2-min PMM: OpenAI & Stripe's Dev Marketing, Uber's Ongoing Guidance, Wistia's Story Fridays.
June 2024, Part 2 release
📈 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