Should product report to marketing?

By Philippe Burns, external relations lead at Neo Financial and organizer of Tech Thursday.

Last Thursday, 60 souls braved -35 degree weather to join a conversation for Calgary tech professionals: Tech Thursday. The topic? Effective product marketing. 

The panel brought together notable product marketers from across Calgary, including Tyler Chrisholm, CEO at Clearmotive Marketing Group; Christine Gillies, CMO at Blackline Safety; Oluwamayowa George, senior manager of growth and product marketing at Virtual Gurus; and, Shannon Dougall, SVP of marketing at ZayZoon.

Here’s my recap of the event’s top ideas and insights (condensed and edited for clarity).

What is product marketing? 

Product marketing is the voice of the customer – your competitive intelligence. Product marketers should truly understand product-market fit and can be best positioned to drive the product roadmap. They are finally being understood as the revenue drivers in the business.  

For effective product marketing, try these tools.

The win/loss interview: Talk to your sales team and product teams and synthesize what went wrong and what went well. That intelligence is how you end up getting new features prioritized. 

“Who says so but you”: Get customer quotes. There’s nothing fluffy about customer information. 

At least one interview with a customer every week: Build this into your process. This is an ingredient in ZayZoon’s secret sauce.

If you’re a marketer who wants to become a product marketer, what do you need to learn?

The biggest differentiator is the customer obsession. As a product marketer you really have to know the customer and understand their objections. Spend as much time as you can talking to customers. 

Should product be a marketing function?

Theoretically, you learn that marketing is made up of four Ps: price, product, placement, and promotion. But marketing is rarely asked to determine price or product. 

When launching a product, having marketing own all four Ps from the very beginning can help to ensure product-market fit.

What should you look for in a product marketing manager?

Mission critical for this hire: strong communication and a strong cross-collaborator. They have to be able to pull information together from across the organization and synthesize it. 

The four speakers who spoke at this week's Tech Thursday joined an esteemed list of the event's alumni. While you don’t always have to brave -35 degree weather, we host tech and innovation panels at The Pioneer every week, presented by Neo, along with generous sponsors including Calgary Tech Journal, The Pioneer, SkipTheDishes, Calgary Economic Development, and Manitoba Technology Accelerator. While this week's topic was effective product marketing, next week will be completely different — and so will every week be after that!  

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