2-min Technical Product Marketing Insights: Mar 2025 Releases
Part 1 Release Date: Mar 13, 2025 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] For AI tools/features: Solve concrete problems using AI by leaning on millions of data points accumulated from your product's history.
Zomato - a restaurant aggregator and food delivery company - has seen millions of customer issues. The company designed Nugget (an AI tool) that leverages this rich history to automate routine tasks, analyze customer sentiment, and offer consistent responses.
[2] For PLG & PLS: Qualify your self-serve users on fit and behavior before you start to enact multi-touch sales plays.
Your self-serve users should (i) fit your target persona and ideal customer profile before they move into your sales funnel, and then (ii) you can start studying their first-hand data, such as product usage plus marketing interactions, to build targeted touches. Unity deploys an eleven-touchpoint sequence against their validated self-serve users.
[3] On customer insights: Create a separate workflow that complements your regular sprints tackling product opportunities.
Your customer interviews can give rise to bug fixes or maintenance requirements that can't be fit into sprints to deliver specific product outcomes. Gjensidige Insurance deals with this by scheduling a week for maintenance requests right after a two-week sprint on priority product outcomes.
[4] Set up a recurring workshop to explore inspiring products, tools, websites, and designs to nurture product intuition beyond just hard data.
Hiring Tool offers a clutter-free, user-friendly interface for candidate tracking built on familiar behaviors like Kanban tracking. It's an example of how companies can use creative judgment as a competitive advantage to create fans.
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Get to Aha!: Discover Your Positioning DNA and Dominate Your Competition” by Andy Cunningham
[1] There are 3 types of companies in the world - (i) "Customer-Centric Mother" with a customer experience or customer segmentation focus, (ii) "Product-Focused Mechanic" with a value or features focus, and (iii) "Concept-Oriented Missionary" with a next big thing or cult of personality mindset.
[2] Positioning answers these 2 questions - Who are you? Why do you matter? Brand can only come after you're clear with positioning. Branding is the "emotional expression of positioning."
[3] Consider these 6 Cs in any positioning exercise - (i) Core DNA (see point 1), (ii) Category: Which group of companies do you belong to? (iii) Community: Who are your stakeholders? (iv) Competition, (v) Context: What are the trends shaping your market? and (vi) Criteria: What's needed to make your positioning successful?
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Marketing With the Soul of a Poet? Why marketing should be beautiful and how to do it ethically
[2] Why most products today are meh. Here’s what designers can do about it.
[3] Using AI to Spot High Impact Product Opportunities
[4] User Research is not optional: arguing like Socrates will help you prove it
[5] AI transparency in UX: Designing clear AI interactions
Part 2 Release Date: Mar 29, 2025 (2 min read).
📈 4 MICRO [PRODUCT MARKETING] CASE STUDIES
[1] Lean on your core product features, spotlight your key messaging, and amplify your customer relations anytime there's a competitor fiasco.
Snapchat chose not to "gloat publicly" while Facebook faced privacy backlash. Instead, they launched Snap Kit for developers to integrate Snapchat features without exposing sensitive information, highlighted their company value of privacy-first again, and let their CEO talk publicly about their strict data protection policies.
[2] For crowded markets: Consider buying out the remaining contract value of promising prospects to steal them away from the category leader.
SavvyCal is an alternative to Calendly and operates in the hyper-competitive meeting scheduling category. They make it easy for prospects to switch by removing the financial risk by buying out their annual Calendly subscription.
[3] For platforms: Enlist your users to create and share extensions for your platform to let your community drive organic growth.
Raycast is a Mac app that lets you access and use various tools and commands with keyboard shortcuts. Their app store allows users to publish extensions to let the community members pick from user-built solutions that fit their workflows.
[4] Create a feature importance matrix to find 'high value, easy to understand' features and shape your user's journey within the app.
Plot the features on a quadrant with 'ease of understanding' (on the x-axis) vs. 'core value delivery' (on the y-axis). Instagram uses its 'high value, easy to understand' features to speed up new user onboarding before tackling new content types (ex: reels, shopping) later in the discovery phase (re: explore tab).
📚 1 BOOK & TOP 3 INSIGHTS
“Just Enough Research: 2024 Edition” by Erika Hall
[1] Simplify any competitive research by asking these 3 questions - (i) User Question: "What matters to our customers?" (ii) Product Question: "How are we better at serving that need than any competitor?" (iii) Marketing Question: "How can we show our target customers that our product is the superior choice?"
[2] Nielsen Norman Group's definition of usability uses 5 components - "(i) Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they come across the design? (ii) Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks? (iii) Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency? (iv) Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are the errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors? (v) Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?"
[3] User research is an extension of ethnography. The fundamental question of ethnography is, "What do people do, and why do they do it?" You only have to add one other question for user research - "What are the implications for the success of what I'm designing?"
🧠 5 CURATED MARKETING THINK PIECES
[1] Start Making Sense: The zero marketing speak way to win over developers - My latest essay for the Product Marketing Alliance (PMA)
[2] The Magic of Marketplaces:Understanding the Lessons of Buying and Selling in an AI World
[3] How To Rest and Recharge In The Tech Industry
[4] The Looking Class: Our Souls Need Proof of Work
[5] Problem Driven Development: Hey bud, what's the problem here?
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