December 2021 Summaries

Product marketing teams are responsible for driving sales success and overall product marketing strategy in a company. Their roles include product launch marketing, go-to-market strategy, sales enablement materials, content marketing, target audience research, content partnerships, market research, user research, ideal customer profiles (ICPs), brand awareness initiatives, marketing analytics & reporting, lead generation, demand generation, implementing growth tactics, and community management. The structure of a product marketing team in successful SaaS companies depends on factors such as company culture, team size, and growth goals. Typical roles within the team include Product Marketing Manager, Content Manager, Partnerships Manager, Growth Lead, Researcher/Data Analyst, and Marketing Strategist. The team's structure also varies depending on whether a SaaS is sales-led or product-led, marketing budget, marketing strategy, product learning curve, and product development stage. To build a product marketing team from scratch, assess your current situation by considering factors such as expected/needed growth rate, product maturity stage, go-to-market strategy, and immediate & long-term goals. Place the product marketing team within the product department and consider internal hires if necessary. For roles that can help with non-business-critical goals, consider hiring freelancers or outsourcing tasks. When deciding who to hire next for your product marketing team, prioritize roles based on business needs and growth plans. Consider generic marketing roles such as growth managers, social media managers, PPC specialists, affiliate/partnership roles, copywriters, graphic designers, and community managers.

The article lists ten popular product management podcasts that provide valuable insights, tips, and stories from industry experts. These include "The Product Podcast" by The Product School, "Product to Product" by Roadmunk, "The ProductLed Podcast" by ProductLed, "How I Built This with Guy Raz", "The Data-led Professional Podcast" by InnerTrends and astorik, "This Is Product Management" by Feedback Loop, "Product Thinking with Melissa Perri" by ProduxLabs, "Masters of Scale" by Reid Hoffman, "Human Insight Podcast" by UserTesting, and "Build with Maggie Crowley" by Drift. These podcasts cover a wide range of topics relevant to product management professionals, from practical advice on specific tasks to broader discussions about industry trends and strategies.

The article discusses a step-by-step process for selecting the right features to develop, focusing on understanding customer needs and aligning them with the product vision. It emphasizes the importance of having a diverse product team, conducting UX research, validating ideas through testing, and monitoring feature usage after launch. The author suggests using tools like Airtable, Amplitude, Tableau, and Chameleon to gather and analyze user feedback and data.

Digital adoption is the process of enabling users to understand how a product works and start using it actively. A digital adoption platform (DAP) is a software layer over another technology tool that guides users through its features. The benefits of using a DAP include speed, saving time and resources, and running more in-product experiments effectively. Companies that will benefit the most from DAPs are those that care about their software being used effectively by users, such as SaaS companies and B2C products with web-based software. Some best-in-class digital adoption platforms to consider include Appcues, Chameleon, ChurnZero, Intercom, Pendo, Userflow, UserGuiding, Userpilot, WalkMe, and Whatfix. When choosing a DAP for your SaaS, consider factors such as access to resources, product learning curve, branding and maturity, and digital adoption goals.

A Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric that measures how easy or difficult it is for customers to interact with your business. It helps predict customer behavior, fight churn, and increase customer lifetime value. CES surveys are single-item Likert scale surveys that ask customers about the ease of their interaction with your product or service. A good CES score ranges from 6-7 on a scale of 1-7. CES differs from CSAT and NPS scores in that it focuses on transactional low effort/high effort, while CSAT measures satisfaction and NPS measures relational experience. Lowering the Customer Effort Score can increase customer loyalty and reduce churn. To build an effective CES survey, keep questions simple and clear, deliver them where the action takes place, and use follow-up questions sparingly. Act on CES insights by prioritizing product backlog, simplifying processes, streamlining customer service, building self-serve support solutions, providing room for customer feedback, implementing low-effort principles, and letting customers know you heard them.