Agile product marketing for 10x product adoption

From a product management perspective, I’ve learned a tonne of things. There are a lot of similarities between product management and product and developer marketing.

I’ve had a chance to think through how I was approaching product marketing and what some of the principles were that I could pick from product management and apply to the product marketing world.

Today, I'll focus on what a PMM function is to a product marketing manager, and talk through an agile framework before going into the very specific example of my experience with Progress DataDirect.

Product and developer marketing start with market research

Product marketing is like the Google Translate of the org. And the reason I say that is because we’re essentially connecting different dots in the organization.

It's extremely important for us to understand what the customer is looking for, what they need, where they’re looking for it, and connect it back to the different parts of the organization.

It could be sales, marketing, product, analysis, or leadership. We could go on and on. There are all sorts of stakeholders within the organization, and our job is to enable those stakeholders to have a meaningful conversation with the customer in the context of the problem and the needs (and the developer pain points).

And from the functions of a product marketer, there's a tonne more. I'm sure it would take an hour for us to sit down and figure out what exactly product marketing is, where it begins, and where it ends.

But, at a high level, I feel like it usually begins with market research. It's about understanding where developer are, what the context is, what environment they're playing in, and what the competition is doing.

How are the developers themselves trying to solve the problem? How does your product fit into this world?

Once you have a sense for the value you're adding to this space, you go on to the go-to-market strategy and the messaging and positioning.

Here, you come up with hypotheses on what the use cases are that you can add value around and what developer personas you should be marketing to. What are the likes and dislikes? What kind of content should you be creating?

And, similarly, demand generation is another major arm of product marketing. We partner super closely with the marketers and the sales engineers in the organization to create content that’ll pull the users back into the product.

But the main focus today is on how we do our research, how we come up with the strategy, how we test it, and how we amplify it in that particular use case.

The agile product marketing framework

When we think of product in the product world, it's always about having a hypothesis, validating that hypothesis, and eventually investing in that direction when you see some leading indicators of success.

In a similar fashion, this is what I was doing even as a product marketer. Back then, I didn’t have a framework as to what I was doing. But, at the very core of it, we're essentially identifying new opportunities.

We’re having conversations internally and externally. You’re validating that in the next phase and saying, “Okay, here are 10 opportunities, but we're going to look at the one that has the biggest potential.”

Something that I borrowed from the product management world is called minimum viable product. And similarly, we have to adopt the style of minimum viable marketing, especially with smaller companies where you have limited budgets.

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You can learn more about creating a minimum viable product in our "What is SaaS marketing?" guide.

You have to think, Here are 10 ideas, how do I test them with the least amount of investment? And, then, gradually place higher bets on your winners.

And eventually, once you’ve seen a winner, this is where being a developer hasn’t helped. Developers don't like to spend. I’ve hated spending and always leaned on organic traffic. But this is where you have to compromise and go into the next mode.

Your goal at the beginning of a new idea is to keep your investments as low as possible. And, as you gain confidence in a particular opportunity, you increase your investment. When we say investment, it’s not just about money. It's about your time, your resources, and whatever else goes into the typical marketing funnel.

To be honest, this isn’t a Holy Grail. It’ll totally depend on the organization. Sometimes, speaking to customers might be a lot easier for some companies.

When we’ve seen enough amount of validation, that's when we start improving the product and going into third-party marketplaces. Personally, that has been one of the trickiest things for me, because invariably we get into the legal zone and that takes forever.

The typical traits of developers

This part is where I want to focus on the specific example. This is about a time when I was fairly new to product and developer marketing. I didn’t know a lot of this on day one, but I was building a mental model around what it is that my end user is trying to do.

For context, Progress DataDirect is involved in the business of connecting applications to data sources. So, imagine Tableau or Power BI, and you have data in MongoDB, Oracle, or SQL Server. We built the pipes.

I can't even express the number of times I’ve had to explain to people how we were making money in this business, but yes, this is what we did. We built a ton of connectors.

These are for developers like data engineers, product managers, and data analysts. They’re the people that we were going after. And their traits are probably fairly common. They’re tech-savvy, super pragmatic, and cost-conscious.

In terms of content, they're looking for value. They really care about their time. And if there's a specific problem, they actually prefer a consultant to say to them, “Okay, for this problem, this is the line of code you should be using.” And that's why you’d see them fairly often in places like Stack Overflow and GitHub.

They also don't like to be pitched to or sold to. I've had to learn this the hard way. In the beginning, I’d go to conferences and give them flashy marketing pitches, and it was embarrassing. So, I had to learn the hard way that they don't like being marketed to.

Identifying your resources

The first step is identification. Here, the fairly straightforward and must-do thing is to talk to your internal repository. It could be your customers, your product managers, your sales teams, or sales engineers. Everyone is a resource.

However, it usually doesn't help with the 10x growth that you're seeing because you’re talking to people who are viewing your product from a certain lens, and that's the only lens you’d be getting when you go to them.

So, you can get marginal improvement in the product, but the real value starts coming in when you start listening to external resources who haven’t used your product before.

For that, conferences, webinars, analyst reports, and a ton of other things are super helpful. I'll focus on web listening, which was a big find for me back in the day, because most web listening tools only listen to social media platforms, not the entire web.

In the beginning, I had to look at a bunch of different tools and figure out which of them was going to help me get to the exact places where the end user was having a conversation. In this case, it was Stack Overflow or an AWS forum.

Validating the opportunity

After identifying the web listening tool, the next thing that’s critical is feeding in the right inputs. Think of it like a machine-learning algorithm, where you give it some input and a certain goal, and it does a good job as long as the inputs and the end goal are defined well.

From that perspective, we give some indications. For example, “Here is historical knowledge of where I think we can win,” and you keep it broad enough. In the first case, it's, “Who’s having a conversation about my product? I want to listen to it.” Or, “I want to listen to my competitors.”

The next one is like, “MongoDB is a space where we tend to win, so I want to hear about all the conversations around MongoDB and JDBC Driver, but not just MongoDB and JDBC.”

This specific tool helped me come up with the Boolean logic that allows for that range of error.

So, what happened as a result of this? I identified a conversation that was happening in AWS forums where they were talking about this brand-new tool called AWS Glue back in the day. It had just launched three or four months prior and someone was trying to bring MongoDB data into AWS.

This was a 10x opportunity for Progress DataDirect. But it had to be validated first. That's where the verification comes in.

Verifying the right to win

In the verification phase, you're verifying a lot of things, but the most important part, the code of it, is to make sure that you have a right to win. That means you're able to solve the problem but, more importantly, you're also understanding how else the end user is trying to solve this problem.

That’s going to be useful in two places. One, when you're creating content, you're able to respect the existing context. But, at the same time, you’re also able to respect the context when you're building the marketing and sales material.

At every point, it’s important to understand what the developer is going through, understand the context, and then weave it into your content wherever possible.

In that spirit, I had to work with our sales engineering team and product management team to run a POC and see if this worked and if it was something we could solve for.

After that, it's about creating content in the format that they prefer. We created a tutorial page where all our tutorials are in one section, and that served as a brilliant SEO funnel for us.

In this case, after creating a tutorial, I went back into that forum and posted about this particular tutorial.

A couple of months on, the people who were looking at this article came in, the opportunity cycle kicked in, and we actually started winning a lot of the deals. So, that was the ‘aha’ moment for us.

This is where the flywheel typically kicks in because here we were in this unique spot where we identified this opportunity before our competitors, and more importantly, we solved it and now had success stories.

So that’s what people are looking for. How do I get started? Is that a smooth onboarding guide? But at the same time, Have other people trusted the solution already? That gives them the confidence to trust your product once more.

The importance of investing in your strategy

Once you start seeing those initial wins, you start doubling down on the strategy. The most basic thing you can do as a PMM is optimize from an SEO perspective.

Make sure you’re picking the right keywords and you're getting strong backlinks. In this case, I was fortunate to get it from AWS, and that helped boost the ranks significantly, but there are all sorts of places you can get the backlinks from.

But, more importantly, in some of these scenarios, people don't know that this problem has to be solved in a certain way. People were just assuming that the only person who could solve that problem was AWS themselves. They didn’t think about the fact there could be an alternative way to fix that problem.

It was important that we educated users on the value of bringing in new data sources in this case. In your situation, it could be something different. It’s about educating them that there's an alternative approach, that it’s viable, and that people have already put their trust in that.

And then you start investing here, which means you start investing in conferences. You partner with the AWS’s of the world and create webinars and bring people in. But at the same time, think of it in terms of, “Okay, there are enough people coming in, but how do I close it?” So, here's where you partner with the sales team and the sales engineers and give them everything they need to close it.

It’s important to put your eggs in the same basket at this point. As PMMs and PMs, we like to diversify our strategies, but at the same time, when there's a winner, it’s important that you go all in on it and make sure you're getting every ounce of the juice from that particular strategy.

In the end, you have to measure. For me, it’s always about following the user journey and having a metric for every stage. How many people are viewing an article? How many people are downloading an article from that page? And how many people are eventually buying that way? All of it can be instrumental.

Sometimes, you have to work with the product to make sure that you're getting all that information from the product itself.

The results of the AWS Glue opportunity

This is what doubling down looked like for the AWS Glue opportunity. In the beginning, it was just about creating a tutorial and posting it in the forums, and then it was amplified through some of the syndication channels.

Then I figured that ads for AWS Glue are lower foot in the sense that they cost money, but it doesn't cost time. And sometimes, you have to optimize for time or money.

When I saw that this was crossing the chasm, that's when I moved on to say, “Okay, let me create a webinar. Let me partner with Snowflake to talk about the larger space of cloud and big data.” This is extremely important.

When you focus on AWS Glue specifically, no one will know the importance of it. But, when you move the context to modern ETL tools for cloud and big data, that’s a way to have a conversation where people are already searching for information.

And then I built a microsite, partnered with AWS to create some additional products and, at the end of it, we even went to AWS conferences.

All in all, we improved our SEO rankings 10x, increased our new opportunities and exceeded that goal by 4x, and exceeded our revenue in a short span.

Key takeaways

If I look back, the important lesson for me has been that there are going to be several opportunities in each stage, and at times it’s hard to back out of an opportunity because you’ve put in too much money. It’s something that we’re all prone to.

When I was going after AWS, there was an opportunity with Microsoft, Salesforce, and other forums. But, at the same time, I knew this was the one that was most likely to be sustainable because that's what the data was saying. So, it’s important that you cut your losses soon and invest in places where it makes the most sense.

And this is what a successful team looks like. ‘Better together’ is what it comes down to. At the end of the day, experimentation is a philosophy that’s at the core of everything that I believe in. We have to try new things, and that's where we come across the next 10x opportunity.

And in that spirit, it’s very important to respect the context of the organization as well, because it could be a startup and you could be slower, so you have to meet halfway. It could be a large organization like Walmart or AT&T, and they’re super slow and super nimble about making the next move, and you have to meet them halfway.

We're not in the picture. We're the ones taking the picture. I always say that the job of a PMM or a PM is like taking a picture for your spouse because if the picture is good, it's usually because the lighting is good and they wore something very well.

And if it's bad, it's because you’re a terrible photographer.

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