The Value of Product Marketing with Rory Woodbridge (Pleo, ex-Google, YouTube)

Andrew I'm joined by Rory Woodbridge. Rory is a product marketing expert. His early career was formed with Google and YouTube and his last in -house role was with hypergrowth fintech Pleo Rory recently made the decision to move into the freelance world where he provides expertise as an interim leader in product marketing. He's very passionate about his work and has a great substack that has tons of articles and thought pieces so you should definitely check it out and subscribe.

When he's not working or writing articles for his substack, Rory's doing more writing as he also writes fiction and has got his first novel in the works. In his spare time, he loves going to rock and indie gigs, but he's also a secret Swifty. Aren't we all, I think, a little bit at this point. And I think Anti-Hero is one of the greatest pop songs ever written.

He also loves comedy and he's heading up to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this summer. Our discussion today will centre around the value of product marketing and what it brings to the table. and Rory will give us an overview on why it's a critical element to successful products. Rory, welcome to the show today.

How are you? Rory Hey Andrew, yeah, doing well thanks. How are you doing? Andrew Yep, I'm very good.

Thank you. So we're going to dive straight into things. So do you just want to give a quick overview on from your point of view, actually what is product marketing? Rory So I think there's a few things that product marketing gets responsibility for.

I'll go through those and then I can go through what it ends up being as a result. And so I tend to sort of put it into four groups. There's commercial insights, so competitive intelligence and landscape, maybe win -loss analysis, maybe market research around customer demand and so on. And then two, you've got...

messaging and positioning both at the company, the product level, or for any feature. Three, I guess the stuff that product marketing is best known and famous for, which is kind of launches and driving product adoption. And then fourth, enablement, like primarily sales enablement, but it can often extend to customer success enablement, SDR enablement, or even sort of marketing or product team enablement, depending on what a business needs. And so in kind of the pursuit of doing those four things, there's a lot of work streams going on under all of those buckets, you end up being the bridge in the company between the commercial half of the business and the product tech -minded business.

So it's not just the bridge between product and marketing, it's the bridge between product, engineering, design, user research. and everything commercial, so marketing, sales, customer success, even like revenue ops. And so if you're a product marketing team doing your job well, you are kind of like the oil in the cogs making the whole company machine run smoothly across those two large organizations. Andrew Yeah, cool.

And I think probably a lot of people have got different opinions. Perhaps what isn't product marketing and what have you seen in your experience where it's perhaps not worked as well as it should do. Rory Yeah, of course. And I mean, it's evolved a lot.

I'd say like sort of product marketing has maybe existed for about 20 years. I think it's kind of in its current form. It's just maybe 10 and it's really risen in popularity in the last five. And so there's some evolution there.

I think in general, it's gotten much more strategic, has a seat at the table more so. But I think there's still like legacy of it not being done as I'd see it. And so I'd say like one extreme example is where like a product org might still see it just as the... the mouthpiece for a product team.

We've just shipped this, launch it tomorrow, send the email, that sort of thing. I think sometimes it is just conflated with broader marketing as well and suddenly you end up seeing product marketers, I don't know, I've had product marketers tell me they're working on performance and paid media marketing or deteriorating into a CRM role which is kind of very different. different kind of roles. So I think it's being careful about not that.

And then at the same time, you never want to be too prescriptive to like a product team or product talk. I mean, in general, you don't want any team sort of prescribing and other teams work. So I think it's about balance. And then it's about being a partner of the teams you work with and having great relationships.

Andrew Yeah, cool. And I think moving on to those relationships, and I guess the one of the critical elements to the role is obviously bridging and managing those relationships between different teams. But I guess particularly the kind of core product teams and then engineering as well. And how have you found that you've been able to do that successfully in the past?

Rory Yeah, I mean, really it just takes time. I think like, like, because you're building trust, you're building like a strong relationship. And so for me, yeah, like where product marketing is still being that it's most effective is when I and the team have had a really good healthy relationship with the product team. I think a good way of starting a relationship like that is bringing is that first part of what we do the insights part because.

If you take a product manager, typically a very busy person, they're running a team, very executional focus, they're focused on shipping and got a million stakeholders. And so having time and space for another input, like a product marketer coming in saying, okay, have you thought about this? And if we assessed whether what we're building is actually going to solve a problem, the right problem. I think it tends to be things that if a product marketer can bring insights to the party.

I think it really starts something and then you use the PMM but start becoming a trusted member of the squad that people want to come to and that's a great way of kicking things off. And then yeah, just continue to bring balance to the partnership and make sure it's a two -way thing. Andrew Yeah, and I guess part of that then becomes the trust in what each other's doing as well. I guess that's absolutely critical to that relationship.

Rory 100 % and so spending as much time as you can together especially in person time always helps speed up those things for those who can. Andrew Yep. Yeah. And I think if we think about some of the people that are going to be listening to this podcast today, there are people in different types of businesses, particularly scales of organization.

And I think there's probably a feeling and certainly when I look at this, that the stage of an evolution that a business is at would actually determine whether they could have somebody in a defined product marketing role. Do you think that's a fair comment or do you think there should maybe be? a little bit more focus on it in early stage companies. Rory Well, I think definitely something I noticed is that most companies end up hiring their first product marketer way too late.

And from speaking with companies about why that is and how they've got themselves into that situation, because when I speak to them, they tend to be in a state where they need a product marketer yesterday and they've left it so late, they're like, we've got so much for this person to do. And then you're talking to them about kind of like their journey and you realize that like a lot of founders are the original. Andrew Yeah. Yeah.

Rory product marketer for a company that, you know, it's really in its infancy and it's just two, three people all around a table and that's your race to 10 or whatever. It's these founders that tend to be speaking to customers, would you use this product, pushing for it to get to an MVP, but then also they are probably doing the messaging on the website, maybe even doing the first sales call track. And so that ends up in that first couple of phases of a company's growth journey.

Andrew Yep. Rory The founders doing a lot of what a product marketer would be bringing value on and then at some point You know it stops scaling you get to maybe like somewhere between 30 and 50 employees and suddenly the Founder can't have influence over everyone in the company on on kind of okay. This is these are the messages This is the USPs. This is why we exist.

This is this is what our ideal customer profile look like they know that deep down inside It's just you can't you know Police that company wants why you need a product marketer? Andrew Yeah. Rory But I think it's quite hard having the awareness internally to spot that and then hire at that point. And so most companies, a lot of companies are getting to like past 100 and still not having their first product marketing and then getting themselves a real pickle because there's no one owning it and there's a vacuum where all those skills are missing.

Andrew Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, cool. And I think this, the role of product marketing, I guess, is quite uniquely placed to solve some of these problems because you're obviously coming at this from a different angle to a regular product person. Yeah, would you say that's a fair comment. Rory Yeah, well I think a product marketer needs to be able to think and speak like a product person and then also think and speak like a commercial person.

You're the product person in the room with the commercial teams maybe giving context to sales teams about why a feature or product is being built the way it is or why something's maybe gonna take a bit longer, why something's not being built and then... Like vice versa, you're there to represent the needs of the commercial teams in product. Or like, this product isn't landing, this message isn't landing. The product team's vision might not be actually matching up with what customers are telling us on the ground, and so on and so on.

And so some hard truths sometimes. And in both cases, you're really there to be the voice of the customer. Many teams are the voice of the customer. Product marketing definitely needs to play that role.

and be really grounding everyone in the, this is what our customers are telling us, this is the value they're getting from our products, these are the problems we're solving, these are the pains that they're still feeling. And everyone wants to hear more about that in a healthy business. But I think being able to switch hats and play those different roles, I think is key to being a PMM. Andrew Yeah.

Yeah. Cool. Well, we've taken a really quick whistle stop talk through product marketing there. So as we kind of bring the conversation to a close today, what would you say the key three takeaways you think people should take away today?

Rory I guess, like, yeah, one is that first point around, like, what is it? And it's, yeah, remembering it's the bridge. It's there to sort of bridge the gap between the commercial half of a business and the product -minded half and to align their strategies and align everyone on the value prop and to just kind of get it, like, yeah, like I said, oil the machine. I think two, as I think more and more, I think it's more pronounced as like, get into the consulting and freelancing space.

I think that product marketing can be boiled down to two simple questions. And I've written about this on my sub -stat recently. Two simple questions. One, what is the pain or problem that your business is solving for your customers?

And then two, how are you, your business, uniquely placed to solve it for them compared to all alternatives, including using nothing? The hard bit is then, Andrew Yeah. Rory like all the work and influencing and relationship building you need to do in answering those questions and actually like getting consensus on them. So that would be my second point.

And then three is yeah, around that relationship between the product marketer and the product manager, like around the need for it to be a true partnership of balance, where neither side is too dominant and both are like working together and putting the customer above all else. Andrew Yeah, absolutely cool. Well, thank you very much for your time today. It's been a great conversation and nice and informative about how I guess product marketing can benefit companies, obviously how you operate as well.

So thank you very much and we'll speak to you soon. Rory No, it's all thanks for having me, Andrew.