It’s that time again folks! Week five’s full of tried and tested software suggestions, onboarding experiences, customer persona tips and story-building frameworks.

New to the round-up? In case you’re wondering, it’s made up of questions that are asked in the #pmm-questions group of our slack community - you can get in on the action here.

Q: Does anyone have any research or advice on building customer personas from scratch?

A: Well, this one’s super easy, we’ve covered it in detail here. To give you a snapshot though, here’s a brief outline of the steps:

Step 1: conduct some thorough research

Step 2: understand your aims

Step 3: ask the right questions

Step 4: collate your learnings

Step 5: keep the momentum going.

Q: What tools/software do people like to use to monitor competitor activity for your product set?

A: Here are some tools that have been personally recommended by fellow PMAers:

And here are a couple more options:

1. Ask your prospect-facing teams (i.e. sales), after all, they’re speaking to your target audience every day and they’ll have probably researched your rivals as well as you, so they’ve got a lot of relevant info to unlock.

Tip: instead of relying on your agents remembering tidbits here and there, give them a few conversation prompters and something (even if it’s just an organised spreadsheet, but ideally a CRM) to write their notes down real-time.

2. Take the load off your plate full stop by hiring a competitor intel firm to do it for you.

For 200+ more tool recommendations, check out our Product Marketing Tools of Choice Directory.

Q: Who owns user onboarding as one of the main responsibilities? PMs or PMMs?

A: Although a relatively similar thread runs throughout, this one largely varies from business-to-business. A few common ownership areas include:

  • Customer success only
  • Customer success + customer support
  • Dedicated onboarding teams
  • Customer experience
  • Product + customer success

We’ve worked in places before where marketing had their hand in it too. The dedicated onboarding team would have the personal over-the-phone introductions, product would run through demos and marketing managed a series of automated emails, like:

Q: Does anyone have any in-app NPS surveying tool they like?

A: Here are the tried and tested ones:

And here are a few more we looked into: Usabilla, Hotjar and Retently.

Q: Does anyone use any framework/templates to help develop messaging/build a story?

A: Try this simple three-tiered approach for a bit of guidance:

Phase 1: context

Phase 2: action

Phase 3: results


For more on storytelling, check out these 10 storytelling tips.