So What? Why? Who Cares? Why messaging matters in product management

John: Hello and welcome back. In this lesson in product management, we're diving into one of the most underrated skills of product. It's a skill many product managers don't consider, uh, a product management skill, but it absolutely is. Even if product marketing, quote unquote owns, um, it, you still need to develop this skill to become a good partner and be good at collaborating in the go to market effort, which you still should very much be involved in. So what is this elusive skill? It's messaging. Today I'm joined by Doug Kimball, senior director of Product marketing and author of the book so what, uh, why, who cares to talk about why even great products fail when teams can't clearly communicate value to the market? We explore the relationship between product management and product marketing, why customer language matters more than a list of features, and and how better collaboration between PMs, marketers and sales teams can prevent misalignment, improve, go to market execution and ultimately build products customers actually understand and want to buy. Uh, if you've ever struggled to explain why your product matters, struggled to align with marketing teams, or how to translate features into customer value, this episode is packed with practical insights that you, you can apply immediately. Let's get started. Hey Doug, welcome to the podcast.

Doug Kimball: Hey John, glad to be here. It's always be fun.

John: Absolutely. And I'm super excited to chat. Um, I love the topic we're going to talk about today, but before we get into that, could you give the listeners a brief introduction of yourself and what you're up to today and what you're working on?

Doug Kimball: Sure, yeah. Uh, so Doug Kimball, senior director of Product marketing at Digital Science, a company that focuses on basically B2B and B2C. Uh, primarily segments of academic publisher enterprise. A lot of different things we do mainly focused on basically using data for research most effectively. Um, been here for about seven months. Focused, uh, actually no, eight months focusing on product marketing and ah, bringing the team together.

John: It's awesome. And so you're not just an academic, you did write a book and we're going to talk about that here in a second. But you're a practitioner, you're doing this day in, day out and I think that's great to um, a great way to frame this for the audience is that this isn't just theory, this is something backed by what you actually do in your day to day.

Doug Kimball: Yeah, I mean I've been doing product marketing officially as a title, I would say product marketing for close to 16 years. Um, doing it long before then, before I really realized and knew that I was doing product marketing. Uh, so one of the things I think that really definitely brought me to digital science was the fact that I've been there, done that, both as a product marketing executive, product marketing director through to being a chief marketing officer. I've seen a lot of things, learned a lot, still continue to learn. But yeah, this is the stuff that I do is based on real life examples of I succeeded here and kind of didn't do it as well there. Let's bring it all in to make that things better.

John: That's awesome. So with no further ado, let's jump into the book and what you've been working on. So tell us about like what is it about? Um, what was the inspiration for it? Give us kind of the. Yeah, give us the over overview.

Doug Kimball: Yeah. And I'm also very excited. I know you probably can't see it very well, but that works well.

John: But there we go.

Doug Kimball: Got the print copy so that's terrible. Got the print copies in just yesterday afternoon. Honestly, it was neat to open this up and see my work in progress. So the book, the uh, book is called so what why who Cares? And you can go to so what why who cares.com to learn more. It's based off of a messaging framework that was basically hammered into my head probably 14 years ago by a really good boss who was still, you know, maintain a good mentor and friend. And it was given to me to challenge some work that I was doing. I put together. It was a competitive killer kit for one of our um, competitors when I was working at jda, which is now Blue Yonder. And I put all this effort in, created this really pretty deck and it looked good and it sounded good to Doug was uh, presenting to, to my manager and halfway through uh, maybe four slides in, I'm being nice, he stopped me and said Doug, this is the. Stop, just stop there. I'm like, okay, what I do. He said this is not going to work. Like okay, well that's, that's a pleasant feeling. He said, take out a little notepad. I want you write this down. So what, why and who cares? Like okay, I did that. He said go back and run every slide that you got through everything, all the messages on there through that as a filter and then come back to me. Um, okay, well that's no fun. I still have the post it notes on my desk. And what came out of that was a completely different way to not only go back against our competitor but end up. I started creating a new way to talk about what we did As a digital supply chain company. Um, the new message that turned into not just competitive, but a whole message was used by the company, presented by executives up on Main Stage. So it really kind of created the evolution of how I've changed my messaging and strategic thinking style. And then sometimes know, early last year, I kept talking about it. I'm like, I'm gonna write a book. And so just published it. I went live, um, or middle end of March, end of end of February. Excuse me.

John: Congratulations. Super excited to get my copy.

Doug Kimball: Yeah, it's fun. It's just. It's neat to see it in person. You know, you start writing things like that, you never really know. I mean, I start out fits and starts. I'd write a bunch and I'd stop them like, yeah, this sucks. And know, get some reviews from people and like, oh, I need to work on that. Um, but, you know, honestly, and, you know, I'm not. I'm not a real braggadocious, uh, person. When you're reading your own stuff and you're like, no, this actually still makes sense. Okay, that feels good.

John: Yeah, that's awesome. And so for. For the listeners who are mostly in product management, right. We're talking about something that typically lives squarely in product marketing if we think, if we look at things through a purely, uh, functionally isolated lens. Right. Um, but can you help the listeners understand, like, why messaging is so important for the success of their product?

Doug Kimball: Yeah, definitely. And for those product managers listening, I was a product manager, uh, so I've done it twice. Um, my biggest transition from being a product manager to product marketer was with Nielsen Company. I brought their first ever SaaS product, M to to market. So M. I understand the hats. It's kind of like the fact that I've been a salesperson. I understand why sales thinks the way they do. And the book isn't really just for product marketers, for anybody really, who wants to challenge the way we talk about features and functions and how we appeal to the market and how we take all the hard work that product managers do to create a very good solution or a feature update, whatever it's going to be, and get the market to say, not only, oh, that's cool, but that's cool. I want to take a look at that and be engaged with it because you can have the best solution out there. But if you don't use the right messaging to create clarity and urgency and even maybe a fear of missing out, um, then it's just a really good product that sits on the shelf. And nobody buys it. And so ultimately while you're a product manager or you're a product marketer, you're trying to take a product to market and get it to be sold. So we make money so we can go back and do more development and more products and the circle continues. And so that's really the focus of everything I've done at Digital Science. One of the things I'm doing is taking the messaging framework back upstream. So we're gonna be teaching or uh, not teaching, so I'm gonna be training our product managers on the same thing. So as they develop their product requirements documents, what they put in there for feature function, language starts to get a little more, let's just say marketing polish for lack of a better word, so that the product marketing team can then do a better job of translating what they're saying in even clearer and more impactful market facing messaging. So uh, truly, it's the book is anybody who wants to just challenge how they, how they talk about the things they're trying to sell.

John: Yeah, no, I love that. And I'm always a proponent of product management and product marketing partnering really closely together. Right. Whether that's um, not just on the go to market aspect, that's like too late in the game, but on the research side of it. Because to your point, and I think one of the parts you highlight in your book is understanding customer language. Right. And if you're, if you're not talking to customers together, then maybe you're hearing potentially different language from different segments of the market or you're interpreting things differently. But why is. From a go to market perspective, I think we understand, from a product perspective at least, hopefully the audience understands why it's important to have customer feedback. But from a go to market standpoint, why is it important to understand the language customers use about their problems?

Doug Kimball: Uh, honestly, you could have said it better. By the way, John. Yes, we have to be. And I've always had myself and my teams be embedded with product management. We don't have to be best friends, but we certainly should be very much close to each other to understand how each other thinks, speaks, needs and responds. And exactly what you said about the customer being the focus and that market research being the focus. Again, uh, like I said earlier, we are taking a product to market if nobody wants to buy it. We missed something. I've seen companies with great products fail because they didn't talk about it.

John: Right.

Doug Kimball: And so when you look at what is it that our buyer or our prospect is trying to solve for it's not always a product that makes them move. It's how we describe it in the age old analogy of uh, you know, people don't buy a drill bit for the drill bit, they buy it to put a hole in the wall. That's an oversimplification, but you got to create some kind of a connection between what is it I'm curious about or in pain about or I'd like to solve better, make more money, do faster, cheaper, etc. And then look up the road to say, well, what kind of things are appealing to me. And that's where the product marketers again usually are closer to the audience, whether they're working with sales or customer success or getting the win loss feedback, which I've been talking a lot about recently, is hearing what's actually coming back from either a decision or a no decision or a poor decision and then feeding that into the product team again to your point, being hand in hand and collaborative and having those kinds of discussions, that's where knowing how the customer thinks and speaks and uses their terminology as opposed to our words or our feature functions or our, you know, lingo, that's just, you're going to put yourself in their shoes better. So that's what I really look at is the more we understand how they think, speak and react, the better we can feed that all the way upstream. So the two of the two teams, product management and product marketing, can be most effective together.

John: Agreed. And you mentioned win loss analysis and that's something I want to kind of dovetail and talk about for just a second because I feel like in most situations there's this anti pattern in partnership where the only time product management hears from sales is when they supposedly don't have a feature the customer asked for and couldn't win the deal because the product managers are too hard headed to go build the feature. Right. Um, but I think win loss analysis is interesting, right. Because as a product manager I'm thinking, well, who's giving the feedback? Is that our target customer? But I don't know if every product manager thinks like that where you're filtering feedback through a segmented lens. And so from a product marketer's perspective, like how do you think about that in terms of like what is that analysis, how do we look at it and how should we use it to make the product better? Potentially?

Doug Kimball: Yeah, lots unpacked there and no, no, that's great. I, I think I would say that product managers, salespeople and product marketers at times do have that Hiccup of like, well, I thought you got it, then we'll move on. And so we don't really truly give as much of the feedback as we could or listen to the feedback. Um, so again, it's not that I don't think, it's not that people aren't willing. Sometimes it hasn't been presented well enough, or sometimes there is that, ah, you know, I'm going to hold on to it. It's all mine. Let me try to unpack as much of that as I can. So again, I talk about this, my win loss discussions. Salespeople who are usually closest to the clients are likely to have the best set of immediate feedback from a prospect or a win or a loss. But whether they tell the actual full story is always questionable. And research, it's not just Doug, this research backs this up. Um, and it's not that they don't want to, especially if it's of a loss. They might be more concerned that, oh, I'm going to be evaluated for screwing up a loss, or we may not just positioned it well enough. And going back to your point of the product team, if I'm out there as a salesperson and, um, I'm pitching and we lose because the prospect says you didn't have this or that feature or functionality, two things are, well, uh, many things are possible. Two things I think about, either we don't. Okay, so if we don't, then how do we get that feedback back to the product manager in a way that they go, oh, okay, now I understand what I should be. The clients are looking for this kind of thing. Cool. Or did we not talk about the feature functionality, benefits? In a way, the prospect went, oh, I get it. And I don't have any numbers to say how the balance that is. I would say it's a pretty good mix. You know, having been on plenty of sales calls where I've seen and I've seen from win loss feedback of they didn't buy from us because you didn't have X and Y. And we come back, we do that. When loss feedback, we're like, we do have that. So we missed something in our demo, in the showing of our features and functionalities and speaking to the value of that and telling the story effectively. Which again, goes back to the so what? Why? Who cares if we don't tell this story effectively? Great products get missed. And it's not the product manager's fault, it's not the salesperson's film. The salesperson ultimately owns it. But we got to figure out how to tie all that together. Hopefully I covered. I think there's a lot of questions in your question. I'll m. Make sure I covered most of it.

John: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think one of the parts that we could touch back on is just segmentation, right? Is like, so let's say in a perfect world, like product marketing enabled sales to send the right message to the right person. Really, like press on the right buttons. Um, but there was something that we didn't expect, right, Where X customer is expecting something that we don't have. Maybe some competitor has it, maybe they don't, but maybe it's just something they need. And the market in general hasn't figured out that need yet or how to solve it. So it's kind of a unknown, unknown type of situation. Well, when the product manager gets that feedback, the gut reaction is, okay, well head of sales tells me I need to go build this feature so we can go in this deal. Um, but like I always go back to the question of segmentation, right? Like is this the customer? Is this a good customer for us? Um, so I'm just curious, go to market perspective and product marketing perspective. Like how do you, how do you think about that as a part of win loss analysis and looking at, you know, um, is this the right customer that came into our funnel? Should we look at this as an expansion opportunity? Like, how do you think about that?

Doug Kimball: Great question. And again, I, I'm not trying m to run the win loss thing too far, but that's where in my mind it's so valuable because you can start saying to your point, we're going after the segmentation segment or a channel or a market. If we are consistently losing in a particular segment, marketer channel, maybe we aren't approaching it right. Maybe our product isn't right for it. Maybe we aren't telling the right story when we do so. So that's where to me the best way to assess that is getting that real feedback as opposed to, and I'm not knocking sales as opposed to a frustrated salesperson who thought they had a great deal and they said no because of this or that. I mean it's, it's always easier to blame marketing or to blame product or blame something than ask the true questions. Uh, of, okay, hey, I understand we didn't meet meet your needs in this conversation. This is the salesforce. What is it we are not delivering or showing to you that you truly need and then having those discussions and you may have to have a decision discussion with executive management Say we truly don't have this. If we don't have this, how do we close that gap? Because that's the biggest thing is that I always say sales feedback is not buyer truth. We have to get that buyer truth to say, what is it we're really going to focus on as a deliverable for that segment and do we actually have it? And maybe if we speak little small twists in how we speak to it, that makes a difference. Understanding if we can make that stale or not, or we may not have it at all. But then you've got to go back to your point. Having a structured feedback process back to product management, not just, hey John, you didn't build it right? You need to build it like this. Here's the details. But going back to your earlier question, we have to have that connection to the market, we have to have that feedback, those competitive insights or information to say here's what really needs to be part of that. Not just one salesperson's viewpoint. Is the market validating that?

John: Yeah, absolutely. So I think there's. But what I love about this and why it's so complex organizationally and like in our individual disciplines is it's so multivariate. Right? It could be a product problem, it could be a messaging problem, it could be a market fit problem with the specific customer that we're talking about. And I think if, if we don't unpack these things together as an organization, then, then we do get left maybe pointing the finger because it's easier to blame someone else when a number doesn't get hit. So I think, I think it's just an interesting conversation to have. But in terms of, in terms of messaging, like, I guess like what are, what are some things that maybe product managers could do better in partnership with product marketing? I know part of, part of your book is how to ask better questions, right? So assuming that that partnership comes together, um, like what does good look like in your opinion?

Doug Kimball: As many lack of assumptions as possible. I mean it's easy. And that's why I actually like, I like your, your path to product as your background there, because it truly is. It's a path to product and a path to market. And so if you and I are working together and I assume John knows what I expect out of a prd, just as an example. And um, I expected to have these things, but John's never done that before. Not because John's not good, but it's just John doesn't think like that. John thinks like a product manager. Um, to me Again, that goes back to that kind of questions. You know John, how would you best see this? How would you best formulate explaining what this new cool feature or functionality is? How would you explain it to your mom? How would you sit down with your grandma and say, here's what I just built today. And are you, you know that doesn't make sense to you? And now of course in some businesses it's harder to do that because data manage whatever, but breaking it down into the most simplistic pieces and most product manager, oh, it's not that easy. It is, we just make it more complicated so the more we can simplify it until it makes sense in a basic sentence, that's where the step is. But if I assume that you know and if you, John, assume that I know what you're trying to talk about and why this new feature is valuable and I don't get it, um, then part of my job now as a product manager is to educate the product marketer. I need to take through training, go through the user interface and say, here's how I'm solving a problem that is to that point. That's why I have found the greatest value in a product marketer and a product manager working together is, uh, I'm a retailer, I need to solve this new category management process. Walk me through it. And now when I walk through it, not in a feature function standpoint, but a user story perspective. Oh, now I understand why this, this is going to be important to my user, who I understand pretty well and I can tell the story better. So yeah, it ah, really comes down to just asking the right questions. It's going to be which questions you ask are going to vary so dramatically by the business situation. But a lot of times it just comes down to what are you trying to accomplish with this? And you know, not to hammer it too much, but so it does this. And that's why I say so what? So uh, it does this. What does that mean when you say it does this and you say so what? Here's the value. Why then, uh, why is this important to my particular audience or to this particular situation, this solution? Why is it important? And then who cares? Who is this going to focus on? Who is going to hopefully get more sleep back or worry less or solve their problems for get more revenue from this if we do these things? And so as I've been saying, it's not just a messaging framework. It is a strategic way to think about, uh, just asking basic questions until you get the answers. You're like Ah. Uh, okay. This, this feels better as opposed to unknown.

John: No, that makes sense. And I'm going to take a stab at something because I would like the PMs or product leaders who are walking away from this conversation to be able to put something into practice right away. And, and what I'm hearing and how I'm interpreting what, what you're saying is, like, there's, there's kind of three components that we should think about and bring to our product marketing counterpart through the process of discovery to delivery. And that's like a clear definition of what the problem is. How m. Are we going to solve it and what value does it create? And I think what value it creates kind of dovetails into your questions of like, who cares? And so what? Right. Am I close there?

Doug Kimball: Yeah, no, I think that's very, that's very accurate. And I think it's, it's. The last one is going to help me as a product marketer the most. Um, although, you know, knowing what it does, how it helps is going to be important. But again, why, it's, it comes back to why do I care? I mean, going back to that competitive killer kid I talked about, I, I was very focusing on feature functionality where we were different and truly actually better than the competitor. But it was at the, it does this kind of mindset, and it was different because of this. Okay. And it was better. Better doesn't mean anything without a qualification of it. Uh, it doesn't really mean anything. And if I can't explain to you without leaving gaps in the, the why part, why it is better. And it's going to help you to do things in a more streamlined fashion so that you can spend more time, so you can put in that story format. That's where I think the product management and product marketing overlap can either succeed or fail if we can't help each other. When I'm done, I read my, I read my value statement back to you and John goes, yeah, that, that is accurate. So, so first it has to be accurate. It may be a bit fluffy because it's, you know, it's marketing language, but if we can agree that. John goes, yeah, it's a little fluffy, but it's still saying the right thing technically. And I see where you're going with making this sound better towards the audience. When you can start doing that, I think then the product manager, product relationship, product market relationship becomes even stronger because you. Product manager. See how I think, I see how, uh, you think as a product manager, like, that's where it Comes together.

John: I completely agree. I think taking these simple steps of bringing those, those key questions to the table, um, partnering together in research. You have shared language, shared customer language I think will help bidirectionally, right from the build to the go to market piece. So, um, that's why I wanted to have you on the podcast. I was really interested in the messaging, uh, framework and like, what you're building, and I appreciate you sharing that. But in general, I, I want to see us partner closer together as a, as a discipline. Because to me, it's like, it's like a coin. Right? And like scratching one side off. If you don't have both together, it becomes, uh, of no value. Right. If you would do that to a coin, it would lose its value. And I think we do that too often to ourselves and organizations.

Doug Kimball: It's a good analogy. And, and like you, like every, you know, people out there, we all have our own egos. And I'm right about this and here's how I feel. And there's a time we have to do that because we have to be strategic in what we think about. But you also have to have enough of an ego decrease to say, I can't do my job effectively without other people in the team and the organization who are going to help me. Product marketing can make stuff up. We may have done that in the past a couple times. We, we can make stuff up, no problem, but then we get it out there and maybe a salesperson does successfully sell it and we're kind of screwed because it doesn't actually do that. And the product manager goes, marketing isn't paying attention to me. That's where we don't want to be. And that's where I love. The collaboration that you're talking about that you guys are working on too, is that it really should be that embedded between, you know, hey, my product manager, I, um, we talk regularly. We've got regular meetings, regular understanding of things. We're going back and forth. I'm learning from them, they're learning from me. That's a huge win in my mind, because it's not about me, it's about the organization and, uh, what we're trying to take to market.

John: Yeah, I firmly believe us as product managers are the reason why sells Vaporware. Uh, and I'll tell you why. Because we don't do our job of partnering with product marketing to enable product marketing to be able to put the right messaging framework in place or position the product correctly. And so you kind of make things up. Like you said. Because that's what you have to do. And then sales sells the wrong thing to the wrong customer. Customer. And now they're asking for things that we should have never had in the first place. And head of sales goes demands to the CEO that we need this feature and sells it as if we have it. And now it comes back to us because we didn't do our job to begin with.

Doug Kimball: Yep, that's uh, that's happened more than once. My experience. Yeah, I've seen it happen. And you know, you always, and I understand again, having been a salesperson and being a marketer for most of my time that you always sell a little bit ahead of where you are. But you know, if I come back to my product manager and say, hey, I know we don't do this exactly right now, but let's just say a customer said I really want to buy that, ah, could you do it in a couple months? Oh yeah, no problem. Then I can sell ahead of my skis as opposed to. Yeah, that might be two years before we do that even in reality. Then I'm like, okay, well I won't talk about like that, but I can stretch it a little bit because that's what marketing does. We, we fluff a bit. I hate that's the only way I can say it. Our job is to get people excited. And if you can't get me excited by stretching it a bit. As long as a product manager and I are talking regularly, yeah, that's realistic. We can get there. Because nobody has ever bought a contract. I heard that. Buy it, I want it tomorrow. That's never happened.

John: No, I completely agree. And I think that's something that I've had to grow in in my career too is like, especially in the B2B setting. There, there's life cycles, um, or there's like negotiation life cycles and there's um, the sales cycle. That's what I was looking for. That usually like a sales cycle to your point, is not a one and done. This isn't like a self serve sign up thing and you're good. And so typically if you're two, three, four, sometimes even six months out, um, as long as you have a reasonable confidence that this is actually going to stay on the roadmap and not get disrupted, then yeah, like I think there's, there's some leniency there to where product managers shouldn't be so dogmatic about reserving to only things that are built today. Um, as long as we're being honest too. Because I think there's there's room for honesty there to say, we will have this by the time you go live.

Doug Kimball: Yeah. And if you, if you've got time, I've got a great example of this.

John: Yeah.

Doug Kimball: Failing and how we had to make a change. So I was at a trade show. This is a job back. And the solution we were selling is a very, very complex technology. Semantic knowledge graphs. I had a prospect walked up and I did the whole, you know, I did the marketing thing, got him engaged. I. I'd love to see a demo of this. And so I turned to my product manager who, who owned that solution and looked. We get a demo. And so they kind of futzed around a bit. And really when you talked about it, then didn't really show anything. So I spent some more time talking to the prospect, explaining more what the, you know, what it is we did, how the value, etc. I, uh, really'd like to see a demo. And so I turned back to my product manager and asked again. Didn't get anywhere short. The short end of this is after they left. I'm looking. I said, what happened? He said, well, because functionally what we sold truly was just a really powerful database. Which is a true answer. It's like, you know, access and steroids is a bad example, but you really can't demo Access or Excel. It just sits there until you put stuff into it. So he couldn't demo that. Like. Well, I get, I understand that perspective. But I also know we've got functional examples of people using it with data in it. We could have showed an example of that. So it was a complete disconnect between telling a very factual answer. Is like, true. Yeah. You can't. I can't demo my computer. It just sits there. I can show you stuff on my computer. It was a complete disconnect between what we wanted to accomplish in telling a story and the factual truth.

John: Yeah, Yeah. I think storytelling is a skill everyone in an organization should develop. Um, especially PMs, because I think that helps us become better partners too in that scenario to where we could have put ourselves in that sales or go to market mind mindset and not be so, um, maybe logical or objective in our thinking. But I want to put my, my marketing hat on for a second and give a call to action for the audience. Right. Because I think the more you said it earlier. Right. The more that you understand my world and you've been in my world and I've been in, in your world to some extent. So I think, like, we have an unfair advantage. But, um, the more that product marketers understand product managers and vice versa, the better we're going to be together. So I would strongly encourage the listeners who are product managers to go and buy your book and understand why messaging matters and a good framework for messaging too. So again, tell the audience where they can go get it and where they can connect with you.

Doug Kimball: Yeah, sure. It's on Amazon right now, which is probably the easiest way to do it. So just Amazon, uh, search. So what, why who cares? Uh, there's that one. Uh, also just so what, why who cares?.com goes links there or you can connect me on LinkedIn. I always love to connect with people because sharing knowledge is the best way to go. So I appreciate that. I really appreciate that, John.

John: Yeah, no problem. And we're going to link the, uh, the link to the Amazon link, uh, so they can go grab the book. So if you're listening to this, the link is already there. Go grab it, go buy the book and let's be better partners and let's, uh, let's understand each other's worlds better.

Doug Kimball: So absolutely.

John: Doug, thanks. Thanks for coming on, man. I really appreciate you sharing. I'm excited to read the book. I'm excited to hear others in the product management community who've read the book and how they benefit from it.

Doug Kimball: Definitely. I always value feedback. So thank you. Appreciate the time, John.

John: Uh, thanks, Doug.