- 3 min read

What Reddit Said About Product Marketing Last Week

In the last 7 days, what posts about product marketing popped up on Reddit? And what was the popular response. Here's a round-up for the end of October 2023. Click on the heading to read the full post.

1. How much do PMs out there think about Product Marketing?

Terrifying question if you ask me. Found this one in the ProductManagement subreddit by user rift321.

Post starts off with "I recently read the book, Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products. It is the first product marketing book I've ever read. Before reading it, product marketing seemed like firing a bunch of media out there and seeing what stuck..."

Yup, that tracks. But then this caught my eye. If you know anything about Cosmic Strategy, you know we love the start-up space.

Screen grab from reddit post: I recently got to speak with her and she said that in her day job working with early-stage startups she finds that first-time founders worry about product whereas second-time founders worry about go-to-market

It takes just a little bit of real-world exposure to understand how vital GTM is, and therefore a strategic approach to product marketing.

And most up-voted comment confirms:

Screen grab from reddit: I'm not familiar with the book mentioned. But in general, Product Marketing was my favourite team at my former company. They get and quantify customer intel and provide data on demand for features. I dream of a competent PMM team where I am now...

2. When to start product marketing?

On the face of it, another confirmation that start-ups get the importance of product marketing. But read more and it quickly turns tactical:

Screen grab from Reddit: According to some startup gurus, I had to validate my idea (lean startup way) before arranging any affair. But I ignored that advice, and started my saas implementation. I need it for my own use. And now, I almost done (like 2-3 months left) and thikning, should I create landing page/sote now to start collecting emails for further marketing, or I have to wait until I finish, and start selling it as ready made product? I planned to propose some gifts (discounts) for emails and provide online chat for live communication, so potential customer can talk to me and ask about product. Eager to know your opinion about this situation. May be you had some related experience.

This was posted in the Startups subreddit by user Hexwit. Everyone in the comments agrees a landing page is a basic necessity to move forward. One person even calls it a "lifesaver".

While companies are still investigating product-market fit, getting out there to seek out signals can be enough. The full-scale strategic product marketing touch will come. We see it time and again with startups. Founders need to get their vision out there, see the response and strategise from there.

3. Ideas for how to go above and beyond in interviews

This comes from the ProductMarketing subreddit by user veni_vidi_vixen. If you've tried to change jobs is the last year then you know it's competitive out there. Even experiences pros are struggling to get to the interview stage, so when it does happen, it's not an opportunity to waste.

After the OP suggests "reviewing their marketing and mentioning where it's strong + improvement ideas", the top comment cautions:

Screengrab from reddit: Be careful about point one, or be VERY diplmatic. Until you know who you are talking to it's really easy to call someone's baby ugly. Which is not good to do in an interview. Bring up ideas/toolds they are not currently utilizing and how you would implement them.

Good reminder that being like-able to the interviewer is just as important as showcasing your competencies.

fyi we created a Product Marketing Interview Preparation Course exactly because of this issue. And never dreamed that this reddit Q would pop up and give the perfect excuse to sign post it to you. A sign of the times perhaps.

4. Anyone here using interactive demos?

Another from ProductMarketing subreddit, user salesisonfire looking for demo tooling suggestions:

Screen grab from Reddit: I've tried a lot of interactive demo tools recently. But most of them were too linear for our needs. We want to let the prospect decide what they want to see. I'm thinking of building a tool for conversational interactive demos. The prospect could enter a prompt like "I'm looking for a tool to do X, show me how this works" and it would show this part of the product. But I'm not sure if other PMs prefer it to be linear. Wonder if this would be useful?

Consensus was Arcade app as the way to go. Haven't tried it out myself but will be looking it up now. First impressions look interesting:

5. Tech Sales AE Looking to Move to Marketing

The final interesting post I found from the last week comes from Vegetable_Mood_4576 in the Marketing subreddit. They seem pretty plucky. moving up quickly. Interestingly, they say they love the data side of sales. Not the norm for most sales people I've met over the last 12 years.

Screen grab from Reddit. I love the data side of sales. I'm always the person that will dive into data and present it to my manager with ideas of how to use it. Most of the time it will lead to a department-wide change, however minor it may bem or I will be leading a meeting to educated the sales team on how to find this data themselves. I play a lot of poken and study a lot of my own play. It's a lot of data that I have to pour through. Like, 100k hands recorded in a software. It's a blast to dive into. I love puzzles and finding creative ways to solve problems.

Seems they go back and forth about saying in sales vs exploring a marketing career:

Screen grab from reddit: During these flip flop phases, I always get drawn to Marketing. I feel a Marketing Analyst role would be ideal based on what I like about sales. I worked closely with my CMO at my first tech company. She asked for data from the whole sales team and I was the only one giving her the data she needed. It changed to her just asking me questions and ignoring the rest of the team. It eventually became a weekly meeting I had with her on the calendar. My VP of Sales actually asked what we talking about as my CMO owuld bring me up occasionally in board meetings.

Someone in the comments suggests Product Marketing, but doesn't really explain the role or why it would fit. Another comment suggests sales enablement and the OP loves the idea. Someone want to hire them to take sales enablement off their hands?

Side note - anyone had a sales transfer come in to their product marketing team? Happened to me after a reshuffle at the chip giant I was working at. Unfortunately it felt more like a spy in our midst than a value add. But have also coached a sales-person friend who made the successful move to Product Marketing and they have the right balance to be transformative.