Questions & Answers

What motivated you to apply for the product marketer role at ConvertKit?

During my job search, I have been especially looking for roles that use the Product Marketing Alliance’s resources and best practices, so seeing the job posted on PMA’s slack channel already encouraged me to apply. The thoughtful questions throughout the application related to product marketing even prior to an interview only reinforced that excitement.

I am most excited about the business of ConvertKit itself, from a business opportunity and product standpoint. There’s something so exciting and fascinating about the world of “creators”—they’re not necessarily marketers by trade, but need to learn the ins and outs to successfully grow their audience and brand. Tools like ConvertKit make sense, and marketing SaaS platforms that cultivate learning skills in spaces I’m passionate about sounds like a good time to me!

Can you walk me through your approach to leading competitor and user research?
How do you turn that into clear positioning?

    1. Identify primary, secondary, and tertiary competitors.

      1. Identify scope of the project/ timeline/ prioritization etc. to determine which competitors you’ll cover.

      2. Summarize each competitor to understand what problem competitors solve, and compare to our product.

    2. Website Audit (primary competitors)

      1. Document competitor’s website, landing pages, use-cases, CTAs, design, messaging.

      2. Using available tools, compare SEO keywords and digital advertising, etc.

      3. With this info we can extrapolate how competitor is messaging their product and what forms of marketing they rely on.

    3. Brand Audit (Primary & Secondary)

      1. Review competitors online and offline presence through social media, press/news articles, and other means of digging.

        1. Understand branding design and messaging, where competitor prioritizes product vs. brand, better understand personas.

        2. Keep up to date on new product launches and relevant events/conferences.

      2. Potentially sign up for competitor services as available to track email marketing efforts and understand product UX and in-product messaging systems.

      3. Review any advertising, paid, organic, online/offline etc.

    4. Share back findings and keep documentation up-to-date on a quarterly basis if possible.

      1. Include value propositions that counter competitor claims, to be considered for messaging frameworks.

    1. Product Calls

      1. Working with Customer Success and Product Team, set up 1:1 calls with current users in different vertical use-cases/personas

      2. Identify goals and key questions prior to the call, including product-marketing specific questions to inform value propositions.

      3. Shareback learnings with the internal team, focused on user’s pain points, use-cases, wins, and why they use our product.

    2. Case Studies

      1. Working with a product champion, build a case study that dives deep into your user’s use case and value propositions. Understand why the product works for this individual, so you can better message to users in the same persona as your champion.

      2. Additionally use these case studies as marketing content and messaging frameworks.

    3. Persona Building

      1. Using a mix of qualitative and quantitative data, build user personas for the different business verticals of your product.

      2. Identify which tools are more/less valued by which persona, to further inform campaign planning and GTM for product launches.

    1. Messaging Frameworks

      1. Product-based messaging frameworks ca be built using pillars that are relevant to he user’s identified pain points and the product’s solutions.

      2. Scaleable frameworks can be applied at a brand level, down to a collateral or single-product level.

    2. Sales Battlecards

      1. Updated sales battle-cards can inform sales team what competitors are claiming and what comparable or better services and solutions our product has.

    3. Informed GTM planning

      1. With new product launches, prioritization can be established based on user’s needs as well as the competitive landscape.

Can you tell us about a product launch you managed?

How did you make the product stand out? What was the impact of the campaign?

I worked with the product team for a new feature release in flights, then called “Need More Time To Think”. As a SaaS business travel platform, users previously could not save flight seats for a later time to reserve. The new feature allowed travelers to hold their seat on flights they were considering, without making the final purchase right away. This also added a layer to the approval process for travelers that had billing departments that required pre-approval before booking their flight.

For this new product launch, we created messaging frameworks with 3 messaging pillars based on the different personas that would be affected by the new feature: Business Travelers and Travel Managers. Using these frameworks we created a new blog post and updated release notes focused on the value of allowing travelers to save their place without fully committing to their purchase. Sales and support teams internally were briefed as well with updates to battle cards, product demo videos, and internal presentations shared on the new feature functionality. Working with the marketing team, a feature call-out in the monthly email series targeted to travelers and travel managers was included at launch which lead to the release notes.

Campaign success was defined by product adoption, low help-center requests, and visits to the blog as well as CTR from the email.

Can you tell me about a time when you partnered with multiple teams to create a successful GTM launch?

What about in a remote environment?

The PMM roles I’ve had thus far have been 100% remote—save for occasional week-long working sessions or working tables at conferences

At Issuu, our teams were located in New York, San Francisco, Copenhagen, and Berlin, while the key players I worked with at Egencia were in London, Paris, Chicago, and Seattle. Working from Chicago gives me the advantage of having a very flexible schedule across timezones, which always helps cross-collaboration.

Egencia required many approvals and content requests for GTM planning—anywhere up to 14 departments would be required for input, scheduling requests, and content requests.

In order to keep track of these requests and GTM plans, documentation was implemented through spreadsheet tracking based on some of the PMA’s templates.

For reference, I’ve re-created a generic version of the documents we used to illustration how I typically kept track of the GTM plans I and the other PMMs in our team were working on.