Hey there. This is The Overview, a weekly roundup of noteworthy B2B SaaS stuff. You’ll find interesting thoughts, articles, and more from around the internet.
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Kill your darlings
Launching features that customers don’t use is even worse than launching bad features. It distracts you from focusing on what really matters, and shows your customers that you aren’t building useful features for them.
We really need to think of product features as ‘bets’ that help us to achieve customer and business goals, and measure the impact before optimizing until signals improve, or culling the ones with no chance of survival. Whilst it may be brutal, strategy is what you don’t do.
Five categories of customer
Your messaging needs to appeal to different types of customers: those that are new to the realm, all the way to those who are focused on price and features.
I’d argue that really, you should have an ICP that is focused on one of these categories. Then you build really deep understanding customers and their jobs/pains/gains/triggers and ultimate value to achieve, and can keep all the power of that in your messaging without diluting. Your go-to-market should discriminate.
Remember that ‘focus’ means both prioritization and clarity.
Do CMOs understand product marketing?
This tweet from the outspoken queen of PMM Ranee got me thinking… have the CMOs I’ve worked with before really ‘got’ product marketing? Probably not.
They’ve understood parts of product marketing, like:
- Tight definition of who the customer is – although not the best way to get it
- Enabling sales – but with tactical service, not strategic execution
- The importance of positioning – but based on what we want to say, not what the customer wants
But overall, product marketing wasn’t trusted to do it’s thing. Maybe that was a sign of the times and the type of businesses: very sales-led companies in the early ’10s.
One of the biggest groans from product marketers, still, is the inevitable “we have to prove our value and reiterate what we do.”. This is something that product marketers will need to keep in mind forever. Our work is often less tangible and more background, so how do we fight for budget and a seat at the table?
If you think you do this particularly well, let me know and help other PMMs in a future post.
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