Episode 219: The Real Role of Product Marketing in Strategy with Rebecca Shaddix
Rebecca Shaddix, a seasoned marketing executive and go-to-market strategist, joins Melissa Perri to explore the balance of acceptable mistakes in market strategy. Rebecca discusses the importance of defining acceptable mistakes to avoid unnecessary delays and to better align team efforts with strategic goals. This episode focuses on how acknowledging acceptable mistakes can accelerate development without compromising core objectives.
Rebecca also addresses the overemphasis on latest trends like AI, stressing the importance of intentional use rather than succumbing to hype. She provides insights into managing internal pressures and steering conversations back to meaningful customer outcomes.
If you want to learn how to effectively balance strategic goals with market pressures while maintaining a focus on customer value, tune in to gain practical insights from Rebecca’s experiences.
You’ll hear us talk about:
09:04 - The Concept of Acceptable Mistakes
Rebecca explains what an acceptable mistake entails, offering examples such as opting for fewer customer interviews to accelerate go-to-market strategies without significant risk.
15:32 - Product and Product Marketing Partnership
Highlights the need for a bidirectional relationship between product management and product marketing, focusing on how they should collaboratively drive strategy and insights.
29:19 - Navigating AI Hype
Discusses the cycle of trendy technologies and how AI has become a prevalent, though often superficial, part of product strategy, emphasizing the importance of intentionality.
Listen to the full episode for more in-depth discussions and insights.
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Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00] Rebecca Shaddix: If your marketing team is coming to you saying, we wanna be a best in Class X, they have some positioning work to do themselves, because Best in Class is a shortcut, just like AI to conveying value. What is the actual goal? And a pretty easy swap, I think, product folks can ask their marketing counterparts for is instead of: we wanna be a best in class, put it in the framework of, now you can. 'cause that makes you have to focus it on the customers. As a rule, any go-to-market spearheading should involve cross-functional stakeholders as soon as possible. Even if it's just a heads up of here's what the roadmap could look like 6, 8, 12 months down the line, it's a lot easier for us to then, thematically bucket roadmap releases and say, here's generally the categories that the product teams are working on than it is to suddenly have a new launch that you have to support.
[00:00:50] And so that means that teams will be more effective to launch it. And a lot of the concerns I heard product teams have of, oh, I don't wanna commit too soon, is pretty easy for a go to market team to mitigate.
[00:01:01] PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way.
[00:01:30] Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
[00:01:39] Melissa Perri: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today I'm excited to introduce Rebecca Shaddix, a seasoned marketing executive, and go-to-market strategist, known for driving significant revenue growth across diverse industries. Today we're gonna talk about how product management and go-to-market functions can work better together to craft strategies and get them out to customers.
[00:02:00] But before we dive into talking to Rebecca, it's time for Dear Melissa. So this is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions, and I answer them here every single week. Go to dear melissa.com and let me know what's on your mind.
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[00:02:55] Melissa Perri: Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa
[00:02:57] Melissa Perri: Dearest Melissa in the B2B SaaS software arena. I'd suggest that sales, customer success enablement and having an effective go-to-market strategy are more important than virtually any other area of product management. That is to say there is no point having a great product if messaging and value is not being conveyed effectively by those whose job it is to do from your experience, what does the best practice look like in this space? Which roles are normally responsible for this? And what challenges do you consistently see?
[00:03:26] So I've worked in a lot of B2B software, and this is what I will tell you that I have observed from this.
[00:03:34] I think you could sell a product all you want, but if it sucks, people will churn. So now you have a leaky bucket problem. I also think you can have a fantastic product that nobody knows about and then that is equally as bad. So when it comes to the B2B SaaS world, especially in scale ups. I often see that go to market and product functions have to work extremely closely together to deploy and develop their strategies.
[00:03:58] So we need to be partners. We should be partnering on customer segmentation, positioning, messaging, reach, feedback, all of these things so that we can review the data together, figure out our best path forward and where we can get leverage for growth. So sales needs to be included when doing high level portfolio road mapping so that you can estimate the impact that new product or features will have on sales and growth.
[00:04:20] Product marketing should be involved so that we can do effective customer segmentation. Make sure that we understand the markets, understand our positioning in those markets. We're going out there with a clear message on differentiation, but product also has to bring that together as well and make sure that our products are meeting those promises that we put out there into the market, right?
[00:04:40] It doesn't matter if we promise somebody this amazing thing, if we can't deliver on it, we'll get a lot of sales, but then we'll lose them, and that happens pretty frequently. Now when it comes to B2B SaaS, and especially scale ups, I frequently see the CPOs leading the charge to bring all of this together when teams have not really operated this way in the past.
[00:04:59] So CPOs can be a great tie to bring together the go-to market functions, the product functions, the technology, and all of that, into a cohesive strategy. Now, that's not to say that they're more important, it's just that I see them as this linchpin that kind of ties it all together when maybe these other functions have not worked very closely with technology in the past.
[00:05:18] So that is the positioning that a CPO can have and the effectiveness it can have in these B2B SaaS companies to bring it all together. But it's still an executive effort, right? We have to make sure that as an executive team, we are building the company strategy and the positioning and where we wanna go together.
[00:05:36] We're all aligned. And if we don't do that, that's where I see a lot of products fail. So that's my thinking. I don't think one is, more important than the other. I think when it comes to go to market, having a very strong product marketing lead in there, having a very strong salesperson is really key on the product side.
[00:05:52] You need a CPO who is very strategic and understands those functions as well and can help harness the data and get that information out of the executives and into something that's actually going to deliver on it when it comes to road mapping and when it comes to looking at our product visions. So I hope that helps answer your question, and again, if you have questions for me, go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are. Now, let's go talk to Rebecca.
[00:06:13] Welcome to the podcast, Rebecca. It's great to have you on.
[00:06:16] Rebecca Shaddix: Great to be here.
Defining acceptable mistakes in go-to-market
[00:06:17] Melissa Perri: So you've been working with teams for quite a while on creating great go-to-market strategies. Can you tell us a little bit about what are some of the most common pitfalls you've seen when people are developing these?
[00:06:28] Rebecca Shaddix: I would love to. Yeah. I think the most common one, the single most common one, is trying to do everything perfectly because you haven't defined an acceptable mistake, and that usually means that your over-indexing on things that aren't moving the needle and potentially delaying in ways that you don't want to.
[00:06:46] So I think the single most common mistake that product teams make and tech teams make in general when going to market is they haven't defined an acceptable mistake upfront, and that is the opposite of a risk. A risk is something we have to mitigate or else we won't hit our goals. An acceptable mistake is something that will not compromise our ability to hit our goals. And commonly you can tell that there hasn't been agreement on the acceptable mistake and people are making assumptions about where they're aligned or not, because you'll hear something like we can't do X, Y, or Z. And usually when that happens, it's because we haven't had that conversation around what actually is the most important thing for going to market?
[00:07:24] Can we not skimp on market insights and research, for example, because we really need to define this big question upfront or could we launch and iterate? All of these have trade-offs, and if you hear something like a product marketing team saying we can't launch a new product this quarter. It's probably because they think they have to do everything perfectly that goes into a tier one launch, typically, when a product team may think, Hey, this is tier three, we can go here and we can skim here. And so if you haven't defined that, trying to do every aspect of go to market perfectly, takes a lot of time, takes a lot of resources, and can delay a lot of the revenue benefits of launching more quickly.
[00:08:02] Defining that upfront and saying, we really can't skimp on team enablement, for example, because it's really important the entire team understands how to sell this complex product. That'll take more time and more prep. But the opposite could be true. You could say, you know what? Let's just get this out there and we can be tripping over ourselves a little bit because our audience is not gonna have a lot of complex questions for our team.
[00:08:24] That's the most common mistake. And when I think about defining great go-to-market strategy, It means having those conversations upfront about the four pillars that I think of in go-to-market strategy, and that's market research or insights. And so things like segmentation, persona development are the foundation for deciding what to launch and how to position it, and then positioning and messaging is layered on top of that, the enablement comes in next, and then the launch aspect itself. And so the go to market launch aspect and when you're articulating which of those are most important, it's easy to see then having a good element and another wouldn't compromise your goals.
[00:09:04] Melissa Perri: I've never heard of the term acceptable mistake, but I really like that concept. Can you give us an example of what an acceptable mistake might be?
[00:09:11] Rebecca Shaddix: Definitely it'll vary by your team, what you're prioritizing. But an acceptable mistake could be we are only gonna do five customer interviews, or we're going to not ab test certain messaging because. It's more important for us to come to market more quickly because we don't think we'll get statistically significant results and so it's not worth slowing down the load speed or managing different variants. It could be: we are going to have a smaller enablement session, that then comes out after launch so we can move more quickly. It really is whatever trade off isn't going to compromise your end results. And this looks into internal teams really often.
[00:09:54] Like where are you putting your bets and where are you putting your resources and what isn't as important. On the launch side, it could be we're only going to use two channels as opposed to all of the marketing channels at our disposal because we think these two are the most important. It's a trade-off, like I said, that won't compromise your ability to achieve your results, and you would make it because you're focusing then on what is moving the needle.
[00:10:16] Melissa Perri: That's really interesting. So it's Hey we are acknowledging that some of this might not be polished or we're not gonna roll it out to everybody. These are not problems. These are things that we are just saying. This is okay. We'll walk through it. We'll work through it.
[00:10:28] Rebecca Shaddix: Exactly, and it's a really quick way to bridge buy-in. Oftentimes when teens have internal resistance or pushback, it's because they think they're going to do something wrong that gets them into trouble or looks bad, and if you tell your support team, it's okay if you don't know how to answer these technical questions because we don't think that's going to delay the launch or delay our ability to hit our goals, then suddenly all the resistance of we can't, we need comes down of maybe we don't need.
[00:10:55] Objection handling scripts in advance because the acceptable mistake is we're willing to trip over ourselves internally a little bit, come back to prospects a little bit with answers that we haven't prepped the team on, and go from there. Now, if you're, it could very well be the opposite. That may not be an acceptable mistake for other teams.
[00:11:13] The idea is to know your audience, know your team, and what's most important so you can rally around that focus area.
[00:11:20] Melissa Perri: So when you were putting this together too, it sounds like were you have to involve of a lot of different areas areas, or, you know, as the product teams are looking at this, are we going out to support and trying to figure out like what would be their worries? Are we drafting this in isolation? Like what's the process for trying to figure out how to anticipate acceptable mistakes?
[00:11:39] Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah, whoever's owning the launch, leadership owners, often product marketing and product leadership should be the ones to recommend an acceptable mistake. They will hypothesize, these are the goals that we're trying to hit. We have to launch before. This busy seeing this pivotal moment, et cetera, so we're willing to make this trade offs.
[00:11:56] You would communicate that, as part of your launch communications plan internally, so you get ahead of the downstream concerns and then talk to the other teams about the mistakes that are okay to make.
[00:12:06] Melissa Perri: The relationship between product management and go-to-market teams and marketing teams and launch teams, I feel like is super nebulous in a lot of companies. Sometimes it's just: Hey, this thing is gonna go out! And we inform marketing teams like way too late or we're not really involving them from the beginning.
How product and go-to-market should collaborate
[00:12:22] Melissa Perri: Can you talk about what that relationship should look like when it comes to product go to market? Anybody who's involved in that launch into successfully, bring a product to market, how should they be working together with those teams?
[00:12:36] Rebecca Shaddix: I think as a rule, earlier is better. It's easy to think that if you're owning something as the product marketing team, as the product team, that it's up to you to figure things out and then share your plans. It's usually better and easier to bring in your partners sooner. And so I've made this mistake as a product marketer myself.
[00:12:56] I thought demand gen will be so thrilled if we show them our go to market plan. It'll be all fleshed out. They'll be so happy because all they have to do is implement it. That's not what happens. They wanna be involved much sooner for their expertise, for their insight on timing issues we may not have thought of for their insight on any number of things that could go inform the messaging more effectively.
[00:13:15] So as a rule, any go-to-market spearheading should involve cross-functional stakeholders as soon as possible. Even if it's just a heads up of here's what the roadmap could look like 6, 8, 12 months down the line, it's a lot easier for us to then, thematically bucket roadmap releases and say, here's generally the categories that the product teams are working on than it is to suddenly have a new launch that you have to support.
[00:13:39] And so that means that teams will be more effective to launch it. And a lot of the concerns I heard product teams have of, oh, I don't wanna commit too soon, is pretty easy for a go to market team to, to mitigate. I like to have roadmaps of the now, next, later, lots of fidelity of what's happening in the next quarter or two.
[00:13:57] A little bit of fidelity around what's happening the quarter after that, and then thematically 12 to 18 months out, what are we thinking about? It helps all of the narrative of the fact of the idea that we're iterating, we're responding to their feedback, and it lets us then bucket the value proposition and the features that are supporting them more effectively.
[00:14:16] I typically do that with a headline of we are working on this high level value proposition as a differentiator. Here's three sub themes of what that looks like. It could be ease of use, greater security, more robust functionality, and then bucketing the releases from there, we don't have to commit to anything that's coming.
[00:14:36] Just in general, we're working on ease of use, search functionality, whatever it is. And so in general, the earlier people know the more effective they can be as partners, the more effectively they can allocate resources, and then the more collaborative you look as somebody who's getting that internal buy-in.
[00:14:53] Melissa Perri: I feel like there's a lot of product managers out there who maybe didn't work with traditional product marketing teams or, came into this without that kind of support, who look at the marketing team says something that happens after, right? So now we're talking about bringing them earlier. I also see where when you start to talk to the product people about bringing them earlier, they're like they're not really involved in strategy.
[00:15:14] And then I see product marketers go, but we should be involved in strategy. We should be doing this. What is the right relationship between product management and product marketing? When it comes to forming strategies and figuring out like what is our opportunity in the market and how should they be working together?
[00:15:32] Rebecca Shaddix: In a single word, it should be bidirectional, so the feedback should be bidirectional. I typically think of product marketing as being responsible for a lot of the evaluative or the generative insights. So we generate new market opportunities. We recognize these patterns and these themes and these trends in what we're hearing in the market, and we should be batching that in a way that's actually insight and not just noise and saying, here's thematically some of what we're hearing, and bringing that on a consistent cadence to then share that feedback back of this messaging is resonating.
[00:16:05] Here's what we're hearing. I think of a lot of the product management research as being evaluative of how are users engaging with the products we've designed? Are there ways that we can build on functionality that would drive up adoption and usage, et cetera. But that should be a pretty robust bi-directional feedback loop with regular cadences, at least quarterly.
[00:16:27] I like to do it monthly. And if you have that motion and product marketing as being a good research partner, it should feel very cohesive and symbiotic. Where it can sometimes fall apart is if, mostly product marketing, isn't doing a good enough job. Batching insights out of their research, just a whole bunch of noise. Look at this competitor's press release, is not intelligence, it's not helpful, and sometimes we get really tactical. We execute one pagers and are all bogged down and the tactics and being reactive that. There're not as much emphasis on the strategic proactivity of bringing those insights. So I think an in a word, bidirectional should be how product and product marketing teams work together.
[00:17:09] When it doesn't go well, when we think, oh, marketing is involved much later, I often think that the issue is on the marketing side and not so much the product side. Because it typically means that marketing hasn't been a good enough strategic partner, bringing insights in a way that's valuable. If we're just launch tactical reactive partners, then it's easy to get into that loop.
[00:17:28] Melissa Perri: When we're talking about product marketing, in my experience too, they've been really good from a strategy perspective of bringing a lot of data.
[00:17:36] Rebecca Shaddix: Mm-hmm.
[00:17:36] Melissa Perri: And where I see a lot of new, especially like new product management leaders struggle, is just understanding what type of data to look at. And I've seen product marketing traditionally like in great companies be strong on those pieces.
What data product and marketing teams should track
[00:17:48] Melissa Perri: Can you tell me a little bit about what are the types of, qualitative and quantitative data that we should be looking at when forming go-to-market strategies and forming our strategies in general and like, how can product marketing help with that?
[00:18:01] Rebecca Shaddix: In general, it should be whatever's waterfalling most directly from the high level business objective. So whatever that high level business goal set at the executive team level is, should have a pretty clear cascade of metrics that would feed into them that we as product and product marketing teams could then support.
[00:18:18] So that could be something like: we need to increase monthly active users of this product because we know that a strong retention loop and a strong driver of new acquisition, if we have a PLG motion, for example, that'll waterfall very neatly into clear metrics that product marketing and product can then own and then ladder up the support into data and insights are not interchangeable terms. Data should be giving us the insights that then ladder up. But where I see a lot of this death by dashboards come in is when we just think more is more. And we have all of the Google Analytics data about traffic to our site. Don't make it directly connected to the insights.
[00:19:01] So in general, I think that the qualitative insights paint the context to interpret the quantitative data, but even deciding what quantitative data you mean, your need has to ladder back up to the goals. Otherwise, we can just be swirling in more data, saying things that are not as important. The volume of the data versus the intent of the data just being the swirling motion.
[00:19:23] You know you're in trouble if you're looking at dashboards to make decisions for you. Dashboards are an input, and if they're not set up correctly or they're not measuring something that's actually meaningful, they can lead you the wrong direction pretty quickly. So clearly waterfalling back to the company level goals, being intentional about what data you're collecting and why.
[00:19:42] What are you using it for? How are you interpreting it? Who has access to it? Who's responsible for having the qualitative insight to make sense of the quantitative data? All of that should be decided before you start collecting and then be really intentional about what you share out. Just screenshots of dashboards with one person's interpretation should have a really specific audience because you run the risk of it becoming noise, or if you're sharing out data that people dunno how to contextualize, they could stop asking really important questions, they may be making assumptions about how to interpret it, they don't realize they're making, and then lead to worse decisions because they're not validating those assumptions.
[00:20:18] So you just wanna be mindful of why you're using the data and what conclusions it's drawing because all of the data in the world can't make a decision for you. And I see a parallel to how we used data uneffectively a decade ago to how AI is sometimes being used a little too quickly to supplement critical thinking now. Just like dashboards, just like any LLM, it can't make a decision for you because it's just spitting out an output that's subject to whatever flawed input is going into it. So the context for why you're collecting data, the conclusions that you're drawing from it, and then thinking really critically about the qualitative insights about your audience, about how they use a product.
[00:20:58] Is really important. And I know I've gone a little bit long, but if I could share one example from my own life that I think would be helpful. Engagement data. So how often people use a product, how quickly they're coming back is a pretty common product metric to measure. I imagine something like chat, GPT would be using that to measure how engaged different user segments are.
[00:21:21] I have been so deeply confused by how the different models are described. There's 4.0 and then there's 4.5 and there's legacy three. Oh, there's 3.0 mini that. Sometimes when I haven't gotten the results I wanted from something, I've run the same query through all three of four of those models, which could look if they're just measuring or tracking average queries, number run, et cetera, like high engagement.
[00:21:44] To me, it was just confusion and frustration with slight tweaks of what I was asking, because I didn't know how they were working differently. That's a perfect example of the qualitative insights about how people are using your products, being really important for how you're evaluating the quantitative, because any single metric is easy to game or subject to be misinterpreted, interpreting.
[00:22:06] A goal metric against attention metrics, something that you couldn't influence, one without influencing the other in another way is really effective. And so something like number of queries, average satisfaction, et cetera, can go side by side. But really, there's a long way to say that the data is only as good as the inputs collecting it and how you're interpreting it.
[00:22:29] And so being really mindful of who's collecting what and for what end and what qualitative insight they need to interpret it is really important.
[00:22:37] Melissa Perri: I find that there are a lot of people who hope the dashboard will just tell 'em what to do, right? They're not comfortable with making a decision.
[00:22:44] Rebecca Shaddix: Oh yeah.
[00:22:44] Melissa Perri: How did you get comfortable in, or like maybe even a story from your own life, like how do you get comfortable with incomplete information? Just saying go that way.
Turning competitive noise into strategy
[00:22:53] Rebecca Shaddix: The short answer is by expressing the limitation right up front. Totally. Absolutely. I used to work with a Chief Revenue Officer. Who, when asked important questions was really apt to say what do the data say? And it drove me nuts because the data said absolutely nothing if you don't know what you're looking at.
[00:23:11] And so for something like, should we invest more money in more events? Should we put more money into the conferences we're already sponsoring? Should we expand into others? There is no dashboard that can really make that decision for you because there's a lot of execution, audience overlap, goaling questions that surround it.
[00:23:30] And so when you ask, how do you get comfortable with it? I like just, I mean, a) looking at data I think should be a team sport. So any dashboard could be interpreted any number of ways, but I'm the most senior person in the room. I like to have other people share their insights or their interpretation first, because there's totally possible that they're looking at something differently.
[00:23:51] So making sure everyone is data literate. Crowdsourcing thoughts of how we can interpret it. Expressing my opinion last and articulating the risk of the downfalls that I see while asking people to share with their other assumptions or risks that you think that we should look at is typically the approach that I like, but ultimately, yeah, looking at dashboards should be a team sport. Making decisions shouldn't. A decision maker who's responsible for the outcomes is really important. Articulating why you've made a conclusion or a recommendation, putting trip wires in place. So a way of saying if we don't see this kind of ROI, this kind of engagement, there's something we need to see by a certain point.
[00:24:32] If we don't, we will do X. Takes a lot of this accountability and blame out. We've said, we knew it was a risk. We were gonna take big, bold swings. If something can't fail, it can't really succeed. So if you wanna get out of this playing to lose, you need to take. Big risks sometimes, and a risk means it may not go well. But if you've articulated upfront, this is the hypothesis, we're solving this problem statement that we agree is most important. These are the hypotheses for how we could solve it. These are the experiments we'll run. Here's how we'll know if that's working and if it doesn't, here's what we'll do when. Then, if it doesn't, here's what we'll do when is already a strategy you've laid out so it doesn't feel as blamey as: why did you do that? So that's just been a really clear framework of laddering to how you explain what you're doing in a way that I found made me a lot more confident, taking big swings and communicating them, and getting a lot more executive support for them if they know where we're going and why.
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[00:25:50] When we think about forming those strategies too and some of that data, part of it is getting like this market intelligence data in there and you mentioned it, it's like what are our competitors doing? How do we differentiate, how do we look at that?
[00:26:02] A lot of teams struggle to figure out what to do with that data to go forward, right?
[00:26:06] Some of them just copy what the competitors are doing. How do you go from, here's a broad, idea of what's going on in our market. Here's what we're going on here. How do you go from there to roadmap, right? What we should build and product.
[00:26:20] Rebecca Shaddix: I love this question. I think it's such a good one because competitive noise, I think is the most common example of exactly what you've just talked about. The Slack channel where anyone can just drop in a press release from any small, maybe competitor, and there's no clarity on who's supposed to do what with it is not competitive intelligence. That's just noise. And so I think that there's two things to do with the onset to make it productive. The first is: to define the real competitive set, and I think for sales and for product, this can be a slightly different list. For sales, the only competitors they really need to think about are the ones that we're actively losing deals to and status quo do nothing, a spreadsheet should be probably one for most companies, and there should probably just be three to five companies that you're actually losing deals to. For product, being really intentional about articulating this is the problem we solve. This is what we do better than anyone else. Here is why somebody should choose a competitor.
[00:27:20] If you have that pretty clearly aligned, then if a competitor is doing something for a market segment that you're not trying to win, you know that's noise. It's this chasing fragmenting. Now suddenly we don't do anything the best for anybody because maybe ease of use was our differentiator for mid-market companies.
[00:27:38] And if you're chasing enterprise functionality because you wanna go up market, and that's noise that leads to fragmenting the strategy. So I think for the product team, specifically, product and sales, but being really intentional about why somebody would choose a competitor, things that would disqualify them from being your ideal fit customer and.
[00:27:58] Disqualifying them from being an ideal fit. Doesn't mean you would never sell to them if they came to you. It just means that you wouldn't craft your product roadmap or your sales strategy around people who won't represent the biggest segment of what you're optimizing for, which does shift. But just being intentional from the product management side of here's why somebody should choose a competitor.
[00:28:16] If they have this criteria, these goals, they aren't the best fit for us. Then suddenly, oh, okay that competitor doing something for a segment we're not targeting is noise that you know you can tune out, but then being mindful of what you share and how, I think that the best antidote to competitive noise is customer feedback.
[00:28:34] So the more you can bring in, customer testimonial, an NPS response, some quote from an interview. Then suddenly you're reminded of the impact that you're having on your customers as frequently as competitors. Where this can go sideways is if you just have that competitive noise channel where the whole company's in it and drop nonsense in there, and nobody knows what to do with it.
[00:28:56] And then everyone's now suddenly opining on things they have no idea about. That's a distraction, that's noise. That's just pseudo productivity. That feels really good. That gets distracting. It's easy to then say, okay, we're gonna have customer wins. Customer stories be part of every, all team meeting. Our all hands meeting. I forget what we call those now.
[00:29:15] Melissa Perri: Yeah, one of
[00:29:16] Rebecca Shaddix: Team, team meetings where everyone's involved. Yes.
[00:29:19] Melissa Perri: Something that you said, like the, the competitive noise.
Responding to AI pressure from the market
[00:29:21] Melissa Perri: I feel like, this it's gonna resonate with a lot of people here. Do you feel like the AI train is some part of the competitive noise? I feel that like a million product people where they're like, ah, our, like board members or competitors we want AI.
[00:29:36] Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay.. So I think that, yes. And this is just the latest installation of every five to eight years. 99 to 2005 we're a digital first platform. And then 2005 ish to 2008 ish, it was like we're next gen. And then 2009 or whatever it we're. We are mobile first and then we're all in one it.
[00:30:02] I just think there's these cycles of a shortcut to describing value. So if a very intentional use of AI to augment functionality that your users want is the best way to achieve what they want, fantastic. Go for it. So AI is a means to an end. It's not a messaging strategy, it's not a product strategy.
[00:30:21] Just doing something that used to be manual with ai. Maybe you were using some format of AI beforehand? Yeah, I think we're in the classic hype curve of yeah, if you put AI in it, you'll get a higher valuation and customers will love it. I don't think that it's a shortcut to conveying value.
[00:30:40] It's one way it could be a how, but it's not The high level impact. The impact is we're delivering the best product to do X for Y, and we're adding new functionality to make that even stronger, which could include AI if it's thoughtful and intentional, but it's not the end in itself. But yeah. Oh, absolutely.
[00:30:59] Companies are gonna higher valuation if you say it's ai. Say ai. We need ai. We need sellers who have AI experience. I think we're just in this cycle of AI is the latest, infuse it everywhere. I launched an AI powered suicide prevention product that we first had to bring to market in 20 17, 20 16. The fact that it was AI powered was not the point.
[00:31:22] The fact that it helped people identify kids who were at risk of suicide or self harm was the point. So I think that no matter where we are in this hype curve, being AI powered is going to probably be a commodity eventually for almost everything. It's not the point. So yes, I think to your question, yes, AI is very much the, oh no, our competitor did something with ai. If it's not a better user experience for now, it could just be another fragmented product offering.
[00:31:51] Melissa Perri: How do you so I. I hear a lot of product people agree with you, but they're like going up against board members or like executives who just want them to slap some AI on it. How do you make this case to them? What have you seen be effective in trying to steer them away from AI as the thing back into like actual customer problems?
[00:32:10] Rebecca Shaddix: I think of it like a yes and principle, an improv, yes, we are going to put AI in our products because it is going to help us generate revenue through this segment because. So it's really knowing your audience. So if you're talking to internal board members and they're like, we just need to see ai.
[00:32:26] Absolutely. Here's how we're doing it and here's why our audience cares. When you're talking to your customers, I would, AI can be in there. It may be secondary to have this amazing outcome you care about. Deliver excellent seconds. That's what it is. So I think about the order of the audience of who you're talking to, but this is the same thing as the Waterfalling goals.
[00:32:47] If your board's goal all of a sudden is AI, it's because they think it's going to generate more revenue, higher valuation, more differentiation. It's going to generate something. That's what you latch onto. Yes. We are so committed to being the most advanced, intuitive, whatever it is. AI is one way we're doing that.
[00:33:04] Here's what that looks like in our roadmap, and it's probably the opposite direction for your customers. This is what we're delivering and we now have AI to power that.
[00:33:13] Melissa Perri: I think that's really good advice. I like the way that you frame it too, because I've seen people just shoot it down instead of that or we're doing this and, that always turns executives and board members off. I find when they're
[00:33:25] Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah.
[00:33:25] Melissa Perri: you're not listening to me. You're not considering this.
[00:33:28] Rebecca Shaddix: Totally. I think getting curious too, if somebody just asks a question that to you doesn't seem to make sense or be connected, just asking them why is that important to you? Why is that coming up now? What are you hearing in the market? We'll let you tailor that answer pretty quickly, because, your goals are all very aligned, right? The board wants you to make money. Execs wants you to deliver great product outcomes. You all want the same thing, so just figuring out why your perspectives are saying things differently is important. You may have more customer facing on the ground, insight and knowledge.
[00:33:57] Put that through the framework of what they care about because they have perspectives that you don't.
[00:34:03] Melissa Perri: Yeah, that was great advice. And one of the, one of the things I was thinking about too when we were talking about this is the crafting of the positioning of the differentiators. We were talking about that a little bit. So I've seen a lot of go to market communications, let's say of products or positioning that will be something like, Hey, we wanna be best in class at X. We wanna do this. And I feel like a lot of product people out there might not understand what those things actually mean, and they bunch of just marketing buzzwords.
Crafting real differentiators, not buzzwords
[00:34:29] Melissa Perri: Can you talk a little bit about how you think about positioning products to be differentiated and how we should. Start to understand some of those concepts and put it back into our product plans and our roadmaps.
[00:34:43] Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah, it's a great question. I will say, if your marketing team is coming to you saying, we wanna be a best in Class X, they have some positioning work to do themselves, because Best in Class is a shortcut, just like AI to conveying value. What is the actual goal? And a pretty easy swap, I think, product folks can ask their team, their marketing counterparts for is instead of: we wanna be a best in class, put it in the framework of, now you can. 'cause that makes you have to focus it on the customers. Instead of saying, we wanna be a best in class marketing automation platform. Now you can manage all of your marketing campaigns easily with no extra training. Make the marketing team or ask the marketing team to put it in that perspective.
[00:35:23] They really should. Be doing it for you, because the goal of positioning is to identify what you're doing something for and put it in the terms that they care a lot about. That should be internally too, but best in class is a shortcut to why. What is the value you're trying to drive and why is being best in class in that specific area a differentiator for you?
[00:35:43] Sure. Everyone wants to be the best at something, but no one is so excited as a customer. Oh, I just can't wait to buy this new product. What you really want is the solution to your problems. And so the marketing team should be crafting it in that way. We wanna be the most reliable solution for X, so now customers can Y. That'll be easier to then build feature insights off of to have shared language around.
[00:36:10] But I come back to if the marketing team is doing that's a cheat to get them to stop and it, they should stop.
[00:36:15] Melissa Perri: I think that's good for people to know out there to sniff out and see, did we actually do our homework here?
[00:36:20] Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah, if it's really complicated and you are wondering what it's describing, it's not there yet. It may mean the marketing team doesn't understand the functionality well enough. It may mean they don't understand the audience well enough, aren't willing to be honest about where we differentiate and where we don't win. Any of that you can start to get past with the, put it in this format. Now you can x.
[00:36:45] Melissa Perri: Yeah I find that some of these conversations too, come from stuff like the marketing team coming back and saying, Hey, we really wanna be on the magic quadrant side of the, Garner's thing. To do that we need to become best in class over here. And that's like how we get positioned and how we move up there. Some of that I do think is useful when you're thinking about how do you position yourself in the market. What's the right way for product managers to work with product marketing on that positioning and where's the delineation of what product marketing is doing, what product is doing for positioning, how to actually think through differentiators themselves, like what kind of data are we both bringing to the table and trying to hash this out with.
[00:37:25] Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah, I think that the goals, the functionality, the structure of teams will vary slightly, but either way, something like, we really wanna be in this quadrant. Why? Because our enterprise buyers really value this category, and we know that's associated with higher lifetime value of the customers lower acquisition costs, pipeline acceleration, et cetera. So the goal is one of those things, and then you can work toward that shared goal. Just like you need to articulate an acceptable mistake. You wanna articulate what you're optimizing for and what success looks like. That should be a waterfall metric back to the company level goal, because a lot of this stuff is fun, distraction.
[00:38:07] It feels good too make some list. But if it isn't making a buying decision, it may not be what you really wanna optimize for. It may be very important, and as the company grow grows, you could have greater ability to invest those resources. But really when we're thinking about working together, laddering toward the shared company goals is where it starts.
[00:38:28] Whatever the company level goals are, ladder than two departmental goals. So product goals should support with product usage, et cetera. Marketing should support in a certain way, and then that should then just get more granular down to specific departments and specific individuals. The right way to bring those insights, I really think is joint customer discovery, joint customer research with clarity on the insights that you're looking for as each party and how you'll use them and how you'll share them.
[00:38:59] Melissa Perri: When you're thinking about these frameworks and trying to move into a magic quadrant or, position yourselves differently in the market, how do you balance the asks that you're hearing from the market and what you're seeing out there with radical innovation, right?
[00:39:12] Especially if we talked about like competitive intelligence, we talked about listening to our customers. Where do you think you start to go, okay, I've got this information, but maybe I can completely think about something different. Where's the space for doing something that's never been done before there.
Advice for future product marketers
[00:39:29] Rebecca Shaddix: Yeah, it's listening to the why behind those asks. So customers are going to answer the questions through the framework of what they think is relevant to you. So the second you say, hi, I'm Melissa. I'm from this company, and we do X, or their existing customers. They're going to consciously or subconsciously filter the their answers through the lens of what they think is productive to you.
[00:39:51] So the more open you can be with talking to prospects and close loss prospects, in addition to current customers, the more representative those insights will be. And typically what I like to do, is say as little about what we're working on as possible until we've gotten their answer.
[00:40:08] And so that usually looks like pretty big, broad open discovery questions at the beginning of a discovery interview, for example. Biggest challenges they're facing, what keeps them up at night, conversation they had with their boss, how they get promoted, whatever is relevant to the problems that you wanna solve.
[00:40:26] Big, broad, open again as little about your company and the product as you can, and then after you've heard them discuss. The biggest challenges they face, which may at surface level not be relevant to you, but could be something you can solve, if you keep that open, then you can get more specific into, here's what we're working on.
[00:40:45] Is this valuable? If you invert that, here's what we're working on. Is this valuable? All you can get is incremental feedback on a direction you're already going. The feature requests you're hearing are filtered through the lens of what they think you're doing. How you can be the most valuable to them is by opening that up into more generative insights, which I often think is product marketing's responsibility to start with recruiting people who may not have ever used or tried your product before because they represent your target audience, asking them what they care about, how they solve it.
[00:41:17] Whittling it down, will typically yield better insights than just starting off with. Hi, I'm Rebecca. This is the company I work for. Here's what we do. What do you currently use to solve X problem? Everything they say after that point is filtered through the lens of what they think is relevant to you, and so it can only be incrementally valuable.
[00:41:34] It's still good. You still need that, but it's much better. There's a lot more opportunity in that open expansion, but I will say. It's not always immediately quantifiably, ROI, as you hear of new positioning opportunities, possible new product roadmaps, it could take over a year before that yields really meaningful revenue for the company.
[00:41:56] And so it's hard sometimes to make that case to execs who don't support or understand it. And so you can start building more credibility by doing the research and the initiatives that they value, showing how effective you are, and then making the case for how you can expand.
[00:42:11] Melissa Perri: Rebecca, when you think about the future of product marketing and how it's evolving, especially in the age of so much data and AI and all of this stuff. What do you think is going to change?
[00:42:20] Rebecca Shaddix: I think most things we tactically think about today are going to change. What I think is potentially more interesting or credible to speculate on now is what won't change. So the need for strong strategic insights, a strong opinion, clear differentiation, excellence in something that people are willing to pay for, that won't change. How we achieve that? I don't even think I can begin to imagine if you had told me in 2020 that there'd be a massive decrease in search engine traffic or search volume, I would've had no idea how that was possible. So I think most of what we tactically do today is going to evolve in some way. That's why it's even more important to come back to the principles of thinking very critically and strategically validating assumptions, being willing to take bigger bets that may not pay off, because that's how you can have bolder innovation. All of this will differentiate the mediocre companies that may have mediocre stagnant growth from those that'll really accelerate.
[00:43:29] Melissa Perri: Rebecca, it's been great having you on the podcast. I've got one more question for you. If you could reflect on your career and give advice to your younger self, what would it be?
[00:43:38] Rebecca Shaddix: Depending on how much younger, when I was 20, it would be, there's no rush. I felt this tremendous pressure really starting in high school to figure out what I was going to do and to start getting really good at it. Really quickly. And so even a year out of college, I just felt such pressure to figure out my path to define it and get excellent at it, and being open-minded to opportunities I couldn't have even envisioned is what got me into marketing in the first place I was going to do education policy. I had no idea about working in tech or in marketing. When I first thought heard of marketing, I thought it was just a bunch of advertising liars who try to sell people things they didn't need. And I was like, Ugh, marketing.
[00:44:19] No, I'm not a liar. But I realize now it's really about helping more people who could benefit from products, get access to them, which I think is great. So that thesis of my life has always been make an impact at scale. So being really committed to what I cared about but not committed to how I got there is what I would tell my 20-year-old self, my 25 or even 30-year-old self.
[00:44:41] I would say know your miss. It's really easy to, in your early career, be rewarded for what you do really well and let the blind spots of things that you don't do as well fall away. As you grow, knowing your hidden shadow weaknesses that are going to become increasingly important as you expand is what I would've challenged myself to articulate and get feedback on more proactively sooner.
[00:45:06] So my miss and the way I developed this hypothesis by asking my manager my direct reports, finish this sentence, if I didn't know you better, I would think X. And over time, the pattern that emerged was, if I didn't know you better, I would think: you do too much research, you're too heads down. You don't execute quickly enough.
[00:45:25] So my research bent means that I have to let some of that go. So when I think I'm not ready, I need more research. My miss is now to ship more quickly. And so when, so things that feel to me like, oh, this is reckless. We only did not enough testing, et cetera. My miss is to ship more quickly because I know that bent.
[00:45:45] Getting that feedback was really helpful because otherwise I wouldn't have known why I wasn't seen as executing effectively enough. That was my miss, so yeah, know your miss. Ask for that feedback directly. Make it safe to give you that feedback, and then be willing to be uncomfortable encountering it is advice I'd give my to five 30-year-old self.
[00:46:05] Melissa Perri: I think that is great advice for all of our listeners out there. Thank you so much, Rebecca, for being on the podcast. If people wanna learn more about you, where can they go?
[00:46:12] Rebecca Shaddix: Connect on LinkedIn. I'm Rebecca Shaddix on LinkedIn.
[00:46:15] Melissa Perri: We will put your LinkedIn in our show notes@productthinkingpodcast.com. Thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking Podcast. We'll be back next week with another amazing guest. In the meantime, if you have any questions for me, go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are. We answer them every single week. Make sure you like, subscribe to the show so that you never miss an episode. We'll see you next time.