S2E3: Navigating the Intersection of Product and Marketing with Austin Fuller

Carl Abbott: Welcome to Productly Speaking, the podcast that dives deep into the fascinating world of product management. I'm your host, Carl Abbott. In each episode, I'll be bringing you conversations with some of the most innovative and inspiring minds in the industry. Together, we'll uncover their stories, insights, and the secrets behind their success. So whether you're a seasoned product manager or just curious about the field, join us, uh, for an entertaining and informative journey through the art and science of creating great products. Let's give it a go foreign. We're going to talk about working with product marketing and why the intersection between product marketing and product management is one of the most important to get right. People tend to view marketing as a disparate discipline from product and today we're here to explore whether that's really the case. Our guest today is Austin Fuller, A, uh, go to market expert with over a decade of experience specializing in technology, Austin has worked with early stage venture capital and private equity backed SaaS companies. He has successfully driven revenue growth for numerous companies by understanding customer needs and leveraging that insight to collaborate with his product team in addressing those needs. I'm pleased to welcome to Productly Speaking Austin Fuller.

Austin Fuller: Thanks, Carl, very much. Excited to be here.

Carl Abbott: So, Austin, let's get started with just a very simple definition. What is product marketing? Is it just making pretty websites and writing catchy headlines or do you have a little bit more nuanced version of it?

Austin Fuller: That is a lot of the output actually, but it is a little bit more nuanced than that. I've heard a couple of definitions and I really like this one where it says, you know, product marketing is taking your understanding of the product and the magic of the product and taking an understanding of the market and connecting the two. That's kind of how I see it, is how can we bring the market and your ideal customers to understand what makes the product magical, different, better than other products?

Carl Abbott: Yeah. What are some of the techniques that you employ to do that from a marketing perspective?

Austin Fuller: From a marketing perspective. You know what's really fun about being in product marketing is you get to dip your toe a little bit into the product management side. A lot of the tools I use I think are very similar to how UX researchers and product managers determine what to build. Right. So having customer interviews, gaining customer feedback through surveys. I even conduct interviews with prospects, people who aren't paying customers. I'll try and talk to people at shows and in person or in other forums where people are and I am and gather feedback that way. I think another Good area as well is speaking to industry analysts. We work a lot with Gartner, Forrester, industry specific analysts that are relevant to the industry verticals that you work in. But ultimately the North Star for us is always the customer, whether that's in my current role at Exeger or anywhere I've been. People who are actively paying you for your software and using it every day, or perhaps not using it every day are excellent sources of truth for what your product is to them and feedback for what you should build.

Carl Abbott: Yeah, you said something very interesting to me and that is that you like to talk to prospects. What type of feedback do you get from prospects versus feedback from customers that are already paying customers?

Austin Fuller: Yeah, excellent question. So I think there's a, uh, big difference between the two as far as when you're talking to a prospect, they don't have much of a filter, which is great because they're not paying you. There's not any skin in the game. Right. They're not worried about offending you or if you have a, uh, customer success manager or someone, they're not going to ruin a relationship or burn a bridge for someone that's really helped them before. So I think for that reason they're really great. Another key difference though is that they often need a lot of coaching so that they are seeing things from a similar perspective. And what I mean by that is you need to be able to set the context correctly to get specific types of feedback if you're looking for more specific feedback. Otherwise it's oftentimes really interesting for me to see, hey, if I ask a certain type of question or I'm asking something more generally, where does their mind jump? What is the first thought that they have? Because oftentimes customers have already been marketed to, they've been sold, they're using the product, they're already seeing the world through your lens a little bit. Being able to see somebody who isn't actively being sold to or actively a customer, where does their mind jump? What is their perspective on certain use cases or problems in an industry? Do they even think those problems are important? Those are all really important things that you can really only glean from someone that hasn't been tainted by, uh, your product and your messaging and your marketing already.

Carl Abbott: No, that's an excellent point because they are going to have different perspectives and it's neat to get that different perspective and then wonder, is that something you ought to address? Is it indicative of a bigger part of the market?

Austin Fuller: Sure. And another part is that you get to hear a Little bit about what the impact of parallel platforms or tools marketing on them. Right. So what do you use? What are they? Uh, a customer of that. That's often a question that I ask is, okay, what is the technographic makeup of this person? What are the tools that they're in and using and why? What drove those decisions? If you're curious, talking and engaging with customers is, uh, really, really fun and very, very interesting. Like I. There's never a boring conversation that I have. The well is deep. You can go a lot of different ways. It is important to have a disciplined approach to it because you can get questions schizophrenia and be all over the place and you can talk about a lot of things but have nothing valuable to go use.

Carl Abbott: Yeah. So to avoid questions schizophrenia, do you like to have kind of a set of prepared questions in the back of your mind or do you just kind of see what the person says to you and then kind of play off of that?

Austin Fuller: For customer interviews, they're very planned. Typically we're doing research for a specific problem or we're looking for specific outcome. We might be trying to launch into a new industry vertical, taking products success that we have in one industry and try and replicate it at another. We might be launching a new feature. We might not be getting traction that we want there. There's a variety of, of causes. Right. But you build your question set based on what is the challenge you're trying to solve and where do you think those answers are, and then, yeah, have a very specific set of questions. Now, do I stick to those questions 100% of the time? Not deviating? No, not always. Because it's a discovery. Right. Much like an explorer makes landfall and starts navigating around. They have a plan initially, but whatever happens, what they find may lead them in a different direction. You should have, uh, a structured approach, but be flexible and be able to deviate based on the findings and responses you get as you're conducting the interview.

Carl Abbott: Entirely unlike running a podcast episode like what we're doing here.

Austin Fuller: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You've got to be able to have

Carl Abbott: a list of shoot from the hip hop. Yeah. We may go different directions than what's in the document. So, yeah, very, very similar. How do product managers best leverage product marketing? You know, there's a number of different types of product marketers and a number of different types of product managers. Obviously, you've talked about both sides of the marketing discipline, where you've got customer research and market research, but also generating materials for that market to consume to understand the product how does this really kind of work when you've got product managers kind of over in one part of the organization sometimes and marketers over in another part, how does that best fit together?

Austin Fuller: So a couple of things. One is understand what type of product marketing organization that you have. Like as a product manager, if I'm looking, hey, how do I work with product marketing? There have been roles that I've either had or interviewed for or just peers that I know. And these are kind of the buckets, right? There's really three categories that I see and there's probably others. But the ones that I see most frequently is this is how product marketing is structured. One is a blended do everything role, which is really common. That's the one that I've held the most, where you're responsible for both product and marketing side responsibilities. And what I mean by that is very often product marketing is structured to be this, okay, we need go to market help, we need to create collateral content messaging and we need you to talk to customers and figure out what those things are. A little bit of market research, analyst relationship. But then there's also like the in app performance. Especially if you are a product led company. I would expect the opposite to be true. You may be creating less content and collateral and you are going to be looking at the buyer journey more. What's the conversion rate from our uh, free option or free trial into paid? What are the points of friction where you know, looking at something like Pendo more intimately, tracking where people are clicking, what their behavior is? A lot of that sounds like you know, uh, things on the product side of the house. So understanding. Do you have a product focused product marketer where they are focused on behavior in the product? Do you have a go to market focused product marketer where they're focused on supporting sales, creating content, the website. Right. Everyone knows product marketing writes the homepage, messaging and all of those things. Right. So do you have a more siloed product marketer or do you have a blended one? Because if you have a blended one, it's going to be a tug of war between product and marketing and there is a delicate balancing act that you know the product marketer has to do. So you have to just take that into consideration. So it's a long answer, but it sets the context for my response. Right. So understanding how your product marketer is, how the roles defined and measured is really important. And then you can go in and see where do you complement and dovetail into that. So at Exeger right now I still definitely sit In a blended role. However, the priority is a little bit more on the go to market side. Right now some of the product managers that I work with, they're some of the finest I've ever worked with by the way. They have looked at and said, hey, so here's a use case we have in our platform. We have a database for Section 889 compliance, which is essentially a list of companies that the federal government is not allowed to do business with. And one of the use cases for our product is that companies can run a check against their suppliers or prospective suppliers to check and see if they're on that list. List that was a use case I was unaware of. It's also a use case we don't have in our messaging or on our website. So a product manager actually said, hey, here's the capability, this is how it works. And we're very differentiated in that nobody else has this list and this database and this data that we do. You should definitely put that on our website and in your messaging. I think that was a really good example of a product manager being proactive. I was onboarding at the time, it was within my first 90 days. That was very, very helpful to me because then I'm able to take it and put it into messaging and get more customers that that use case, which leads to better adoption, which leads to better performance for that product marketer's product line, which, which is a win for everybody. Right. So I think that was a really good microcosm of understanding where my role was, what was really important to me, and being proactive about how to, how to work with product marketing. And that's kind of the dream scenario.

Carl Abbott: Yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

Austin Fuller: One of my previous companies called Viking Cloud, where I was at, we had really good product manager, product marketing collaboration. We were lockstep there, which is one of the reasons I think we were able to grow so quickly. I was able to do the go to market and the market research side to the point where I was invited to like Sprint planning meetings and lots of other product meetings, bringing those insights in, like, hey, these are the surveys we've done, these are the interviews we've done. These are some things that you can actually put in to justify some of the JIRA tickets that you want to put into this Sprint. I think that's really important like as far as like what product marketing can do and what you can ask of product marketing. Here are things we're thinking of building or here's things people are telling us we have to build. Can you get uh, us some justification for that? Can you find justification? Is there market validation for some of these things? What are competitors selling already and bringing that in? Like product marketing can be really, really good compliment to take some of the risk that comes from the guesswork you have to do. Because like, let's be real, there's really no way to define with certainty that a product is going to be successful, a feature is going to be adopted. Right, Right. Like we like to say there is to some degree if you, if you like. There's just. So maybe guesswork's the wrong word but there's a level of uncertainty. Mhm. I think that you can leverage product marketing to remove some of the uncertainty and risk.

Carl Abbott: It's an educated guesswork. It's not just straight let me wake up this morning and see what feels right. It's actually educated guesses because we've seen these trends, we've seen these signals, we're going to respond to those in a way that we think is going to actually address what we're seeing. And so uh, you never know for sure if you've got it right until you know. But yeah, it's very educated in that regard. And that's a great explanation of how like product marketing can help support that product strategy and defining a product roadmap within a company to really kind of drive that product to the market to meet those customer needs. So thank you very much for that.

Austin Fuller: Absolutely.

Carl Abbott: You talked about go uh, to market, product marketing manager people and also the other type being more product focused for a company that's just getting started, say doing a 0 to 1 versus a company that's got a product that's maybe a little bit more mature. Is there a time in the product life cycle where one type of marketer is more important than the other?

Austin Fuller: If you're 0 to 1, I would look at, okay, what's your revenue model like? Are you product led? Are you sales led? Because the revenue model is going to define it. Right. But as you get more mature, the company gets larger and the justification comes that you do need both. And I think there's value in specializing it. Uh, you know, if I were to be at a larger company that had mature product lines, one, I want someone that is going to make sure these things get adopted, that we're driving revenue through the product. Just because you have a sales LED motion does not mean you can't have a product led, upsell motion or cross sell motion at Viking Cloud. That was part of what I think Made the growth so successful was we added product led things. Once we had sales led established look 0 to 1. There's a lot of uncertainty. You have, the founder has an idea of like what will work, but very likely it'll be something radically different. I would say you want, you want somebody that can do both. Especially if you're product led. You need somebody that's going to be able to write and you know, do good copywriting, create good content or good enough content at the start to get resources in to tell the story, to get people in to the product. And then you need somebody that knows how to set up Pendo or a similar tool or knows how to look at. Okay, what is the time between somebody logging in and then logging back in a second, like setting up their profile and logging back in or heat mapping, understanding what their clicks on, what they're doing, what the behavior is inside of the product to hopefully create content that keeps those users engaged or find other ways to engage them so that they convert into paid. If your sales lead, it becomes much less important to have a uh, mixed skill set. As somebody who leads product marketing as a function, very often we're asked to do a lot with less resources. Right. The discipline itself is rather new in the sense that like there are vice presidents of product marketing. Product marketing has kind of become a standalone function. It used to just be like we have the marketing function and we have a product marketer or product marketers under marketing umbrella. I think for me, looking at the maturation, I don't know that one becomes more important over another. But the resourcing to specialize, just like any function becomes available. For me as a product marketing leader, I want to drive revenue from both sides, from both pre sales and from, you know, post cross sell, upsel sell adoption because ultimately we don't want churn. I've been in SaaS, uh, software as a service for those who don't know. So for us we live and die by the subscription. Right. Which means we can't have Churn. Churn needs to be as low as possible and product marketing helps both of those things. And I don't want to say I can nail down exactly when product marketing and customer marketing become bifurcated or when you for sure dedicate resources into building out your product side product marketing. But it is very important. And initially when, yeah, the business is small and just trying to grow and trying to validate, I would say yes, go to market is probably more important because you want to be able to build repeatability and validate that the way you go to market is correct and therefore your product is correct. Right. You're trying to find product market fit, post product market fit. Now you're like, okay, we have a product that fits. How do we get people to use more product and buy new products? Right. Hopefully that's what's going on as a part of product management too, is we're informing roadmap, we're tracking what people's behavior is and we're building features based on problems we're hearing from our customers.

Carl Abbott: Well, it's kind of interesting from what you said here and something that, uh, I've not necessarily thought through a whole lot is just kind of the interaction with sales and marketing and how that's sometimes separate from the interaction of sales and product. And I've certainly seen scenarios before where you're trying to find that product market fit. And sales has their list because sales is going out there with prospects and they're coming up with, hey, if we just did X, we could sign this much of a deal. If we did, why this big of a deal? It doesn't always play out that way, unfortunately. But you know, sometimes the things that they're asking for that prospective customers are asking for isn't really the direction where you as a product team want to actually take the product. But marketing seems to be kind of stuck in the middle of that conversation. So tell me how marketing can help both sales and product kind of navigate those waters. Yeah.

Austin Fuller: Wow, that's great. And uh, hopefully we can get to the answer here. This will be a real, this may

Carl Abbott: not be an answerable question. Maybe it's just a general direction you want.

Austin Fuller: No, no, I, I, I think it's a great question because yeah, we do often get stuck in the middle and product marketing is square in the center of that middle. Sales loves to say, we need this feature. We would have 10 million in revenue if we could just build this feature. There's so much business behind this backlog. Please prioritize it. Right. Sales has a certain type of customer and prospect interaction. Right. Product has a certain type of customer and and prospect interaction. And uh, maybe not very much pro. Hopefully you are getting some. And again, that should be a good job of product marketing is if they do get prospects to have product there again, a previous employer at Kion something that's great is we sent product people to trade shows and we could get prospects, people who are not customers in front of product team members. So definitely do that. If you're not product marketing is hopefully categorizing and organizing these different types of interactions. And I think that's part of being in the middle of it. Like, yes, it can feel like you're in a tug of war, but hopefully you're actually categorizing and bringing clarity to the other side of what's going on. So for example, sales is going to be talking to prospects who want things and the prospects are going to say they want things because they want to see if they can get them. So I started my career in sales and guess what? As a part of a deal, a lot of prospects, not all of them, but a lot of them will see what they can get you to throw in. Right? We want this thing. It probably does enough for us. Maybe it doesn't quite yet, but let's see what they can, we can get them to include. Right. They want to try and get as much value for their money as they can. Especially when you're in, uh, an earlier stage company, you might say, hey, this is an interesting product, but really we're looking for something like this and it's in a totally opposite direction and contrary to the product vision and strategy and where the company wants to go. Right. Product marketing reconciles these things. If I'm doing a good job, I'm listening to customer recordings because sales is being really diligent and definitely recording every sales interaction that they have. But especially if you're early stage, most companies do this now. It's becoming much more commonplace post, uh, Covid, where sales interactions are recorded where possible. Right. I'm listening to those. I'm doing my own interviews and conducting surveys with customers and UX and product are doing interviews and product marketing is in the position to sit and reconcile these things, to actually structure it out and bring clarity to what product is doing to sales and bring what sales is hearing and doing to product. Because what I found is, yes, there are absolutely some crazy requests that come out at Kion. This happened a lot, actually. People asked us to become entirely different categories of product in a sales process. And sometimes the deal was worth it. Most of the time it wasn't. Right. But it's good for product to know it's a data point. And so product marketing should be collecting and categorizing those data points to bring clarity there. The other thing is that product marketing is also able to see, because they're in marketing, the top of the funnel. Uh, this is what product marketing adds beyond cataloging and unifying and bringing it all together. Product marketing is bringing in top of the funnel people that are Actively buying are talking to salespeople. Right. That's pretty far down the buyer journey. Right. You're 40 to 60%. It gets more every year. Salesforce puts this out. But the percentage of a buyer's journey that happens before talking to a salesperson goes up and up every year. But it's around 60% of uh, the buyer's journey is done before they talk to a salesperson. It might even be up to 80%, I'm not sure. So bringing in these data points from top of funnel, people have never heard of you. People who don't know they have a problem yet aren't problem aware or maybe are problem aware and not solution aware yet. These are important data points because product can then go and figure out what are some of the deciding factors of solution aware prospects that we should build into the product so that it's more of a slam dunk into, you know, using and adopting it. What's the barrier to getting to value for people who are, who are solution aware? How are they comparing and selecting between products or what problems lead them to us? Could we make this more streamlined on the product side? Because if you can do that, it makes things easier in the sales front and you have a lot less of this. Like, well, we think you should build this so I can close my deal.

Carl Abbott: Yeah.

Austin Fuller: So those are some ideas and some of the ways that I look at, hey, how do we unify both what sales and product and marketing are seeing and also how product marketing can bring those together. Enrich the data a little bit from with top of the funnel insight to what product sees post sales and what sales is seeing, you know, kind of late in the buyer journey, but pre sales.

Carl Abbott: Yeah, no, thank you for that. That is great insight into that. And it will continue to be an area of friction as sales teams try to meet their numbers and product want to keep strategic directions on path. But it is great to see that product marketing offers insight that can help both sides get to where they need to go. Because ultimately we want sales to sell and sales doesn't want to see product get off vision most of the time. And it's, uh, just trying to run those two together.

Austin Fuller: Absolutely.

Carl Abbott: Another thing that I wanted to talk about is you kind of talked about sometimes you'll get product marketing people that need to play in both marketing and product. In my view, there's a lot of overlap between the functions. You're talking about talking to customers, doing surveys, trying to understand the market. Well, there's a lot of that that's needed from A product management perspective as well in your regard, uh, what is the best way to delineate between the product manager and product marketing manager responsibilities and where is the overlap that either could pick up?

Austin Fuller: Great question. So I've seen this divided so many ways and full transparency. I think a lot of the times the way it's actually decided practically, it's, it comes down to what does the product manager not want to do? And then they hire. Because very typically you're going to hire a product manager before a product marketing manager, depending on what stage you're at. What does the product manager not want to do? Okay, well we can carve those off, put it in product marketing. That's how I've, I've seen it like practically done. That's how it happens a lot of times. You can definitely be more intentional. So when looking at how to delineate product and product marketing, there is a lot of overlap. Product managers are some of the busiest people in the company and I think everyone would agree with that. At ah Exeger, it is nearly impossible to book time on the calendar for our product team. And that's a sentiment. Hopefully a lot of product managers are nodding their heads with yes, I am in meetings constantly, all day. I am fighting fires all the time because of that. You need to look at what is the most valuable way product managers should spend their time. What do they need to be doing? Are they spending time in like development and engineering discussions that maybe they shouldn't be having? One is, are they spending time where they shouldn't on the product side? But also two, like where do you need their decisions and their vision? And I think that like a lot of the time suck for like interviewing, uh, why I really like it as product marketing and why I really like keeping customer interviews and product marketing is a selfish reason. But I love to hear the actual words that customers are using and I don't want it diluted or filtered. I want the raw because that writes the best copy now. And copy that resonate, you know, and messaging that resonates comes from the mouth of peers of customers. So I'm selfish and I like to hold onto that one. But also I think that actually conducting the interviews is a massive time sink. So what product marketing can do is like where can product marketing collaborate with product to get questions and objectives and priorities and align with those and become an extension and a force multiplier for product. And I think you need to look at your product organization and think where are areas we're falling short that we would like to do better and where could we use a force multiplier? And that's going to be the best way to decide what's right for your product. Org. Earlier on in my career around the 2016s, we had a really large like UX UI research team and they did a ton of the interviews. It was really unnecessary for me to do interviews in product marketing because they recorded them all, they were all there, they were already doing all those interviews. I just had to get with them and say, hey, these are some things I would like you to ask how I would like you to ask it and present those questions. But you're right, there is a lot of overlap. It also depends on how you're measured as a product manager. You know, if you are measured by revenue for your different product lines, then you're going to have a lot of overlap with product marketing and want to work with them very closely because they're probably going to be driving revenue to your specific product line. That was how we, we did it at Viking Cloud when I was there. I don't know how they do it now, but you know, we were focused. Uh, we were doing a lot of research, but they were very invested in what types of campaigns are you writing, you know, what type of efforts are you conducting? Like how can we get more sales, more leads, more things coming in? How can we cross sell more? Because of that, they were very eager to get the product led, flow and journey built and done just because of the alignment on how they were measured and how performance was gained at that company. So look at how you're measured, look at areas you're falling short and then align product marketing as a force multiplier in those areas to make sure that you can cover those gaps. Apps like, those are the good principles to just get started and how you can like think about aligning product marketing and product. But I also think that if you want to get really specific, driving adoption, I think is a really easy thing for product marketing to do. That is a little bit harder for product management to do because I have access and sit with the marketing team and hopefully depending on the size of company, there are times where I'm sitting on the rights and permissions to go and execute campaigns, run ads, all of these things, right? I can just go do autonomously. And so the execution gap for me is a lot shorter. When you talk about driving adoption or getting people to re engage or like, you know, free users back into the platform, those things I can do really, really well because the execution gap is shorter. I can, I know the message, I know the customers and I have access to all the tools. I don't have to go and create a brief, ask someone who's running the ads to like go make the ads and then go do it. Oftentimes I can even just go make the ads or have access to the tools where the ads are stored, the templates are stored, change the message, download the ads, put them in the platform and run it. So that's an area where I think product marketing usually has an advantage. I've worked with a lot of product managers that don't want to interview customers and prospects personal preference. I know in general, like most product managers want to be in the market. That may not be it for you, but I usually take that one on product is very happy to hand it over to me in that regard just because again, it goes back to the. Well, we kind of delineate it based on things we don't want to do. I do think it is nice having it sit outside of product for a couple of reasons. Just because I'm more apt to go and distribute it instead of having it sit inside of like Confluence. But again, depends on your tech stack. I've just been able to put it in places where everybody can access it. And as long as you have a platform like that, it doesn't matter whether it sits with product ux, product marketing,

Carl Abbott: everybody can get it.

Austin Fuller: Yeah, it's fine. As long as it's not gatekept, it's really okay. So as far as the research side goes, I'm not sure it really matters. It can sit anywhere.

Carl Abbott: One thing you said, uh, a little while ago was talking about how product managers are some of the busiest people you've seen in a company. It's very difficult to get time on products calendar, which means that there can be problems with marketing and product management getting to work together. If you can't schedule the time to actually have those conversations and to make those connections, what are some of the consequences of not having a tight relationship between these two functions?

Austin Fuller: Very good question. So I think that's when you start to have things where messaging starts to not resonate. There's a lot of other symptoms of that, but if messaging was resonating and it suddenly isn't, one of the biggest symptoms is product launches don't go well. It becomes difficult to launch products and features when product and marketing aren't working well together. And this is. This sounds super cliche, but a lack of alignment with product and marketing creates a lot of dysfunction for the customer. And I don't think that that's seen a lot because it happens external and it manifests itself way too late in the process. But what happens is you start advertising and or selling something that you misrepresent what your product is or does and that becomes misaligned. And so the customer's experience isn't very good. That's probably the biggest risk that you run, right? That expectations for the customer become misaligned with what you can deliver, which results in churn. And whether that's marketing, selling or, you know, messaging, something that doesn't exist, or marketing and sales bringing people in that expect capability that isn't there, the customer can be surprised. And that's never a good thing. After you've made a technology investment, I think that's probably the biggest risk that you run of falling out of alignment. Why? I think product marketing is an important function because product marketing can sit at the table at marketing meetings and organizations and be involved with sales in ways that product maybe may not be able to. Hopefully they can and be that representative, that ambassador of product to other parts of the organization to at least keep general alignment. It may not be perfect all the time. Right. We all work in a very, again to be cliche, dynamic, fast paced, changing environment. Right. Things do change very quickly and are always changing seemingly. So that helps keep things in alignment to at least have a representative of product there, uh, as I said, an ambassador of sorts in those other meetings and functions.

Carl Abbott: It's a very interesting observation. I've been in situations where marketing and product management haven't been aligned, haven't really been trying to work together as well as they could and you feel internal tensions. You definitely see that, you get that there can be little spats that come up between the two groups. You get these things. But to then think about the fact that yeah, it actually does impact the customer later, not right now while the internal friction is going on, but later. There are these impacts that are actually then felt by the customer. We don't really think about that too much because it feels more like an internal operational thing of how do we get this to work better together or just how do we best operate in our own siloed platforms and not step on each other's feet too much and you don't really see or think about the uh, nasty impact later on. So that's really, really interesting to get that insight that the customer feels it eventually.

Austin Fuller: Yeah. And unfortunately the customer probably won't see it coming during the sales process. They're gonna Sign they're gonna get started and they're gonna go down the path, and then probably, I don't know, it depends on how much friction there is and what the expectations are. Right. But I don't know, probably a third of the way through the year, the buyer's journey, you know, your customer journey, they're gonna have a realization of, this is not what I signed up for. And for customer success, that's a really difficult hurdle to overcome. And the problem is, is that it's not gon. And it might. Okay, I won't say it's not. It might come out. They might say, hey, you know, I thought this was one thing, but it's totally not what I expected it was going to be. Sometimes customers aren't very transparent with customer success. And they say, hey, you know, we went with a competitor, they have a little more features, their price was better. Sometimes that insight is buried. And so that's a huge risk is you might have a whole customer segment that is not aligned to your product and you're setting yourself up to churn a bunch of people and you don't know to how well.

Carl Abbott: And you may have an interesting problem in that, yeah, you may be ready to churn these people, but you may also now have a feature backlog, a request backlog of things we need changed in your product to meet our use case that don't align with where you wanted it to go. But now, instead of being prospects that we could get, they're actually people that have paid. So now you're talking about actual revenue.

Austin Fuller: Yeah. And you might end up the other risk, like you're saying, is you go in a completely different direction, having to build something that this audience wants. Look, the opportunity cost of building something is not building everything else. Right. So if you build something to appease this customer segment, that means you're not building things that get you ahead of your competitors, not building things that the core audience wants or whatever. There's a lot of hypotheticals that we could draw through that scenario. Product and marketing absolutely need to be aligned. I don't mean to hurt sales feelings, and they're very important, and I don't want them to feel like they're not. I love sales. I came from a sales background. But in the modern buyer's journey, the battle for mindshare is one well before they talk to a salesperson or before they start sending prospecting emails and LinkedIn connections. So marketing is the tip, uh, of the spear, so to speak, in a lot of go to market strategies, so with that, marketing and product need to be aligned so that the expectations are right, so that the people that come into the product are aligned to the product and the use cases.

Carl Abbott: Absolutely. Thank you very much for that. That's a good insight there. So, one final question to kind, uh, of help our audience get to know you a little bit better, what hobby do you think would be a lot of fun to get into?

Austin Fuller: Ooh, what hobby do I think would be a lot of fun to get into? One hobby that I have always wanted to get into, that I have never pulled the trigger on, is scale model remote control submarines.

Carl Abbott: Wow.

Austin Fuller: Very specific, right? It is. I don't know if anyone else has ever said that on the show, but not, uh, yet.

Carl Abbott: I bet there's a subreddit for it.

Austin Fuller: You know what? There probably is. There's subreddit for everything, right? There are people that build scale model submarines that actually function, that have ballasts, that have tanks. They function. They're a submarine. You can submerse them. They are controlled underwater, uh, like, again, like a remote control car or remote control plane, but it's a submarine. One of the things that's really interesting about the hobby and why it's not very widespread is because it's not very accessible. And again, why I haven't partaken yet is the accessibility factor. You typically have to build the submarine part. It's not like a car or plane where the airframe's built, or, you know, even the balsa wood ones where they have parts.

Carl Abbott: Parts.

Austin Fuller: You get the pumps and the ballast and those sorts of things. But you have to do all the math and figure out how big do I make the tanks. I got to draw these schematics. You can hire somebody to build it for you, but you're missing out on, like, 30% of the hobby.

Carl Abbott: So the scale of this. Are we talking something that, like, fits in an aquarium on a desk, or are we talking like, you've got to go to the local lake to deploy this once you build it?

Austin Fuller: Yeah, yeah. Like public part. So that's another interesting thing. A lot of times they'll have gatherings, they'll have shows and expos where people will bring boats and submarines and maybe helicopters or something, but where they'll do them at, like, really large pools or aquatic centers. But, yeah, a lot of time it's a public park, it's a lake, it's whatever. You can build it to the size that you want, I should say. But these are fairly large. Like, a lot of these models are like three to six feet in length. Right. They're pretty substantial. But I find the entire thing absolutely fascinating. It's a hobby that I'm not in that I. I definitely want to get into. My son is captivated by videos on YouTube of these submarines just going underwater, surfacing later. People go crazy. There's even ones that actually, like, fired, like, little torpedoes. And. And that's kind of one of the things that really interests me is how do you take something that's been really well engineered at a scale. Right. Like a real submarine, and how do you scale it down? How does the system scale down? What are the things you have to consider when scaling this down? You know, I can't source carbon fiber and titanium, so what are my materials I could use? What is affordable for my budget? You know, do I make it out of wood? Do I make it out of plastic? Do I 3D print things? It seems like a really fun puzzle to solve. And if you solve the puzzle, you have something that's very unique. You have a scale replica submarine that submerges itself and surfaces again.

Carl Abbott: That is very cool. Yeah. Well, you'll have to let us know if you, uh, get one built and actually get it tested or anything. That would be awesome to see.

Austin Fuller: Yeah, I got to find my local group that does it and get involved with them for sure.

Carl Abbott: Well, thank you so much, Austin, for your time today and for talking about this important connection between product marketing and product management. I really appreciate the conversation we've had.

Austin Fuller: Absolutely, Carl, thank you.

Carl Abbott: This episode of Productly Speaking was brought to you by the letters P and M. If you enjoyed our conversation, be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Share this podcast with your friends and anyone who loves a good story about product management. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Feedback. Visit us at www.productlyspeaking.com. drop us an email at helloroductlyspeaking uh.com or join the discussion on matrix@productlyspeaking matrix.org thank you for tuning in and ah, we'll catch you next.