Two things that make any PMM indispensable in defining product strategy

This article originates from a presentation at the Product Marketing Summit in San Francisco, 2022. Catch up on this presentation, and others, using our OnDemand service. For more exclusive content, visit your membership dashboard.

I’m Daniel Waas, the VP of Product Marketing for AppFolio, a property management company. I’m here to share how you can make yourself indispensable at the product strategy table. That's a high bar, so let me tell you why I’m totally competent and qualified to talk about this (honestly!).

I've worked in companies of all sorts and sizes. In 2003, I started out in a company called WEB.DE – the German equivalent of Yahoo. It was an awful product, and the customers hated it. We had 230 users and 215 of those users were people within the company that were mandated to use it.

I didn't know this was product marketing back then, but I was brought in to manage the product and I ended up doing a lot of go-to-market stuff and messaging, which was kind of fun. Nonetheless, I left pretty quickly.

Then I went to debitel, which is sort of like Sprint in the US. I was on the product side of things, leading the development of their eCommerce storefront. After that, I went to Netviewer, which was an early freemium SaaS product, and I did product-led growth. Both Netviewer and debitel got bought.

My next role was at GoToWebinar, and this was my first actual PMM job, so I was really excited. That's why I moved to the US eight years ago. I co-led the product strategy, and it was super fun. Then I got let go.

After that, I started my own consulting business. I landed one giant client, and then I signed on with AppFolio – I had to do these two jobs, so I quit the consultancy. Now I'm the VP of Product Marketing for AppFolio, and everything's going great!

The merry and mighty product marketing framework

Let’s take a look at my merry and mighty PMM framework and I’ll show you what I mean. There’s a lot of talk in product marketing circles about all the skills you need to have to be a well-rounded PMM. This framework lays out those skills and helps us to understand what our team likes to do and what their strengths are.

Here are the skills and responsibilities we look at:

• Discover and share market needs. This is all about getting close to the customers.
• Define and build the solution. In other words, the fun part where you work with the product people to build the product and think about the roadmap.
• Align and launch products and features. This is all about go-to-market, getting the product out there, and having a big bang moment.
• Position and message the solution. I don’t need to tell you how important that is.
• Publish and evangelize content and insights.
• Market and enable sales and care – always fun.
• Standardize and optimize workflows.
• Satisfy and grow the customers. This is where customer marketing comes into play.

In my team, we do a super fun exercise with this framework. I give everybody 22 points (which is not a lot) to allocate to the stuff they really like doing.

Then I give them more points to score themselves on how good they are in each of these areas. This is a useful exercise for when you’re hiring too. As you bring new people onto the team, it’s great to see what their strengths and weaknesses are.

What gets you the seat at the table?

So how can we put all of these skills to use in securing a seat at the strategy table?

Firstly, you really want to bring net new insights – things that the leadership team doesn't yet know. These insights should highlight opportunities that your organization is well-positioned to exploit. In other words, you need to know your stuff.

If you're trying to align people but you don’t have any valuable information to offer, it’s going to be a lot harder to get them on board. You're just making noise and taking up their time. When you know your stuff, people will come to you to learn with you.

So how can you get hold of valuable insights and get that seat at the table? Without further ado, here are the two things that any PMM can use to become indispensable:

📊 Pivot tables

☎️ Talking to customers

The unexpected magic of pivot tables 🪄

Now, you’re a data-driven product marketer, so you might be wondering why I’m talking about pivot tables. Why not Tableau, Snowflake, or any of that cool data science stuff? Hear me out on this.

First, with data science, you need an expert to extract information for you, so there's a barrier between you and the insight you want to bring to the strategy table.

Plus, you need to ask that expert very precise questions; otherwise, they won’t know what to bring you and you won't get the insights you need. What I’ve found time and again is that this results in a slow loop of you going to someone with a not-great question and them coming back to you with more questions.

Pivot tables, on the other hand, are stupidly simple to use. You just have to click one button. Remember, I promised two things any PMM can do to get a seat at the table. I didn't promise secrets or witchcraft because I want to share two things that you can actually do every day that’ll make you more knowledgeable and more likely to have a seat at the table.

Pivot tables are also blazingly fast, which means you can have constant and rapid trial and error. Instead of not knowing what the right question is, you can go in and slice the data, look at it, discard it if it’s not interesting, and pull in the next dimension until you find something that actually is interesting.

Finding strategy in just one chart

Whenever I join a new company, one of the first things I do is export data from the CRM and dump it into a pivot table.

I typically look at the segments they have and, if the company has multiple products, I look at which customer segments buy which product. Let me show you a couple of examples from past roles, what they’ve led to, and how that relates to product strategy.

The first example is from GoToWebinar. Now, GoToWebinar wasn't a great product for Citrix – or at least it wasn’t getting a lot of attention. GoToMeeting was the main revenue product.

They'd introduced a ‘good-better-best’ strategy pricing model for all the products, and GoToWebinar was just coasting. One of the first things I did was use a pivot table to look at the tier distribution for GoToWebinar, and I found that 74% of customers were on the lowest price.

Based on that finding, we decided to focus our strategy for the next two years on differentiating the better and best tiers. For six consecutive quarters after that, we outperformed our financial targets just by adding functionalities to the middle tier so that more new customers would sign up for it. Super simple, right?

Anybody can do this, but as a PMM, you are in the best place to make it happen.

One-click segment insights

As I mentioned a moment ago, pivot tables are great for looking at how products are distributed across customer segments. In this case, customers were segmented based on company size from extra-small to extra-large, and then we looked at which customers had product A, who had product B, and who had both.

When we threw that data into a pivot table and saw straight away that it was mostly the customers in the smallest companies that were using product B.

Slicing it that way, we very quickly got to the insight that our messaging, positioning, and strategy for that product needed to be completely different – and it only took five minutes to find that out, whereas the business has often taken a lot longer to find those kinds of insights – if they’ve found them at all.

One-click competitive insights

You can do the same thing for competitive insights. At AppFolio, we used Salesforce data to look at competitive information for all the 20,000 or so accounts in our space. Then we sliced it to see how our customers compared.

Looking at the distribution in a pivot table, it’s immediately obvious that we have a different set of customers than anybody else in the market. That means we’re doing at least one thing right that gets us the type of customer that the others have a hard time winning.

Again, that feeds strategy. You can take that information to the leadership team and give them a differentiator that the organization can lean into. From there, your messaging can focus on why your solution is the best and others can’t compete in that segment.

An evergreen lead magnet built on pivot tables

At GoToWebinar, we built our best-performing asset for five years on pivot tables. The great thing about this asset is you just need to refresh it once a year by dropping a new dataset into the same table, then – boom! Evergreen content.

We took our data on all the people that had attended a webinar in a certain timeframe, plus 258,000 rows of session data, and dropped it into a couple of pivot tables.

From that, we built a giant asset called the Big Book of Webinar Stats, packed with really useful information like the best time of day to host a webinar for the highest attendance, and when to schedule your registration emails to get the most people to sign up.

All this from a couple of pivot tables! Anybody can do it and it makes you indispensable.

The amazing contextual insight you get from talking to customers 💡

Hopefully, now you’re thinking, “OK, fine. I should spend more time with pivot tables. But talking to customers? Really? Obvious much?” But when did you last speak to an actual customer?

If you're the sole PMM in a small startup, there's no way to avoid talking to customers. However, as your organization grows, there are more layers between you and them, so chances are that if you’re in a bigger organization, you might not have spoken to a real customer in a little while.

At AppFolio, we have 12 people on the product marketing team. Meanwhile, it’s client services and sales’ jobs to talk to customers. When I came in, everybody had been told that part of their role is talking to customers.

Great, except that while the extroverts will happily pick up the phone and call any customer from our database, there are others who are just not going to take that step.

You need to build a process so that talking to customers comes to your PMMs automatically and everybody has the opportunity to get to grips with the context and understand why the data matters.

You can look at all the data in the world, but it’s hard to gain insights from it until you hear first-hand how it affects your customers. That’s why you need to get out of the office and talk to your customers, or at least pick up the phone.

Let me tell you about a time when talking to customers turned our assumptions on their heads. We were seeing user accounts from competitors in our database. We thought they were spies trying to get all our product information and do who knows what nefarious things with it.

We looked a little closer and saw that the accounts they were getting into were churning. We were like, “What the heck is going on here?” Our legal team was on the verge of sending cease and desist letters – until we picked up the phone and spoke to a customer from one of these accounts.

It turns out they had decided to switch to the competitor. They just needed to move their data over, and the competitor had offered to do it for them. There was no nefarious plot after all. We ended up doing a lot of churn calls, which were a great way to gather some win/loss insights.

Gaining contextual insights on market trends

Conversations with customers can also help you bring clarity to really complex issues. Not so long ago, we were planning for the year ahead. As part of that planning process, we needed to look at the current market trends.

We're in real estate, and there's a lot going on out there right now – inflation, the recession, the housing shortage, and so on.

We needed to figure all this out, so we turned to the smart people in the room that know something about real estate and asked them what they were seeing. Then, as a PMM team, we did a bunch of desk research, looking at articles and research papers to figure out what was going on out there in the market. We also got a bunch of third-party research.

We assembled all that information, and we had a Beautiful Mind moment. The picture we got of the market was so complex that we kind of freaked out. I’m not a Harvard Economist, and I couldn’t figure out how all these trends go together and what they mean for our planning.

Then we added context with customers. We surveyed them and conducted interviews to hear first-hand what trends they were seeing in their businesses and the impact those trends were having.

Once we added those customer conversations to all the research we’d been doing, everything became much clearer. Suddenly, we could see how the labor shortage affected their ability to bring new apartments to market, and how that contributed to the housing shortage.

This comes back to the point I was making earlier about needing to know your stuff. When you bring in new information that is relevant to the business, people are gonna come to you and give you a seat at the strategy table. Talking to your customers is one of the best ways to make that happen.

Instituting constant customer contact

Constant customer contact is super useful, but how do you institute that? There are so many ways to go about it, but an easy strategy that we’ve had great success with is NPS closed-loop calls.

I wanted the entire team to have a reason to talk to customers regularly in a way that it wouldn't be on the individual to go and find a reason to talk to a customer, and NPS closed-loop calls do that.

Now, whenever we get a negative NPS response that mentions a competitor or our pricing, challenges our value prop, or gives a really in-depth perspective, a PMM is assigned the task of talking to that customer and closing the feedback loop. Salesforce sends these tasks, giving each PMM two opportunities to interact with customers per week.

That way, everybody on the team, no matter what level they're at, can show up at the table with insights from actual customer conversations. In a conversation with sales or product, it's so powerful if you can say, “Wait a minute! Last week, I spoke to a customer and they told me…” Those are really valuable contextual insights.

To recap…

• Grab any spreadsheet and get started with pivot tables. Slice and dice your data and have some fun with it.
• Pick up the phone or get out of the building and talk to customers.
• Rinse and repeat until you know your market, your product, your competitors, and above all, your customers inside out.
• Enjoy your seat at the table.