Know the "So What" Like a Digital Science PMM

In product marketing, there's a moment that separates reactive teams from strategic ones. It's the moment when product says, "Hey, we're launching next week. Ready? Go."

And everyone scrambles. No clear definition of success, no clarity between release and launch, no agreement on who owns what, and somehow PMMs are expected to just make it happen. Today, we're talking about one of the most transformational things a product marketer can do, rebuild the entire go-to-market function. Not tweaking it or optimizing it, rebuilding it.

With that, it is my pleasure to have Doug Kimball on the show. Doug is one of the best PMMs in the business. Let me tell you why. He successfully built and managed global marketing and product marketing teams in multiple companies, helped plan and deliver several global field kickoffs, and flipped product launches on their head using the Pragmatic Institute principles while improving pipeline impact, team collaboration, and lead development.

And most recently, he has been delivering his expertise to the masses. He just published a book on upleveling B2B positioning and messaging. It's called, "So What? Why?

Who Cares?" Check it out. You can find it on Amazon. Oh, and if that weren't cool enough, he has also been training and teaching Brazilian jujitsu for more than 18 years.

Doug, it's amazing to have you on the show. Thank you. I may have to pause for the blushing part of this, but, uh, thank you for that intro. I've had an amazing fortunate career.

I'm just happy to be here, so thank you. So cool, and, um, I'll have to pick your brain on the jujitsu piece. We've been thinking about trying that out for our daughter. I just feel like it's something every kid should do.

Highly recommend. All right, let's dive right in. So bring our listeners up to be, up to speed a little bit. You currently work at Digital Science.

What do they do exactly? G-good question. A lot of people don't, don't know that one. So we are a - Digital Science is a company that basically has a lot of B2C and B2B focus, looking at how to help bring research and information to market, which there's a lot of ways into that.

But we focus on academics, funder, funders, um, not-for-profit, government, uh, publishers, B2C, and really it's about bringing and streamlining the research process to market. And I have the privilege, I enjoy managing their product marketing team. Been there since August Awesome. It's helpful to have some of the context about the company itself because the first segment of our show is the case study, and the case study is exactly about rebuilding the go-to-market function at, your current place at Digital Science.

So, let's dig a little deeper into that now. So in the first segment of our show, we're gonna do this case study, right, of rebuilding the go-to-market function, and it's so meaningful because it sits exactly at the intersection of strategy and influence and ultimately operational excellence. So take us back for a minute. What was happening when you first joined Digital Science?

Controlled chaos. they had gone through - They've gone through a lot of acquisitions in the last several years, and in the beginning of twenty - twenty twenty-five, they'd gone through what they call Evolve and kind of tried to merge a bunch of different units together. We had disparate marketing teams, disparate product teams. There really wasn't a cohesive part.

So they, they did a very good job of trying to put that all together. But when you have five different segments and you've got products that go across segments and some that are segment-oriented only, there's a lot of, uh, challenges going on. Again, I'm not trying to be negative. It was just more, you know, the usual chaos It's more sophisticated, yeah.

Exactly. what was really cool, and one of the reasons I was interested, is they do a lot of really innovative stuff there. the ability to, for example, track where a researcher might be cited in a publication someplace or track patent information, things I really hadn't thought about before. Like, that's really important stuff they do.

but the challenge was that these business units weren't always really working well together. We did a lot of product launches. I mean, more product launches on average. Companies our size, we were doing twice as many product launches than most companies.

So, when I talk about launch, it wasn't just launch sometimes as it was a release. "Hey, we're gonna release this. Let's make a PR." I'm like, "Well, that's not really the same thing as a launch."

So part of it was me just getting them to understand that, release and launch and go-to-market, there is a little bit of a difference apiece on that. Yeah, yeah. And that's, it's so funny you mention that because I feel like that's happened, every PMM out there can attest to experiencing that happen, is what I'm trying to say. So when launch means something different to everyone, and you don't really have a go-to-market function when you're doing that, when everyone kind of is speaking a different language.

so tell a little bit more about specifically, like, what was, what do you think was broken in that situation? The first thing that was identified as broken was that product owned the commercial part of launch. So product would say, "We're gonna release XYZ product feature name, whatever it's gonna be on April fifteenth." Why?

There wasn't really a plan. It was more, "Well, we're done, so we're going to release it." And again, that's going back to the release versus launch, which Again, I, I can't, uh, be difficult about that. A lot of companies do that.

They confuse release versus launch. So one of the first things that I pushed in there was saying, "No, marketing, specifically product marketing, needs to be the one that owns the commercial decision to make a launch." We're the ones, as you know just as well as I do, that make all the pre- and post-launch, especially the post-launch people, get things successful. And if we're not involved in that, if we're just being tossed over the, the fence and say, "Go launch, run," we're gonna run really fast in a lot of wrong directions.

So, the other thing I started asking about was basically, why are we doing this launch? Is there a particular audience we're going after? Are we trying to prevent churn? Do we have a new competitive response we wanna do?

All those different reasons of what is the, the reason behind this? I like this new product feature. That's not enough to make a launch out of it. This is gonna help us to push back a competitive incursion.

Now I'm listening. Or this is a major enhancement to our AI capabilities and gonna differentiate us. Now we're doing something. So we really didn't have this, um, shared definition of what success looked like from a launch.

It was more we have released it and we have launched and we have made noise, and then we kind of paused there. So that was the... one of the biggest things I think that was, was broken beforehand. Yeah.

Yes, yes. So you have this, like, lack of clarity, lack of alignment, a- and then you already mentioned right away, like, ownership. so now talk a little bit about, like, the task at hand. You know, at what point did you realize, like, "Okay, this isn't something we need to tweak.

Need, we need to actually rebuild this"? Yeah. seeing a couple of launches that got pushed out while I was still coming on board that, again, I don't wanna say nothing has failed. The, the company's quite successful, doing great things, but we don't want a launch to do okay.

You know, we want a launch to really just kick butt and make some serious noise and drive leads and drive awareness and call it, you know, we all want revenue. And I started asking a lot of questions and meeting with the sales teams, the product marketing team - sorry, product management team, leadership, and just asking these questions of what it was it that we wanted to get out of a launch, what that meant and what release meant to them, and realizing that we weren't doing enough before a launch to have things planned effectively, and we weren't doing things as well after a launch for them to have true impact, uh, from the market and drive a commercial impact to that.

So it, it really is just me. I mean, I'm very good at asking questions. Sometimes they're good, sometimes they're dumb. but I'd rather...

No such thing as a dumb question. I like that. Uh, I'd rather be persistent and, get the answer to a question and then, then, okay, what's the second level of that question? And okay, great, now I understand that you and I are not speaking the same language when it comes down to the answer to this question, and here's what I define this based on my- You know, 15-plus years of product marketing as a launch, as a commercial success, uh, here's what you define that.

And then looking at it from what are the revenue goals that we're trying to accomplish, because again, a go-to-market should drive revenue. Are we mapping that back? And so it was just a lot of questions, a lot of conversation. But also because as I said, we were kind of a, not a cohesive product marketing team when I came on door- board just because of the situation, was to...

I had to rebuild the go-to-market function and also define what product marketing is, what we do. What we don't do was just as critical as anything else, and then start to develop those processes around how we bring a product to market. All the - Everything from the, "I have a product release to talk about," to, "I'm nurturing the flows 90 days later." Yeah.

You make it sound easy by saying, "Yeah, just rebuilt the go-to-market function," you know? No big deal. an hour. hours.

All right, guys, we're done. But seriously, this is where a lot of PMMs get stuck, and I'm sure there's a lot of differing of opinions or approaches out there around, like, how do you do this? But I guess, like, break down for me, like, your plan of action and how you, how you actually, like, did it. You don't have to - We're not gonna go into the specifics quite yet, obviously.

We're gonna build a playbook together in just a, in just a moment here. But r-real quick, like, just kind of bullet point, like, what, what the action was, the plan of action to, to was, again, like I, I always go back to the questions because that's just what I'm good at. but it was really just like... Okay.

So to, to, you know, to your point, it was not an easy thing. It was not a short thing. There's so many stakeholders because, again, we have five segments in the organization. We've got product and we've got sales, who are my let's call my key audiences, and then I have my boss as well.

I spent a lot of time with each of the stakeholders for each of those groups, basically saying: What is it d- that you are looking for when it comes to defining a successful product launch or a go-to-market? And go-to-market and launch in the conversations were treated kind of a similar conversation. and really, you know, where are we now? What are we doing now that, that is, is our kind of our state of, our state of the union, the, the regular thing we're doing?

What's working? And like I said, some things were working very well. With the, the person who was managing this and the project manag- product management office, fantastic job. Uh, but what wasn't working?

And a lot of what wasn't working was, I mean, sales wasn't being notified early enough. Pre-sales wasn't getting the information in order to prepare for a demo. Uh, lead generation or demand, the growth marketing teams weren't being fed information in order to plan for campaigns. You know, I could go on and on about that.

And once I understood all that, again, like I said, I came back and said, "Product marketing is gonna be the ones owning the decision to go live." And I put - During my, my first two months, I put two launches on hold because the product marketer came to me and said, "Here's where we are. I wanna launch whatever, you know, date," which was like next week. I said, "Well, do we have this, this?"

"No, we don't." Like I said, "No, we are not launching." I, you know, I made myself a little unpopular. I probably still am a little, but, but it...

Again, it's not about Doug, it's about does this have a success with that? this gonna serve the company? Is it gonna serve the customer? And like, we're gonna try to take the best action that's going to Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, we talked about, and, you know, I don't want, depending if you want to get into it, but, you know, we wa- we moved into - we tiered launches. Nothing that's, you know, dramatically new and surprising there. Tiered launches have been talked about a lot of these, your great podcasts.

but, you know, I had to go then say, "Now we've educated the, the teams on what a good launch means, how do we put that in place?" so another thing we did, and again, nothing, you know, dramatically unusual for product launches, is talking about a tiered framework and really provide more clarity around what those were. Agreed, we had an agreed through framework, what assets will be part of that. Introduced a new, basically a framework of 90-60-30, 30-60-90, we can talk about that later.

Really worked to imple- improve our product requirement documents. So taking that, the so what, why, who cares framework, embedding that in there, putting together a launch council, and just really made it much more clear where stakeholders were going to be involved in this process. And, that only took two hours. You know, as you were, like right before you said it actually, as you were answering some of my previous questions, I could actually start to see the so what, why, who cares just in how your brain thinks.

So I just really love that. you mentioned so much here that I want to unpack further, which I know will come to the playbook, but first I wanna quickly ask about stakeholders. How did you manage their expectations and like, I guess with all these big changes you wanted to make, like was there, was there pushback, and just how did you manage all of that? Very fortunate in that the, uh, uh, I guess her, I'm not sure exactly her title, I call her head of product.

She's kind of, she's not a CPO, she's below... that reports to the CPO. She is also newer, new-newer to the organization. She is - She's awesome.

She's a gem, and we have, we gelled very early on, so we've got a very good rapport. Uh, we don't always agree, but we, uh, disagree constructively, if it makes any sense. So having her on board, and she and I are very aligned, uh, she's also gone through the Pragmatic Institute training and a lot, which was helpful. That was really, really big.

So she was help, able to help, you know, go upstream on her side and, you know, had the alignment on my side with things. But she also would say, "You should talk to so and so forth, and have those conversations with that particular product manager or that particular product lead, uh, that pre-sales person." So there's a lot of just identifying you know, who had a, a stick in the fire that needed to poke. Uh, and that was really important.

But also then going back and looking again at the massive amount of launches we already had and seeing how they did and seeing where they did well and seeing where they didn't do as well. So it was really just about understanding all the facets of what happened with the product launches, releases and launches to define where it didn't work. Yeah, and I could imagine that as, you know, you're the new guy in town, and here you are evaluating past launches. That could not feel great, I would imagine, to the person whose work is being evaluated from a person who wasn't even there when it all happened.

So I'm curious, and, and now, and, and you have new ideas and thoughts, and it sounds like you're lucky that you have a, a stakeholder who is amenable and open to hearing you out and like wanting to support you, so that's already a step ahead. But how did stakeholders and leadership respond to you coming in and doing that? I got really good at tap dancing. Um, overall, I would say pretty good.

There, you know, there were a couple of conflicts here and there that, you know, some I created some challenges with, some it was more miscommunication, here's what you mean, here's what I mean. Uh, some just plain disagreement. No, we're gonna do it like that. and I try to find that balance between, you know, being the new guy and having that honeymoon period and coming in, "Hey, let's do this," and full of ideas and full of energy.

You know, also having been there, done that a few times, been on both sides of that, that I can't just walk in like the bull in the China shop and say, "I have all the right ideas. We're gonna do it Doug's way," 'cause it's not Doug's way. It's, it's our way. but also having had several people in the first three or four months say, "We think you should be more pushy," which was weird for me because it's just not my style, and I'm used to working with global organizations.

I had people - I've had people say that to me too, and that's not my style either. I'm just, I'm a little bit softer in my approach. think there's definitely a time to do that, and I, I am all about collaboration, let's get all in the same boat going together. but also I have learned over the years, sometimes you just gotta push forward, you know, knowing that you're doing what is the right thing for the organization, not for Doug, but for the organization.

and just, just really push through. and, so again, taking it back to why it was so important that product marketers owned the commercial launch decision, because again, we understand what's going on in the marketing. We hand- we handle the messaging. We're looking at revenue outcomes.

Not that product market- managers don't care about revenue, but we're closer to that revenue and that strategic side of things. So yeah, there was some education and there was some little bit of bruised feelings, and I had to step back sometimes and say, "I'd like this, but I'm gonna get this." Yeah. A lot of compromise.

And I'm sure over, over time you prove, you kind of earn trust and you, you prove how your ideas and your frameworks are working, and then you, you get a little more. That's sometimes that's just how it works. so it sounds like, you know, stepping back here, you had to, to rebuild this go-to-market function. A lot of sophistication, a lot of like layers of complexity with all these different business units, and it's kind of messy and, you're in r- your reaction mode or the, the, the team is in reaction mode.

Um, and then you've come in, you did all this research, you implemented all of these things. What happened in the end? Success, honestly. That's what really kind of feels good about this is that, you know, I was just on a call about an hour ago with that head of product I was talking about.

so we, we, we kicked it off January 1st, so we have an, an... We, we - So let me back up. That's jumping ahead. We put together all the processes, laid them all out there, documented them, communicated to the teams that are gonna be involved, both on webinars and on email and pri- in slides.

Uh, I presented to some of the senior management to say, "Here's what the, the short version. Here's what we're gonna be doing. Here's what the why behind this is. Here's the value it's gonna yield."

made better role alignment between what product managers do and what product marketers will do. Still some education ongoing about that one, but making a lot of progress. Uh, put together a launch council as part of the whole process so that, you know, there was the, the key stakeholders from each group that needs to be part of this whole launch success process were involved. Kicked the first one off or early part of January, um, '20 - this year, 2026.

Uh, and even in just that first meeting, you're watching some of the chat come through and it's like, "This is what we've been needing all along. This is a great way for us to change our go-to-market pro..." I mean, people are saying that, not product marketers. You know, product managers and other people are saying positive things in the chat.

You're like, "Win. I can go home now." and also to be very honest, and this is what I was just talking to my head of, head of product about, 'cause she was, you know, "Well, you know, I feel like we're not doing this. We're not...

We're missing... People are complaining about this." And I said, "I agree." I said, "Remember, 80/20.

Let's get 80% of the things lined up and we're doing great things, we're making great progress. Where we were, where we are now to where we were four or five months ago is hugely improved." I said, "We have to sit back and go, 'Okay, we're making progress over perfection. We've, we've chipped away all the rough parts.

Now we're smoothing things off.'" So we have to remind people that we've made tremendous progress. We're not a hu- we're not 100%. We may never get to 100%, but we can get a lot better, then I'm happy.

I love it. Okay. So what I wanna do is take this case study and now turn it into a playbook. So, uh, again, just quickly summarizing here, we're rebuilding the go-to-market function.

No easy feat. so let's say that I'm a PMM, I just heard your story, and now you're coaching me on how I can replicate it. And if I needed to rebuild my go-to-market function in my company, what is step one What do I need to do First, First, put on your - If you have experience, first put on your humble hat, is the best place I would start, and then start gathering information. Uh, because again, if you walk in as that person that I know how to fix everything, you're gonna get the same response that most people do.

But understand where are we now, where do we wanna be, what's been, been successful, what's not been successful, what does good look like is one of the things I always go back to. And how do we - everything we do when it comes to the go-to-market and the launch change, how does that end up driving or impacting or benefiting revenue or preventing revenue leakage? You know, we're looking at churn. So start there.

Who are my stakeholders? Who needs to be involved? Who should I talk to? Be data-driven.

I mean, and understand what's happened well in the past. If hopefully your CRM is halfway decent, you can dig into your CRM information or at least get some kind of a launch details back and use that to plan the future. Got it. Okay.

So step one is to get this state of the union Dig into the data. gather information. is there anything specific that you're looking for? I think you mentioned a couple of things, but are there like specific measurements or signals that you could be looking for that would specifically help you identify like what's broken within a like go-to-market function?

Like Let's take a tier one launch as a good example. Um, so we have a tier one launch, which in, in our case, it's a big launch. We're doing big things. We're gonna make a lot of noise, a lot of assets behind that.

And we do this big launch, maybe we do a webinar, we do some lead activity, but then we look back at the leads that have come in and the, the, the awareness that have come in and the click-throughs that have come in after that. And if the, if the numbers are low, and of course, metrics are going to be defined by a lot of different things. If the numbers are low, but we had a really big deal we tried to make, then something got missed. So that's where looking at the data is like we tried to...

We made - This was a powerful solution, but we didn't do a good job of engaging the market before and after the commercial part of the launch. We missed something. So that's one of the places you can look at for data is, did it resonate? we excited launch and was the market excited to hear about it?

Yeah. Yeah. Good one to call out. Okay.

So again, quick recap. Step one, gather the data. what's step two? make sure that.

your product marketers and your product managers are hand-in-hand. they don't have to be best friends, but they should be very much embedded, be, be aligned. Uh, make sure they know what - You do this, and I do... Here's where my job, I hate to say job stops, but here's where I stop being involved, and I hand it off to you.

Uh, clarify again that product marketing/marketing should own the commercial part of this. Make sure that we're the ones that- That say, "Yes, ready to go." and you absolutely have to be involving, involving sales. And by that mean, by that I mean they are educated, they're aware.

You don't launch something, then sales goes, "Oh, hey, what, what's the pricing on this?" Or, "What's the messaging?" Or, "Who's the audience?" Uh, make sure that they're involved in all that, and have an executive sponsor.

That is one of the most key things so that that way it's not just the product marketer saying this, it's the person sponsoring saying, "I'm sponsoring this launch. We've got to get in line here and get things successful." Yep. I love Essentially what it sounds like you're saying is establish or reestablish the product marketing charter.

So I have had to do this before, and w- I - This is so So I did it at Cisco. Cisco obviously has been around for a long time. There were product marketing teams ahead that, that were this portfolio ahead of me. But when I presented the draft of a charter, before I socialized it outwards, I had product leaders The VP directors, right?

That I wanted see my first draft charter before I socialized it even to my team. And they, they had some feedback, but like overall they were like, "We've never seen something like this before. Like, we love this." And I think it's because they're like, "Yes, product marketing is collaborating.

Yes, of course, we want you to have a seat at the table." We just... You know, I think so. It's so interesting.

I, I'm glad that you mentioned it, I guess is what I'm saying, because they - It's not that they want to exclude product marketing, but just someone to come in and really like own the, uh, function, I think is actually something that your PM will appreciate. Um, there. Okay. So now we've got the, we've gathered the information.

You have your, you know, people and team alignment. That was, you know, your step two. So let's skip to step three, like what's next? We talked about the tiers, and then we, we, I'll just, just jumping.

We only, we did a three-tier level. I've seen three, four, and five and, however, however works for that particular company. We only did three, and then we narrowed down, you know, one is the biggest. And here's, we do all these stuff.

We listed out what went in there, what kind of assets. Right now we're continuing to build that out. I've got members of my team that are helping to build out, you know, here's an example of the assets that we're gonna use for a tier one and for a tier two and for a tier three. Um, and by the way, I'm taking...

I forget which guest it was you had that talked about social swarming, um, in the launch process. I'm taking that idea and I'm building that into stuff that we're doing. So see? You, you bring value all around.

And so the, the way I looked at the 30-60-90 again is, and the, the way I kind of joked with you earlier in our prep was looking at how NASA works. I mean, NASA doesn't just, you know, have a l- rocket launched off to the moon and then walk out of the building and say, "We're done for the week." they gotta stay engaged. So if we don't do a good job of making sure that once we launch this amazing product or feature or solution to the market and keep in touch with the audience out there, then we're not doing a very good job.

and so the structure with that, that, that 30-60-90, I think will make a big difference in ongoing flows and engagement and nurture, but not just what happens to drive the, the interest of the prospect, but us getting feedback. You know, we're putting messages out there And we check into that 30 days in. 60 days in. Is it resonating?

All right. What, what feedback do we take back in? And again, now we're feeding that, doing that. feedback loop back up to say, "This went well.

This needs to be tweaked going forward." So it's really trying to create a, a, a, a framework and a feedback loop. I love your rocket analogy. Like, you don't just, like, send it off into space and be like, "All right, cool launch.

See you later." Yeah, you measure the, you know, the orbit stability and the fuel, and you track trajectory. Like, that's all your 30/60/90 or, or 90/60/30, 30/60/90. And I love that.

it's spread out like that because so many PMMs launch it, and then they're like just onto the next one. And by doing the feedback, you get better, you improve, you figure out how to tweak things, whether it's messaging or even product roadmap items. So I love that. Going back to leadership, and I've been doing that, uh, just in the last few weeks.

I've been presenting to the chief operating officer. I'm presenting to the chief of staff, I think, next week. the chief commercial officer, just kind of making sure they understand what's going on. Tried to do some of this before this all happened, and there was some email communication, but just schedules, end of year budgeting didn't happen.

so if I had a recommendation for a PMM, ideally do it before you implement the major change as opposed to after. This was situational. you know, feedback always important. We had the buy-in from pretty much everybody that was part of the process.

That was very important. Again, having a very good partner, it made a big difference with that. Uh, and just making sure people continue to understand that we have to let some things run for a bit before we start making any changes. So as opposed to saying, "Well, it's not working right."

it's, we're on month two. You know, we just started this Yeah. you're not even in the full 90 days of your... Yeah.

Yeah. You gotta give it time, see if it's working. Okay, I love that. You socialize it, you start to gather feedback.

so and then step five. Is there a step five Go. just go. And, and it, it...

And I, I'm being a little flippant, but go And making sure that we tell all the people that are involved in the... Oh, sorry, the people, the teams that are involved in this, you know, is, is pre-sales feeling like, "Okay, cool, we're now getting information ahead of time that we weren't getting before, so now we can do a better job of supporting sales and getting demos set up." you know, does sales feel like they've got their talk tracks ready? Does customer service feel like they can be able to answer questions that, are coming in?

You know, are the PMMs and the PMMs... That's a lot of Ps. PMs and the PMMs feeling like they're working together? Are we getting that feedback loop?

Uh, and just go. and you know, for the product marketers listening to this, you know, if you're a company of 100, you may not need to put together a launch council. It may just have to be you and your PM and a couple of people and get it go. Larger companies, I do recommend a launch, a launch council because you've got a lot more, you know, just hurdles to go through, a lot more people to be bought into that so having that, and especially that executive sponsorship, makes a big difference.

Yeah. A quick question about the executive, or sorry, for the launch council. How often do you meet? Who's in it?

And like what kind of decisions do they own? it's... The, as far as own it is, who is on it in our case, is the, the, the person who's the product manager for that particular item, the, uh, segment leader for that particular... W- whoever this had the most impact in the segment.

Obviously, the product marketer, the head, the head of pre-sales for that particular segment. So anybody who is going to be most directly commercially impacted by the launch is involved. Uh, the product product management officer, the person who basically is coordinating all the craziness, um, from the... More the, the tick box as opposed to the product marketer who com- who mana- manages the commercial part of that.

I sit in on some of them. I try not to 'cause I want my product marketers to be the owners of those things. You know, they're the owners of their world. Uh, and How often do they meet is kind of evolving at this point.

it's sort of a check-in sometimes, and they... Again, from the... What they're deciding on is, are we ready to go? have we, have we ticked the boxes?

Do we have what we need? If we haven't done so, then again, that's where you have the, you know, the, the, the, leaders on there say, "Hey, get this stuff done. You, you, you are responsible and accountable to move these things forward. What's the roadblocks?

How do we eliminate those?" Yep. And then, all of that, I'm curious, you mentioned earlier on in our conversation, you dropped like a, a hint about PRDs and your team coming in and to reshape them, and obviously your book is coming out, "So What, Why, Who Cares?" Uh, can you talk a little bit about how so what, why, who cares changed some of those conversations, like whether inside the product launch council or not, but how did the so what, why, who cares change some of those internal conversations?

Yeah, definitely. And that's - It's been really kind of fun to watch that evolution happen. It's still it's still a work in progress, but in-instead of always having PRDs come in that were just a feature function, technical dump written as a product manager is going to write. And again, there's no criticism at all in there.

It's just how, that's how they think and how they write. But because we didn't have as much early collaboration back, back then between the product manager and the product marketer, what came out of the PRD was sort of mildly massaged and turned into messaging. Now, with the So What, Why, Who Cares framework that the product marketers are using, they're translating that much better into outcome-based messaging. But my product leader is also very comfortable with me going back to the product management team and saying, "Here's how we think.

Here's how product marketers like to understand messaging," so that what they take and put into the PRD is pre-messaging prepped, for lack of a better word. And they're think It does this. Okay, cool. So what that it does that?

And think that's - Again, we're not there yet. We're making progress, for sure. and it's just helped them, helped the product managers to be more aware that you have to focus it on is what a confused prospect might want to understand, not what we as informed technical people understand. Yeah, sure.

okay. So I wanna really quickly recap, uh, what I think the steps were. So one is just to gather information, talk to people, dig into data. Two was to align the team and make sure everybody's on the same page about who does what.

Three is apply your launch framework. That's where the like 90/60/30, 30/60/90 framework and the so what, why, who cares framework really comes into play. And then you socialize it, get feedback, and then you execute while still doing the feedback. Um, so I love that.

My last question for you, just for this segment of the show, is what advice do you have for, one piece of advice, so just one, one, one big takeaway, what is it for a PMM who is rebuilding the go-to-market function? Be confident in your knowledge of being customer-facing because we are the strategic people who don't just come back and say, "Here is information." We should be providing insights and recommendations to give guidance on that. And by, if I sum- if I try to summarize that means don't launch just because we think we should.

Launch because there's a reason and a commercial impact we're gonna have to drive revenue so that we demonstrate our, our ability to impact revenue decisions. Mm-hmm, and a lot of that comes from knowing the business and having that context and understanding the customer and being really confident in that. Yep. So helpful.

I love it. Okay, we're wrapping up the case study playbook segment of the show, and now it's time for the next segment of the show, which is " so fun. It's the messaging critique. So this is where, Doug, you and I as marketing, product marketing experts get to analyze real world messaging.

the rules of this are, one, to pick a company that either you know the target audience really well or you are the target audience. Wouldn't be fair to critique messaging on a company where we have no idea that, who their target audience is or what they do. and then first tell me what stood out to you about the messaging, what you're loving about it. Maybe share something y- that you wish the PMM would've considered or done differently.

And then finally, we're gonna just brainstorm a little bit and give that PMM some good ideas on how they can take it to the next level. So without further ado, yeah, reveal the company that we will be looking at today. The company is called, they're called OppTrack, So O-P-P Track. Uh, and it's either .

com or .io. I think it's .com.

And they are essentially a win-loss and competitive intelligence smaller startup company. And I picked them. for a couple of reasons. Definitely I'm the target audience.

I know a decent amount about win-loss. In fact, I just presented at the Austin conference about win-loss. They reached out to me, which is how I became aware of them, not to sell me initially, but to gather and ask my feedback as a startup. So I'm like, "Well, that was kind of an interesting way to approach that."

So I give them a lot of respect for that. So is it optrack.io? So what I, what I found when I Google searched it is O-P, one P, O-P-T-R-A-C, Yeah, two Ps.

Yeah, For, for so for, I think Opportunity Track. Uh, try opportunity... opptrack.com.

okay. So it's optrack.io doesn't work. Okay, let me try optrack.

com. Just for our folks who may wanna follow along, um, I found them. There they are, O-P-P-T-R-A-C-K.com.

I found them. Okay. What is standing out to you from their messaging? And before And before I tell you the goods, I'll have to give them also credit because during our conversations with them, you know, I was looking through the tool, I was pretty, you know, impressed with what I saw.

But they also, you know, "What, what do you think?" I'm like, "Well," I said, "I'm not sure what you guys do yet." And because what they there on their, their, their main page before, it was not, wasn't bad, it just was very - it was much more technical language. So I gave them a bit of feedback.

So I give them a lot of credit, and even in the last three or four days, they've made some changes So what stands out to now open up the page, and I've got no question what they do. They do competitive and win-loss for lean go-to-market teams. Now, I don't love that it says competitive win-loss agents for lean G- GTM teams, but that's just a Doug style thing, 'cause agents could be any number of things. I know it's probably agentic AI, et cetera.

But Yeah. me a bit of like, what does that mean? Little bit of guessing. What's working for me is that they clearly state their ICP, like right there in the header.

It, it stands out, and then underneath that it. says, you know, what, OpTrack is a win-loss program that does... it. does certain things, and then it tells you the agents use these to align your messaging, protect deals.

And again, they've already started, in my mind, done some of the so what, why, and who cares in there because they've said what it does, who it's targeted for, to your point, the ICP. It's giving a decent sense of, um, alignment with somebody like myself who's coming in and saying, I'm struggling getting good comp- competitive intelligence insights. I'm struggling knowing what to do with the win-loss details or how to get that." Um, so I like that.

And the fact that it says agents, when I take my anti-AI thought o- off hat for a minute, means maybe I don't have to do as much work. So that's kind of intriguing too. But it, it does give me a bit of an intrigue as well as a dislike of agents. That's just a Doug thing.

Yeah, I get it. Yeah, you're like, "I'm willing to look even though I'm... got a little bit of suss about anything with agents and AI." I get it.

Okay. So what then is - what do you wish the PMM would've considered differently? I'm gonna guess that it has something to do with agents, but maybe not. Maybe not.

well, I, I don't know if They have a PM, so that's another very good question. I, I, think if I, was to, to, rip it apart even more, is to tell me some more of the why. I mean, they tell me what I can do, which is good, and there is a little bit of a why in there, but I'm missing... They go from the, the what to how it does it, which is cool.

Uh, it's nice to know the behind-the-scenes piece, and it's got little diagrams in there. But for me, it's also important to know more why this resonates with me as a person looking for more information about win-loss programs to gather all that. Why is OpTrack better, different, faster, stronger, whatever it is, more useful than fill in the blank other competitive intelligence or win-loss programs? Um, that me is really important because, uh, as I'm sure you've seen, there's a lot of people out there doing these programs.

Why, why this one? Or why do I add you to my tech stack? Or why do I replace something in my tech stack? It would be helpful.

Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, The like com- competitive alternative, whether the alternative is a sol- software solution or like a spreadsheet, right Um, yeah, so I definitely agree with you. They do a lot of educating, like education, educating on like what their solution is and what it does and what it can do, but they don't - I, I'm struggling to see, well, what is your differentiator? Um, so I, I agree with you.

I think that's really smart. Okay. So how can this product marketer or just marketer or founder, whoever, how can they take their messaging storytelling to the next level? my book?

No, sorry, that was too easy. Uh, I think taking their, their messaging and their, their framework to the next level really is to just put yourself in your prospect's shoes as much as possible. Don't make assumptions that they know exactly why they're going to look at your site, whether they've come across it through LinkedIn or an outreach. What, what's gonna make me want to engage?

So, okay, cool. I, I see what you do. This is very interesting. I see that.

But again, I go back to the, the why I should care. I think they do a decent job of nailing the you know, the, the persona, like you said, the ICP and the what. It's just that in-between piece of how do I not - how do you not sound like every other win-loss company out there and give me that emotional... That's one thing I think, there's not a lot of emotion in here.

There's not a lot of pain point in here. It's, it's very good They, like, They, I like the education piece, but emotion and pain point give me. urgency. you know?

Create some FOMO in me. Like, oh geez, if I don't use this not gonna get access to blah, blah, blah, blah. Or I can't answer these questions or inform my sales teams. Make me feel like I'm not a I hate to say that.

Not that, make me feel I'm not doing a good job, but You know, what I mean. Right. There's not like a sense of urgency. Like there's no sense of urgency.

no - it doesn't tell me why I need this now. It doesn't... Not that they should like, you know, invoke anxiety or anything. Like you could, you could shoot for another emotion like joy or, you know, any, that, that sort of thing.

So I totally agree with you. Um, but overall it looks like, especially after conversations that you've had with them, that they're, they're continuing to evolve their messaging. Um, and just wanted to say like messaging is so hard, especially if you don't have a product marketer, it is so hard. Yeah.

So, uh, but you know, shout out to OpTrack. You know, I think you guys are clearly continuing to iterate and, um, it looks like you maybe have a cool Yeah. it's, I, I've been but they've, they've made changes just based on what I've talked to the people too. I'm like, "This is pretty good."

This, they're getting better, so I think it's good. Yeah. Keep the evolution going. That's where everything, everything just of continues to evolve and iterate.

All right. So Doug, I, one thing I always like to do on this podcast is leave time for a moment of gratitude Because in product marketing, maybe in, in just life in general, none of us get here alone. We are always learning from each other and building off of each other's work, and we're all better for it. So before we wrap up, I just wanted to say a genuine thank you for your time and insights today, um, and all the preparation that, you've done for the episode today.

So thank you so much. Really it's been a pleasure. I've been looking forward to this, uh, since I first listened to your podcast and waved my hand at you and you said yes. I'm like, "Yay, this is fun."

Aw. Thank you. Thank you. So I wanna turn it over to you, though.

Like, who are some PMMs that you maybe wanna shout out who've helped, you know make a real impact on your career? It's Yeah. It would be a very long list if I went through them all. I'll, I'll focus on two.

Uh, one is actually the person that inspired me with - to write the book because he gave me the framework, Prashant Bhatia, who I've worked for three times as a VP, as even as a CMO, um, really upleveled my product marketing abilities, my mindset, my thinking, gave me a lot of opportunities to do stuff that I look back now, I'm like, "That was really cool." so that was, I mean, a great leader, great person, good friend, just very inspirational. And then a product marketer who worked for me for four years, uh, Ian Pittock, based in the UK, who - I mean, just his style gave me different ways to think about things and to talk about and, and message things.

So, um, between Prashant and, Ba- and, you know, Ian, just two people I look back as having really solid impacts on my overall product marketing journey. Um, couple other people, people I wanna call out, and I know that she's been called out before, but Hattie. I mean, reason I wanna call out Hattie, she hasn't done as much to inspire my product marketing journey, but she's doing so much to inspire others. I just love that because it's just, it's just that giving and helping other people get better, you know, just as I told...

generosity. Yeah. And then Michelle, who I'm not gonna try and pronounce. Michelle Nieberding, I hope I'm saying that.

Yes. Thank you. Um, because, uh, again, the stuff she puts out on AI, again, that unselfish sharing of stuff and information. I mean, what she posted about lovable made me completely revise my website for my book that just - I mean, I keep saying, every lovable just blows me away.

Without her making about that, I would probably spend a few hundred, probably $1,000 on a website that I'm now, because of her sharing as a product marketer to make other Yeah. better. Yeah. And, oh, And at the risk of being self-serving, this lady named Elle.

I mean, again, I've listened to your pod- I, sorry. I mean that sincerely. I've listened to your podcasts, and again, you're doing something that, again, just helps other product marketers, other growth marketers out there to get better, so thank you. That's the goal.

That's the goal. If it's, um, you know, truly gives joy, and I think, I don't want to speak for Hattie and Michelle, but, um, ha- both of them have been guests on the show. Um, Michelle's episode's not out yet, but it will be soon. Um, having met with both of them multiple times, they're just, they're so generous, and, you know, just the kind of people that you wanna work with.

Like, and I, I'm probably, probably the other folks that you mentioned that you gave shout-outs to are probably similar, like, like-minded people, you know? We tend to find each other in circles. Content good Okay, my last, yeah, my last question for you is where can we continue to access your expertise? Is LinkedIn best?

Anywhere LinkedIn is probably - I mean, I'd love to connect with anybody. Always happy to have LinkedIn chats there. And then my website, sowhatwhywhocares.com.

Um, I'm gonna continue to build my portfolio and updates in the book and just share fun stories. I love that. Again, thank you so much, Doug. Yeah, and hey, PMM listeners, if you like this episode, please share it with a PMM friend.

I would be so grateful if you would also leave a review. It helps tremendously with our reach. Thank you so much for coming on this adventure with us today. I hope this episode leaves you with inspiration to take on the next step of your own journey.