Inside Olivine #6
🚩 Product Marketing red flags and how to fix them with Michael Greene
Hi!
Michael Greene here, Product Marketing Lead at Olivine. I’m a soon-to-be first-time Dad preparing for one of the best days of my life while making sure my wife has all the support she needs.
Hot topic: Product Marketing Red Flags
As you look for any new role with a new company you should be on the lookout for ‘red flags’ or warning signs that the advertised position isn’t the best fit. For product marketing, I believe there are a ton of red flags to be aware of and more than most other roles because (1) the role itself is often misunderstood or not understood at all and (2) the role is very cross-functional so there are just more opportunities for red flags to exist.
Here, I set out to identify the biggest red flags for product marketing teams and strategies to overcome them. I pulled from both my own experiences and the experiences of my fellow PMMs in the community. Hopefully, by putting these more out in the open product marketers, marketing leaders hiring product marketers, product managers, and founders can create better product marketing roles and bring more value to their companies.
Here are some of the most prominent red flags, how they manifest, and how to overcome them:
More Red Flags:
Directly jumping into execution without working on the strategic foundation (personas, positioning, messaging, validation)
All priorities are tactical (brochures, ads, website flow, endless marketing tactics, etc.) and aren't clearly connected to an overall product/company strategic goal
When positioning is considered playing around with headlines on the website
When Product Marketing is told they only get customer insights from the Sales team and have no access to customers for interviews
More Red Flags:
Lack of an existing product team and/or launch structure
Product and Product Marketing don’t have regularly scheduled meetings or a shared reporting of product success
Product and marketing teams don't trust or work well with each other - so your first job is to heal relationships
Product manager has a detailed GTM plan that oversees research, marketing, and sales more than product development. They feel they need marketing support for automated email copy — and that's why they think they need a product marketer.
More Red Flags:
Assume that product marketing is the “one who can make the deck pretty”
They simply demonstrate that they don’t know what Product Marketing is
The expectation is you will be primarily writing copy, not influencing roadmap, positioning, or launch plans
When positioning is considered playing around with website headlines and subheadlines
Metric for success is deemed as “Win Rate” when there is already a sales team
More Red Flags:
When anything new is considered shipped the moment dev is complete
They ask how many blog posts you’ve written and how many you can write in a month
Lack of an existing product team and/or launch structure
Top Tweet
You could probably tweet the same thing, but replace brand marketing with product marketing and get a similar batch of responses with a variety of answers attempting to give the best definition. The reality is that too many marketing jobs aren’t well understood and it’s on all of us to do a better job explaining what our marketing functions do, what value they add, and why they’re important.
Fresh finds
Tool I love
Toggl is a time tracking app that keeps track of days, helps me understand where I’m spending most of my time, and figure out how to be more efficient.
Shallow dive
Wayback Machine to explore what your idols or competitors have done on their websites in the past.
Deep dive
SEO Copywriting Guide: 10 Tips to Improve Your Content. (14 min read)
Inside Olivine
Content gems
How to grow during a downturn: marketing strategy for lean startups
The Four P’s of Marketing: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion
Client happenings
Congrats to Thorn, parent company of Safer, for being the winner of the End Violence Partnership funding round. They are joining forces with 18 organizations working to keep children safe online.
Equals, a next-generation spreadsheet with SQL data connections launched today on Product Hunt!
Thanks for reading! We’ll see ya next month.