2-min Product Marketing Insights: June 2024 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: June 14, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Your positioning needs to change depending on your market maturity: immature vs. emerging vs. mature.
The difference between the maturity levels - IMMATURE: you want the customer to do something they haven't considered before; EMERGING: there are no dedicated tools for a well-recognized workflow; and MATURE: it's a well-established product category with incumbent players. Gong's initial positioning spoke to an immature market as it had to convince customers to improve their rep's performance by recording their sales calls!
[2] Follow these 5 lessons to build best-in-class onboarding and convert a greater percentage of your users into customers.
Airtable's onboarding process highlights a few important lessons - (i) personalization: learn about the user to show the right template; (ii) reward sharing to improve collaboration; (iii) get users to use their own data; (iv) offer relevant templates with a demo video; and (v) go for reverse trials, i.e., users get access to premium features until their freemium ends.
[3] Redirect all your efforts, including product, engineering, and marketing, when you have a time-sensitive opportunity to scale.
Arc is a digital bank that had to scale without notice when SVB collapsed. Among many initiatives, they increased bank opening volume by 15X by building new products for SVB account holders and rotating people from different departments into client-facing roles to support customers.
[4] For early-stage startups: Customer diversification matters even if it means saying NO to one big customer.
According to Lightspeed, early-stage companies run the risk of building features for a single big customer that doesn't represent the rest of the market. An added risk of having one big customer is that they can treat the startup as their outsourced development shop while also gaining pricing power.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“How to Speak Machine: Computational Thinking for the Rest of Us” by John Maeda
[1] Opt for MVLP over MVP - The 'Minimum Viable Product (MVP)' prioritizes all available resources on the functional aspects of the product. Choose MVLP - where L stands for 'Lovable.' MVLP forces you to remember you're making viable experiences. It's not just about reliability and efficiency.
[2] Gather thick data on top of quantitative data - Thick data, unlike big data, takes time to gather and interpret well. You fully incorporate the context of your fellow human beings through this data. You must constantly fight away the allure and ease of big data to tell the complete story.
[3] Why exponential thinking matters - You want to look for 'exponential leaps' and go beyond thinking of a future that's incrementally better year after year. Linear vs. exponential thinking is similar to the difference between additive and multiplicative effects - "Addition makes a number get bigger by a set increment; multiplication makes a number bigger by a set LEAP."
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Excuse Me, Is There AI in That? Businesses and creators see a new opportunity in the anti-AI movement.
[2] If AI Can Do Your Job, Maybe It Can Also Replace Your CEO
[3] How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
[4] How to market features to existing customers (+ mistakes to avoid)
[5] Back to the Future: Process First. AI Second.
Part 2 Release Date: June 29, 2024 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Build a great developer brand using these 3 ingredients: be non-transactional, consider delight, and steal from another industry.
The first marketing hire at Stripe offers these learnings on developers: (i) Don't expect anything in return when you put out content for them, (ii) Sweat the details on look and feel, and (iii) If you have to borrow a playbook, borrow from a different industry to avoid the sameness!
[2] Create a 'Story Friday' ritual for your growth team to review session replays of users working through different parts of your product.
Wistia's growth team would spend every Friday afternoon evaluating user interactions with their product to identify improvements across different paths and workflows - ex: onboarding, support, payment, etc.
[3] Choose ongoing guidance throughout your product experience over prolonged onboarding tours to delight active users.
Uber leverages 'contextual' tooltips to guide every new user in understanding the app while using it. Slack leans on a bot (Slackbot) to progressively introduce additional features.
[4] Remove these product and sales enablement restrictions before you take on new customers beyond the early adopters.
The product team should verify zero limits to broader usage - for ex: no issues stemming from product stability, support escalations, or documentation. Simultaneously, the sales plan should include sales training, playbooks, response support, and transition details on new sales to onboarded customers.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
[1] Key workflow for continuous discovery - (i) Define a clear outcome to set the scope for discovery, (ii) Map out the opportunity space to reach that outcome, and (iii) Discover which solutions to pursue using an opportunity solution tree.
[2] Distinguish between what you're trying to learn (your research questions) and what you want to ask in an interview (your interview questions). Seek to translate your research questions into interview questions that let the interviewee answer with specific stories of their experience.
[3] Try pre-mortems to figure out what can go wrong in the future. These occur at the start of the project to uncover assumptions. For example - "Imagine it's six months in the future; your product or initiative launched, and it was a complete failure. What went wrong?"
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Why many startups never achieve great design (and happy users)
[2] CEO Keynote Template: A 10 ten-part plan for CEO success
[3] You suck at marketing
[4] Accidentally narrowing your market - biases in product research rituals
[5] A shortcut for building confidence in my product opinion
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