AMA: Canva Ecosystem Marketing Leader, Indy Sen on Self-Serve Product Marketing/Product Marketing for PLG

That's an excellent question. Done right, product release stages should service not just your product lifecycle goals but also the marketing/commercial goals that go with it. Just because something is in beta, doesn't mean you shouldn't amplify it via your marketing. Similarly, just because something is now technically ready to roll out into production, doesn't mean you should force an announcement out of the gates. Just like product strives for and MVP (minimum viable product) to test the waters, you should make sure your marketing team is set up with minimum viable positioning to validate technical and commercial readiness. My team and I developed the following framework at WeWork, which we then used at Matterport, to structure our beta releases through GA. It was inspired from how we thought about product launches at Google but simplified and codified so we could set the right expectations with our GTM teams from the get-go. Notice the callouts to technical as well as commercial readiness. This is the most important thing to align on with your product, marketing, as well as leadership teams. There are many different, winning, plays you can orchestrate to highlight where exactly your product is from a capabilities and marketability standpoint. But the kiss of death is when you either over-market something that's not ready, or under-market something that is. Take a look and feel free to adapt this to your needs.

There are so many ways to collect user feedback these days. Between product surveys, customer interviews, and user testing there are many different tools to wield. It's not always easy to use them all, let alone find the time to do so. As a product marketer, you're also not always across each of those channels, but my best advice is you should do what you can to synthesize their input when building your product strategy with an eye on extracting the specific feedback you and your product needs. Pound for pound, I believe that is one of product marketing's many superpowers. As I've onboarded myself into different roles over the years, the best way for me to quickly collect product feedback was to go outbound as well as inbound. Outbound: * This is really my shorthand for saying that you should ask for and make asks around customer feedback. So rolling out product surveys, scheduling customer interviews, or participating in those processes with your sister teams to help frame the questions that will be useful to your gtm strategy will be key. I've often seen survey questions that focus on company attributes vs product attributes, and maybe that's because most survey work is done by brand teams in marketing. Nothing wrong with that, but they don't always help you get to the heart of whether your product is hitting the mark. * My favorite question to insert in a customer survey is taken from Rahul Vohra, the founder of Rapportive and now Superhuman. It goes as follows: "How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman/[insert your product here]?" Answers: a. I’d be very disappointed b. Somewhat disappointed c. Not dissapointed. Measure the % of very disappointed. If more than 40% of your responses are "very disappointed" you have Product Market Fit Inbound: * This is really about getting your hands on the right signals and data that are already available to your and your product teams. So when you're getting up to speed on a new product or initiative, of if you've just started a new role, ask for the results, outputs from existing project work, whether it's user surveys, customer interviews or pricing studies. Nothing will get you up to speed faster than plowing through those existing benchmarks. They can also help you build a quick baseline. * Another great resource is to speak to colleagues within each department your product touches, and ask them about what they're hearing about the product and its perception. Obtaining that internal feedback is great, because you get the good, bad and ugly very quickly. * Of course, there's no substitute to speaking with customers, but that's not always a luxury that's at your fingertips. The one hack that I've gotten to more and more over the years is searching through Gong sales discovery calls around specific keywords and getting verbatims. Saves you tons of time, and you're hearing from an objective source. Finally, you touched on NPS. I think that's still a very powerful metric to use, but like many, it can be manipulated/misinterpreted. You have to be very clear on what a suitable baseline is, as well as what the bar should be, and be able to explain to stakeholders, including executives, why an NPS is not relative, and that anything short of a 8 or a 9 is a net detracting result.

IMO, the easiest way to separate PLG marketing from non PLG marketing is to think about the touchpoints you cover as a product marketer, as well as the audiences you address. These will differ across PLG and non PLG motions, in the following ways: Touchpoints * A PLG product marketer is across the different steps of a user's journey. Because growth and activation in PLG comes from offering a frictionless first-time user experience (FTUE), your role in product marketing is to "grease the skids" across the product discovery process, and make sure that the user ends up going through the different steps of that user journey as intended. For that reason, PLG PMMS should focus on working with the product management, UX/UI, and lifecycle and web marketing teams, as well as whichever team runs pricing and packaging. * A non PLG product marketer, by contrast, is across the different steps of a user's buying journey. While they also need to make sure a potential user/customer has a great first impression of the product, they really optimize across the marketing funnel itself: from awareness and consideration, to evaluation, and eventually conversion. In most cases, they will support a sales-led motion, whether that's through direct sales channel for enterprise or through merchandising and placement for b2c. Non PLG product marketers typically work with sales, sales engineering, influencer relations and customer success. On the marketing side, you can expect to work more with brand, demand gen, field marketing, partner marketing. Audience Another way to look at the difference between PLG and Non-PLG marketing is to think about the audiences you're trying to reach. * PLG is also known as self-serve, and in most cases that means individual consumers or smaller accounts that need your core offering and are motivated enough to swipe their credit card to acquire your solution if they deem it to be satisfactory. Your job as a marketer is to make that process sesame street simple. * Non-PLG is typically sales-led, or channel-led. The buying decision is a little more complex and takes longer. Your audience there is typically a more sophisticated customer and larger customer (mid-market, large business and enterprise). Your job as a marketer is to take them on a consideration/evaluation journey and have them sign the dotted line at the very end of it.