Product Marketing Insider [podcast]: Karim Zuhri

In episode 11 of our Insider series, we caught up with Karim Zuhri, Global Head of Product Marketing and Product Research at SafetyCulture, about the ins and outs of his role, how he kickstarted his career in product marketing, as well as how - living down under - he manages all the time differences that come hand-in-hand with leading a global function.

Full transcript:

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the product marketing insider podcast, brought to you by Product Marketing Alliance. My name is Bryony Pearce, and I'm the Content Manager here at PMA. To help establish and elevate the role of product marketing, we're on a mission to speak to 50 PMMs and pick their brains on everything from their journey into the industry, which teams they interact with most, what skills they believe are critical for the role and a whole load model. To do just that, with me today is Karim Zuhri, Global Head of Product Marketing and Product Research at SafetyCulture. Karim joined SafetyCulture back in October 2018, and before that, he spent more than three years at Expedia Group as a global Senior Product Marketing Manager. Anyway, enough from me. Welcome to the show Karim.

Karim Zuhri

Hi, thanks for having me today.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Oh, it's an absolute pleasure. We're really excited to have you here today. To kick things off, canI just get you to please give everyone a bit of an introduction to you, your role and a bit about the company SafetyCulture?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, sure. I am based in Sydney, working for SafetyCulture for almost 15 months. I am their head of product marketing and product research. It's a scale-up company. We are around 350 people across the globe. It's a company that is valued at around 650 million Australian dollars today and it's a B2B SaaS business with a PLG model. We call it product-led-growth model because we have a freemium and a free trial of our premium offer. And what we actually do is help companies digitise their inspections processes, and help them do better product quality inspections, safer workplace, and make their operations run much smoother and better across a lot of departments.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Okay, great. Thanks for that. I'll kind of go back to SafetyCulture again a bit later on. But just to rewind to the start of your career. What made you want to become a product marketer in the first place?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, I have an engineering background, I did study computer science and electronic engineering. So as soon as I said this, it makes a lot of sense to say that I worked in product marketing? Maybe, maybe not. I actually finished engineering and didn't want to be an engineer, so I joined a management consulting company in France, and I started working with them on different projects that were at that moment, 10-11 years ago now, more focused on IT transformation projects. So rolling out big IT systems to help these corporations with their core business solutions. So I worked with retail banking, with insurance, with energy companies, and I started looking at what I can be helping these companies with from a consultant perspective. And it always came back to the product strategy. So working in all these assignments made me realise that what I'm interested in is actually not the consulting only, but also this helping roll out this product strategy across their business. So when I finished with that, I moved to a tech company called Amadeus. Amadeus is a platform that connects travel agencies with airlines, and hotels, and enables communication between them, helping travel agencies see the airlines and hotels fares, schedule etc, etc. So I worked there reporting to the VP of product management and helped them as well with the product strategy across the whole distribution portfolio. And then I moved to Expedia, one of Amadeus customers, helping the B2B brand called Egencia on product marketing projects, mainly with the reporting and the lodging offer. And then I focused towards the end on segmentation, helping identify who are the ideal customer profiles, where's the sweet spot for this business? How can we grow the business in the most sustainable way? And along this journey I was realising that product marketing is evolving. It's heading towards this product strategy side and helping the product manager find the best product market fit and helping them as well with research and analysis to get the product adoption happening naturally afterwards. So yeah, started as an engineer, then became a management consultant and then worked on product strategy and this is where I am today with product marketing.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yep. And would you say then so you mentioned you started with engineering, to get to that progression into Product Marketing, would you say that was quite self-taught or...?

Karim Zuhri

I think that to be a product marketer, a very strong product marketer, you have to have a lot of knowledge that is technical, and be very tech savvy, but also be interested and curious about what you are selling to the customer, and what you are actually marketing and pushing to the market. So on the technology side, understanding the product and its technology and then the analytical side is extremely important as well. And this is where I see a lot of value today in my career because I use a lot of the frameworks and the knowledge I learned as an engineer and apply them now to these technology companies and products.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yeah, that makes sense. In terms of your direct team, now at SafetyCulture, what does that look like in terms of numbers and roles?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, so, my team today has two parts, you got the product marketers and the product researchers. So, we got three people in the product marketing team and two people in the product research. The product marketers are looking at the go-to-market strategies and how we work with the marketing team, and the go-to-market team, so sales, customer success, and support. And on the other side, we have the product researchers looking at the market sizing, and the analysis of the opportunity itself, building the business case, and then go to the product team, pitch some ideas, pitch some recommendations, show and surface some insights to get them on board with a new feature that we have to build or a new opportunity that we should translate into a feature. So the team is split into two parts, the inbound and the outbound; the outbound is more about the go-to-market strategy, and the inbound is more around the analysis, the research that feeds into the product roadmap.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yep. And then just focusing on that research element. What are the main tactics that you use to gather that research?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, so I think of research in three elements. The first one is the market. The second one is the customer. And the third one is the product. And at each phase, there are different tactics and different methods. So when I'm looking at the market, I do market sizing, I do market conditions, players and competition. So it's more like desktop research, assumptions, modeling and estimations, and building of a business case based on the numbers that we have. How big is this? What is the problem that we're trying to solve? Then when I move to the customer research, I start looking at surveys, I start looking at interviews, and focus groups, I also look at the data that we have in our systems. Today, we have 25,000 customers and around 600,000 users. So I have a huge database that I can look at, run queries, and understand customers engagement, their profitability, their behaviour in the product, their firmographics. And this is where I look at the data from a segmentation perspective to understand the sweet spot and target audience. Then, when we do product research, we look at prototyping, journey mapping, deeper interviews and surveys to understand what the feature that we have to build should be looking like.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yep. And then you mentioned that you then go to the product team with the results of this research. What is the relationship with a product team like and are they usually quite receptive to your findings?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, that's a very good question actually. I feel very lucky because I'm in one of these companies that are very tech driven and we report today to our VP of product. So we are part of the product organisation that has three big roles, the product marketers & researchers, the product managers, and the product designers. And we work in a triangle, the three of us together. So we agree on what we want to research ahead of time, we kick off things, we look at the problems that we want to solve. And then the product managers expect from us some analysis, expect from us some research so they are waiting for them. And then we discuss, we tweak together and we plan based on this. And we involve the product designers as soon as possible to try to understand and visualise what we are looking at and what we're thinking. And we have a big customer success team that also go through our prototypes and give us feedback before we start building anything. So I feel like we have a very good foundation where everyone gets on board very early and knows what we're doing. And the product managers themselves are 'the asker' or like 'the demander' of these requests. So they are aware and really happy with the results.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yeah. And then you mentioned you reported to products. Out of curiosity, when you worked at Expedia Group, who did you report to there?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, that's a tricky question, okay, so I'm going to answer it very quickly, when I joined Expedia, the product marketing team was reporting to SVP of product. And then what they tried to do is actually having the whole team of marketing reporting to the product SVP. So they mixed product and marketing under this SVP of product and marketing. And then they moved product marketing under marketing. So it still was reporting to product as an umbrella, but with aCMO that was reporting to the SVP of product and marketing.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Okay, then how did you find that? Did that work or?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, I think it's a challenge to have Product Marketing to be honest reporting to marketing, because they can do an okay job helping with acquisition and growth strategies from this perspective. But where they are needed the most, I believe is actually helping with the market product fits, we have a way of researching, we have a way of thinking that is very unbiased. It's not towards any goals or any quotas that the marketing would have. And we don't have this appetite to build cool stuff for the sake of building cool stuff. So we sit in the middle between marketers and product. But if we are working closer to product, we are much more efficient, because I always say something that I may have stolen from someone else, which is - user adoption is not an afterthought. You have to build it from the first day. And you have to build it in the entire experience. And actually, you cannot build a product and then see if it's okay for the users. You cannot build something and then test it on the people. You have to think about it, you have to reflect on the problems you're solving first. And then user adoption comes as a natural result. So I believe when you're working with product first and thinking about this market-product fit, I always say market-product fit and not product-market fit by the way, because you look at the market first and then build the product. So if you are working in this situation, you are much more efficient than working under marketing on the strategy. You can do a good job at marketing. But if you didn't build the right product, you cannot have an efficient strategy anyway.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yep, that makes a lot of sense. And then next up, I keep asking this question in the series, and I get the same sort of answer. But if there is such a thing, what does a standard day in your role look like? And are there any sort of constants to it?

Karim Zuhri

Oh, I don't think we have a routine. And honestly in my team, we have a lot of areas that we look at, as I said, market research, product research, customer insights, go-to-market, and adoption campaigns. So depending on the phase, and depending on the season and how fast we went with something from product delivery, or how big are the goals of marketing, we align, and we start shifting our focus towards these goals. I'm always trying to align my team's goal with the company goals. So I shift a lot towards these goals. And the initiatives look like what these goals are about, instead of actually keeping with a fixed agenda. So we are very adaptable. And I think we change a lot sometimes our directions to make sure that we are complying to these goals. Does that make sense?

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yeah, absolutely. And in terms of those phases, how often would you say you launch new products or features?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, today we are, as I said, 350 people and half of our teams are on the “technology” side, so engineers and product. So we deliver a lot. We have a lot of releases. It's a SaaS model, it's cloud based, of course, and there are releases almost every day on the app, or on the website. So we have small ones, big ones, we make sure that everything is communicated to the customer through different channels, through emails, through in-app messaging, through webinars, or through a support center. We try to communicate them, depending on how big the launch is. I would say every year we have maybe two big launches. And then I would say, new features to an existing product, and rollout of small features that we try to also make the customers aware of. So yeah two big ones and then smaller releases almost every week or every month.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yeah. And then I see a lot of conversations in Slack about launch tiers, and how do you know how big to go on a launch. In terms of your launches, what's your criteria and how do you determine what scale to go with that launch?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, I would say that the best assessment here is actually to look if it's a new product, new area that you haven't actually offered before. So that's actually a creation of a new category in the market, you have to build credibility and awareness. You've got also a feature, which is a lower impact, but it's still very important. So you have to explain what it is, how it makes sense in the product, but it's not a category. So there's less effort around awareness and credibility. It's just a continuity or like the next step for the product. And then you have small releases that are improving basically how a feature works, makes it actually more seamless, makes it more intuitive. So I would say three tiers, the first one is about a new category and expansion to a place where you haven't been before. And the second one is the feature, and the third ones are small things to improve the experience. In our company today, for example, we focus on inspections, this is the core experience of our product, we are expanding this offer to incident reporting and training. These are two categories that we have to explain, we have to build credibility for. If we build a small feature in the inspection area, that's less effort in terms of credibility and awareness. So all depends on the effort in terms of go to market and launch.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yep. And then when you're building out the content for these bigger launches, how does that process work? So for example, is that content that product marketing would build? Or is it something that you would brief into the marketing department?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, that's a very good point. Where do we stop and how can we work with the marketing team is something that we always look at. So what we try to do is because we are part of the research process, and because we are kind of helping with the decisions around the roadmap of the product, we try to involve the people that are building the content with us from the start. So we have what we call the focus briefs. And we have also the meetings that are preparing the team that will be helping us from the beginning. So we involve marketing teams, we involve the video content team that we have internally. And we start briefing them, we start preparing them that this is what's happening, this is when it will be happening, and how we can start building together the life cycle campaigns, how can we kick things off? Maybe lead generation, what is the content that we need? And then actually have them take care of that. So we give them focus briefs and positioning documentation and have them actually plan the campaigns, the programmes, the channels, etc, etc. We have some recommendations on the tone, on the narrative, and the channels, but we give them all the freedom of picking the right options for each topic.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yep. And that kind of leads me nicely into my next question. So in terms of teams outside of product marketing, like sales, products, and marketing, for example, which departments would you say you interact with most on a day to day basis? And what are your relationships with those teams like?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, I think the team that we work the most with is definitely the product managers. Then you got the product designers, you also got the analytics team, the team that provides us with a lot of insights, and looks at the customer base from a data perspective, so we work a lot with the internal analytical team. We got a big part of our role that is connecting us with the world and the customers. So we work a lot with the marketing team. We try to a certain extent to help with the enablement of the customer success and the account executives, which is the sales team. And we have the responsibility of having the support team always aware of what we're doing and help actually enrich our knowledge base with all the information. I would say that I would rate the relationship, maybe nine out of 10, with almost all the teams, the team that we struggle the most with actually is the marketing team, because we cannot sometimes be very sure about the dates. So sometimes we get some disruption in terms of delivery. And this is where it becomes a bit more difficult. But even with them, I think the relationship is getting better and better. And we have clear lines of responsibilities. It's getting much stronger and much better as a relationship today.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yeah. And then in terms of these conversations you have with these other departments, what does that look like? So for example, do you have meetings, recurring meetings in the diary, or are these random desk drops? How much structure is there to those?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, so each person on the team has a focus area, which is a business focus. So is it market research? Is it customer insights or product adoption? And the other part is actually a focus area on the product itself. So each member of the team would have meetings regularly with their product counterparts. So the product marketing manager and the product manager, and the product designer will meet with the engineers sometimes, speak about the most important topics. With product that's like almost daily. And then we have weekly meetings with marketing. We have almost bi-weekly meetings with the GTM team. It depends on how busy the season is, and how much work we have in terms of releases and where the resources should be, at that moment.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yep. And then you mentioned a few minutes ago that everyone has clear lines of responsibility which kind of ties in nicely to this question. So would you say there's a lot of crossover between what you do and what a product manager does at your company? And where do those lines begin and end?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, let me see. I think product managers are the best people who know the complexity of our product and dependency between all the areas of this product. And also they have by nature, excellent project management skills. And they work very well with the engineers and they keep everyone on time, and they make sure that deliveries happen. And we help them on the strategy side, helping with the insights, analysis, bringing new opportunities. So this is how we would build basically the balance between these two teams. Of course, sometimes the product manager wants to have some research and customer interviews, and we encourage that because they need to meet the customer very often, so there are some parts where it's part of the research scope that the product manager needs to do research as well. So this is where I think there's a crossover, but it's not actually a bad one. It's a complimentary one.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yeah. And then if I remember right before we started recording, did you say you have calls with people in the UK?

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, so I've got a person on my team that is sitting in Manchester, that was our first attempt of globalising the team. So we are headquartered in Sydney. Our biggest team is in Sydney. But we have 4 other offices. One in Townsville Queensland where the company started. One is to service our North American region, in Kansas City. Manchester is our headquarter for Europe and the Middle East. And we got Manila to help us with expansion in APAC, as well as the customer service. So we started now looking at our product marketing function from a global perspective. And the UK is where we sent the first person, Garrett, who is sitting now in Manchester. And I'm planning to have a person in each of these regions gathering more insights on the market, understanding it, having customer calls, region based research that feeds into the product plans and the strategy.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yep. And then how often are you on the phone to these people in different countries? And then how do you find managing those time differences?

Karim Zuhri

Being in Sydney is a curse, even though it's like the beach and the sun, etc. It's very hard. We sit in a different time zone of course, and I wish the earth was flat, but it's not. So sometimes my days start very early. I would say sometimes around 7am and then finish late, but I'm very flexible at work so I try to have my time in the middle of the day and have some life outside of work for sure. But because we are exposed to all these departments and we feel like we have obligations to all of them, this makes it harder sometimes and you have to speak to them because the relationship is the basis of trust. And the trust is the basis of better collaboration.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

I feel like I should let everyone know as well that Karim is very kindly taking some time out at 21.50 local time to do this for us. So thanks again for that.

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, I'm very excited about the Product Marketing Alliance, to be honest, and what's been going on is incredible, and it shows how much there's hunger in this community to learn more, to level up, to expand the scope, the impact around the business. So I'm very excited and I think jumping on the phone for Product Marketing Alliance anytime is a pleasure. We started actually helping here for example, in Sydney, and we are really excited to see how many people are interested in joining. We have a meetup in two weeks where 76 people have just registered, so it's exciting. And I think there was a need, and I think this alliance has found the solution for it, hopefully.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Thank you. That's always nice to hear. So, final few questions, I won't keep you up too much later. What would you say the top three skills are that have helped you get where you are today in product marketing?

Karim Zuhri

Okay. I think that product marketers are the people that can identify an opportunity, and even though it's a very complex topic, they make it simple, and then they make the simple appealing. So I think this is how I would say that three skills are laid out, first of all is, be very strategic and look at things from a very different perspective from others. So the strategic side is extremely important. The second one is the analytical side. Think of data, try to ask the question from different angles, and try to start with hypothesis and confirm through observations and experiments, and look at quantitative and qualitative at the same time. Don't make assumptions too quickly, be factual. And the third one is be a storyteller and onboard people in your initiatives, influence the decision and don't try to be going too much into the operational or tactical side. But have actually people helping you amplify what you find and what you think are the right things for the business. So strategic, analytical, and then a storyteller. And these three things will make you the lighthouse of the business and have the business make decisions based on your findings, have trust in what you're saying, and come back to you more often, see your value and make you grow afterwards.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

And would you say these are skills that you've learned over the years or things that you were just born with, so to speak?

Karim Zuhri

I was lucky that I studied engineering, and this is where I got the analytical side. I was lucky thatI worked in management consulting, and I got the strategy methods, and working now in product marketing, I built the storytelling. I don't think there is a recipe, a magical recipe for it. There are ingredients that you can gather over time, you can build, you can practice, there are so many courses online. There are also books, a lot of content, and people that speak about things in a very good way, there are podcasts, you can build this over time. And no one is not actually capable of doing this.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yeah. And then penultimate question, in your opinion what do you think needs to change about product marketing, if anything?

Karim Zuhri

Oh, a lot of things, I think the biggest part is looking at the product marketers that you have hired in the past and seeing how you can do the work with them is not the right approach. Start with the goals of your business. Look what you need, look what you want from the company future, and then hire for these goals. So, the skills of product marketers should be levelled up, I think there should be a direction that we should all take and fight for. There is an element around the product market fit that I am a big believer that is a big responsibility of product marketers. I think we can do an okay job at many, many other functions in the business. We can do demand generation, maybe we can even do customer marketing. We can help with acquisition but all these efforts would be a very okay job. Whereas if we are the strategic people that can help on the product roadmap, the strategy of the company, we can actually make better impact on the business and drive the most of value. So I forgot the question already, but I think I was just saying that, yeah, there's definitely a need for levelling up this function, there's definitely a need to look at our skills differently, challenge some of them. In our nature we try to get everything on our plate, and we want to do everything. Let's give some scope to other teams, have other people responsible for other things and focus and build for the impact on one or two big things instead of actually being spread across so many initiatives and so many skills.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Yep. And then you touched on that about being strategic and influencing the product roadmap, how much influence would you say product marketing has on the roadmap at SafetyCulture?

Karim Zuhri

Again, because we start research based on some requests, and we align from the beginning on our planning, I would say today we have a big influence on this. I would say around maybe 7.5 to 8, at least. And we have identified a lot of processes and areas that we want to work on this year. So I'm starting the year of 2020 of course by saying I will go more to the gym, but also actually saying that this relationship will be even better and we will hit the 9.5 and 10 with the product team and hoping as well to hit the nine by the end of the year with marketing.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

I love all the ratings you've given throughout, they're super useful. Final question. If there are any new or aspiring product marketers listening to this podcast right now, what would your advice to them be?

Karim Zuhri

Focus, do less stuff, but bring bigger impact. Focus on the areas that connect directly with the company goals, bring data, and know your audience. I think one of the things that we always pitch, but we don't do enough is actually knowing our audience and speaking to our audience. So we do it very well externally. And when we speak to customers, we analyse the personas and the profiles, but when we're speaking to people in the business, we have to be much more tailoring the message to them. So when you go to the marketing team, speak to them in their language, when you ask the analytics team for data, try to approach it with the right questions. Talk to the product managers with data, with facts. Bring every discussion to the level that it needs to be at and know your audience, focus, be analytical and be strategic.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

Okay, that's great. Well, thank you so much for that, Karim, and thank you for taking some time out of your evening to chat to us today.

Karim Zuhri

Yeah, thank you again for having me.

Bryony Pearce - PMA

It's been our pleasure. For everyone still tuned in, thanks so much for listening. And if you enjoyed the podcast, please help us spread the word to other product marketers. Before we leave you to get on with your day, if you want to get involved here are a few ways you can. If you're a product marketer and you want to come on the show to speak about your day, a specific topic or just your role in general, that's one option. If you want to flex your podcast hosting skills, being a guest host is another. And finally, if you or your company want to sponsor an episode, there's a third. Thanks again and have a great morning, afternoon or evening wherever you are.