AMA: Nextdoor Head of Product Marketing, Brianne Shally on Consumer Product Marketing

* Be a Product Marketer: Understand the marketplace, trends, and competitors. * Use the product: Use the product, sign up for emails, check out their SEO and social presence, and interview current users to form a point of view on the product and opportunities (e.g. opportunities in the onboarding process, use cases, etc.). For an interview with a company, I interviewed a handful of their customers to understand use cases, pain points, and their target audience. From these insights, I developed recommendations and brought an informed point of view to the interview. Also, I demonstrated I was interested in the customer, the product, and willing to roll up my sleeves to get insights. * Bonus Points: Conduct an analysis (competitor, messaging, segments, etc.) to provide value and demonstrate your skills, and show your interest.

Top 3 Soft skills * Be collaborative: Be open to new ideas, raise your hand to help, lean in to new areas, and have fun while doing it. * Build strong relationships: Invest in your cross functional partners, get to know them personally and professionally, know what is most important to them. * Develop a point of view, clearly communicate your point of view, and influence others with your point of view Top 3 Hard skills * Analytical <-> Creative: Navigate this spectrum to be both analytical and creative in your problem solving, go to markets, and develop recommendations. Demonstrate the ability to get deep into numbers to uncover insights. Then test something unscalable to see what works. * Strategic <-> Execution: Set the strategy, align cross-functional partners, execute, measure results, incorporate learning, and do it again! * Storytelling: Be the product storyteller in evangelizing the product both internally and externally to truly inspire. Bring the product to life, through user stories and highlighting the impact.

* It’s most valuable to align the PMM team to the Product team structure to drive stronger alignment and integration. Back in the day, when we worked in person, we strived to have Product Marketers sit directly with their product teams. In some cases, this has meant that I’m in a different building than my manager and some of my team members, but I find this integration extremely valuable. * Nextdoor is structured by the following Pillars: Member Experience (Consumer), Neighborhood Vitality (Trust, Safety, & Groups), Business Solutions (free to paid products for businesses), and Agency (government and organizations). * As a result, Product Marketers are focused on B2B or B2C and integrated within a pillar team. That said, it is important they have a holistic perspective across both, especially in marketplace platforms. For instance, when we launched Business Postings for SMBs, the PMMs also had to take into consideration the implications to members seeing Business Postings and partner with the Member Experience PMM to coordinate the go to market efforts.

* B2B and B2C are both H2H (human to human) marketing at the end of the day. I’ve seen folks try to say there's a strong distinction and to ‘pick a lane’. I’m of the mindset that B2B and B2C are more similar than different. I’ve found my experience in B2B especially, in demand gen, has helped me with B2C thinking through app store activations and vice versa. * That said, here’s the minor nuances that I’m oversimplifying: * Sales Enablement: You must work closely with the Sales team to ensure they are prepared with a deep understanding of the marketplace, personas, buying process, positioning, and product. Also, Sales is a great channel to test messaging and gain customer feedback. * Target Audience: In B2B there are usually multiple personas in the decision making process, while B2C is usually just one person, though there are influencers in B2C. * Sales as an input: Sales is a great channel to test and iterate on messaging. For example, consider your top sales rep. They have already iterated and optimized the messaging more than an a/b test. (ok, maybe not that much, but you get my point). Partner with these reps to test your hypotheses and iterate. Also, Sales is an input for voice of customer and product input. Leverage Sales, win/loss reports, and customer calls to capture the top themes for product development.

It’s difficult to define growth by titles since titles vary greatly by company and company maturity. Also, more and more companies are shying away from title heavy culture. When you consider growth and trajectory, I encourage you to evaluate it based on your goals, what you want to learn, and what you want to do next vs. a title. Focusing on obtaining a title can be short sighted and may result on you being lost after you achieve it. That said, with career progression top of mind, here are some tips: * Perform at the next level: Companies want to see that you can demonstrate performing at the next level before being promoted. It is helpful if your company has a job level to review it and understand your strengths and opportunities and where you need to focus on. It may be helpful to get a mentor at the next level to help provide guidance, advice, example deliverables, etc. * Own -> Lead: Transform your approach from owning an initiative to truly leading it. Identify and bring forth the strategy, establish the vision, ask the hard questions, identify and address potential barriers, define success, and bring key stakeholders along. * Know the Business: Understand the overall business, including business drivers, company goals, and overall strategy, even if these are outside your specific role. In knowing how the company operates, you are well informed to make decisions that align to the company’s overall goals and increase your impact. * Cover the Basics: be collaborative, nail your day job, and go above and beyond.