2-min Technical Product Marketing Insights: Jan 2025 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Jan 9, 2025 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] For early startups: Focus on these 4 core metrics related to product-market fit when you set up your analytics team.
DoorDash's CAO recommends that early-stage startups develop clean data habits by focusing on 4 PMF metrics: user acquisition, customer engagement, revenue generation, and operational efficiency. The startup can explore setting up a formal team as growth picks up.
[2] Figure out if the DNA of your business is mission or product or customer-driven to shape your brand positioning.
The leaders of Eight Sleep went through an exercise to unpack what they believed about sleep and the phrases they associated with it. The insights helped them avoid being labeled as another mattress company and create a new 'sleep fitness' category.
[3] Set up weekly forums for teams to submit specs for cross-functional review when you're getting your product enterprise-ready.
Asana used the 'land, expand, explode' PLG model to gradually win over enterprises. To ensure it meets enterprise-level requirements around integrations, standardization, security, and compliance, Asana conducted a weekly 'enterprise readiness review' with cross-functional members to offer product teams feedback on the submitted specs and decide on the path forward (ex: do/try/consider).
[4] For early startups: Evaluate yourself across these 3 areas before you make your first sales hire and transition away from founder-led sales.
Stripe's former head of revenue suggests reviewing your (i) ICP: Is it specific? Do you know it well? (ii) Capacity: Do you have a lot of inbound leads? Or have an outbound motion to scale? (iii) Sales Process: Do you understand it end to end? How technical does one need to be?
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights” by Gary Klein
[1] Employ these 5 strategies to discover insights - connections, coincidences, curiosities, contradictions, and creative desperation ("finding a way out of a trap that seems inescapable").
[2] Tip for any customer (or stakeholder) interview - You can understand why someone acted a certain way by probing "their knowledge, beliefs and experience, motivation and competing priorities, and their constraints."
[3] Build an insight muscle for your team - Get your team members to collect insights and discoveries from around the organization. Encourage them to share these every month with the entire organization.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] 2025 Predictions (from Prof. Scott Galloway)
[2] The next big thing in 2025 will be…
[3] Seven Predictions for Tech in 2025
[4] 2025 Trends in Product Management (Predictions for 2025)
[5] How to Plan Your Career for the AI Supercycle: Top Industries to Focus On
Part 2 Release Date: Jan 24, 2025 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Onboard users faster by initially asking questions about their use cases and offering them pertinent templates to use immediately.
Notion uses 3 strategic questions to personalize the onboarding for every new user. The responses to these questions populate the user's workspace with templates and real-world examples of similar users, thereby avoiding the blank page problem.
[2] Create a series of 'viral moments' within your company to turn skeptics into champions and build momentum for a new product bet.
Figma Slides started with the founding PM scrappily selling her vision to engineers at a company hackathon. Every subsequent effort - showcasing this product vision with mocks and prototypes, giving the project a code name, creating a custom Slack emoji, etc. - created the internal groundswell for the eventual product introduction at Figma's mid-year user conference.
[3] Create a mix of entertainment, product info, product education, and promotion to crack developer marketing on social media.
Supabase's X posts (for example) consistently outperform peers and billion-dollar developer companies in engagement and impressions. Besides connecting with their ideal users and talking like them, Supabase mixes different types of content to escape the monotone dev-style content and build excitement about their product, community, and events.
[4] Set a priority for your product efforts using the 4BB framework, especially when resources get tight.
Swiggy's Former SVP suggests you categorize your projects into (i) Brilliant Basics: tasks to tackle tech debt or compliance, (ii) Bread and Butter: incremental product improvements, (iii) Big Bets: high-impact growth opportunities, and (iv) Breaking Bad: high-risk innovations or pivots.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] You need 4 distinct yet interconnected systems for an 'adaptive' organization - (i) threat detection: identify and prioritize emerging threats, (ii) crisis management: diagnose and respond to surprises, (iii) post-crisis learning: reflect to avoid future problems, and (iv) problem prevention: mobilize for action to prevent identifiable threats.
[2] A leader can choose from 5 archetypes to talk about their company - (i) LOVE: company loves its product and wants to share its passion, (ii) REDEMPTION: business is facing hard times and will recover, (iii) RAGS TO RICHES: the company's an underdog about to overcome adversity, (iv) STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND: launching a new product or service, and (v) THE HOLY GRAIL: you have ambitious goals to discover deep fulfillment.
[3] There are 3 components to framing a problem - (i) define the problem as a question requiring an answer, (ii) clarify the criteria to evaluate potential solutions, and (iii) identify the most significant potential barriers to overcome for success.
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] The Capacity Allocation Illusion: Capacity in the context of software development
[2] Doubt the default: 5 product development standards to challenge
[3] Stop building products for your imaginary user: Dear Mary-the-Marketer, you don’t exist - signed, every PM
[4] What comes after design thinking: The popular methodology isn’t equipped to solve the complexities of the current world
[5] The Great Product Reset of 2025: Navigating product building career uncertainty on the eve of an AI supercycle
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