see their happiness when we solve their issues, we bring people exciting news.

We solve communication issues and help people to stay connected. The most important thing is to keep the balance and not burn out. And always take a vacation when you feel tired (or almost dead); sometimes, even a short reboot can increase productivity.

Today is Sunday, so I’ll keep it short.
So why do I love being a PMM? I tried to cover a lot of different activities during this week and almost all of them bring me joy 🦄

But to summarize, I love that I can influence product development, and at the same time, do marketing. I love to create new content, messaging, improve the product, find promo channels, and influence people’s minds.

I love to have the ability to experiment and analyze the results of those experiments. I love to automate the processes. And the main point of being a PMM - I just love to be on both sides of the product.

What about you? If you are a PMM, what do you like about it? If you are a Product manager, do you have a PMM in your team? Do you work on your product together or you prefer to be on your own?

Anyway, I’m going to wrap up. I hope you found this week intersing and learnt something new. Did you like it?

If you want to be an author of the week - drop me a message @NatashaKatson ☺️
Archive is not available yet, but the website is in progress 🤞