Episode 74: Kate Obiidykhata - How To Drive Product Success Beyond the Launch Day

Kate Obiidykhata: I truly believe the launch day is really uh, least important activity within the whole product launch process. And yeah, the launch campaign, I would treat it as the uh, let everyone know that yeah, we're ready, uh, let's begin the work. The hardest work just starts in educating, collecting feedback and understanding how in the most efficient way to get to the point that you set up at the beginning.

Luis Liu: You are listening to. This is Product Marketing brought to you by Product Marketing Hive, a product marketing community that gives back. I'm your host, Luis Liu, Product Marketing Hive and this podcast is supported by Product Marketing Edge, a technology product marketing consulting firm. In this episode, Kate Obi Diharta, Group product marketing manager at Percona, shares her thoughts on how product market managers can become a strategic driver of product success. Hey Kate, welcome to the show.

Kate Obiidykhata: Hi Louis, nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Luis Liu: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your product marketing journey.

Kate Obiidykhata: It started about 12 years ago when I just got into IT and marketing in general. Back then I didn't know that such role exist at all. I broadly knew about um, marketing in general, but I realized that it is one of the most creative and interesting jobs so far I faced back then. And I also was quite passionate about IT business in general. So that was one of the easiest um, entry point uh, for me back then. My career grows from manager, um, then to head of marketing uh through like being familiar with all of the different roles within the marketing. I realized that PMM is something that really uh, excites me when you basically driving the strategy. So for me it's the most rewarding role. So after growing in the general marketing I decided that I want to make let's say ah, a step side and um, kind of understand uh, what I want to do like with the rest of my marketing career in the future. And basically yeah I picked PMM as it was one of the most interesting, challenging for me back then. A ah, topic. I realized that I need to learn more, uh, how to communicate with a different department, how to drive the strategy, what it consists of all of this like complex system. Back then for me it was like super complicated and I decided yeah, I want to just do this challenge. So that was my beginning.

Luis Liu: Thank you. Uh, I'm glad you found your passion for product marketing. So currently you are a group product marketing manager at Percona. Tell us a little bit more about this role and responsibility.

Kate Obiidykhata: Right, so I'm um, driving go to market success at Percona for specifically cloud native products, which is a few software products, specifically open source and a set of services together it combines uh, in like packages, solutions and um. Interesting thing and quite challenging is that I have to drive both strategy for the software itself where it really relies on the community success and different other factors with a quite technical audience and in the same time assure that our sales team is enabled with all tools to actually generate like profit with the services part. So yeah I'm responsible for that part of the business of GTM strategy. Quite challenging but at the same time very interesting.

Luis Liu: From your experience regarding product marketing, this function or this role in a company, um, what do you think it actually plays?

Kate Obiidykhata: If you will read about the PMM role that you will notice is that it's in the middle of all the departments. And this is really the unique thing of this role where you basically you sit within the marketing but you actively um interact with uh other departments and not just interact, not just inform the strategy but you have to heavily collaborate and drive the actual projects with the sales team, with the product team, with the engineers team and align it all to executives and also be a fundamental department and base for the growth marketing as they're relying on you as truth of source. Yeah, I would agree that PMM um sits uh in between of all of those role but I would always align to the sales team as a northern star. When you have to prioritize or pick uh from like plenty of different projects how to understand what you should do first I would always prioritize sales interest for PMM as in the product side. We also have quite strong allies as the product managers and we should be covering this be a backup for the sales team making sure they absolutely enabled.

Luis Liu: When people hear about product launch oftentimes they think it's about the product launch day. But I remember our intro conversation, you said that launch day is actually the least important part in the entire product launch.

Kate Obiidykhata: Why do you think that I'm sharing this for someone? Not very popular thought but I truly believe it's really uh least important activity within the whole product launch process. Because imagine to prepare to the launch day you usually work in advance the whole team, the whole like in some if it's startup the whole company works for that day. Meaning that you're prepared. Basically only thing that you have to do for the launch day is just distribute everything in the right way. That's it. You already have uh, your materials, um, booked activities, campaigns. Yeah, just press and distribute. Uh, but while many companies treat this like really accomplishment well we just you know launched it. I would say this is a little bit wrong Approach where you have to be just be ready to start working hard at this day as ah, this is the day where either it is better or it is actual general availability stage of the product. This is the time when you are making sure that everything you've been creating so far is actually with line, with the real expectations, with the real customer needs. And since this day you will be charged revenue wise. And this is very important to stay ahead of any changes or misunderstanding or problems. To be able quickly give an answer to executives, to the team and just in general to understand what doesn't work if your projections doesn't work. And answers uh, like store doesn't align some features doesn't work. All of those things should be figured out in advance. And if they're not and in many cases it goes like wrong. We're all human. It's quite hard to predict everything um by 100% but you just need to be ready to talk to customers a lot, collect that feedback and quickly incorporate it and make sure that product actually meeting customers expectation. Because at this moment yeah you're judged by revenue and your expenses to this on this product and launch and everything.

Luis Liu: You also mentioned that many SaaS launches fell after the actual launch day. So in your opinion what goes wrong here?

Kate Obiidykhata: Yeah, so that's exactly this trick that I personally seen many times when team put so uh much effort and rely on the launch day on like something that is. Well now everything will be you know automatically we are launching the product and customers will just use it. Obviously we will just you know run some campaign and that's it. But the reality is that it is absolutely new product and depends on the circumstances. Either it's competitive uh environment or it's just the new solution to the problem that's right now customer solving in some other way. The hardest work just starts in educating, collecting feedback and understanding how in the most efficient way to get to the point that the two set up at the beginning. And from my experience uh, when people pricing like start the campaign, launch the awareness, publish this PR blog post, they're kind of relaxing. We just distributed everything and um, this is the wrong approach because exactly one month after that you will see that your blog post does not generate traffic anymore and your PR campaign just uh, either finished either in the middle. But you can't drive the PR launch campaign for all the time. And yeah, you just need to start the product growth right from this moment and uh, not wait till customers will just sign up for um right from the launch campaign. And yeah the launch campaign I would treat it as the uh basically just let everyone know that yeah we're ready uh let's begin the work. We are ready for your feedback, we're ready for a trial test and we're ready to become better based on your expectations. And yeah that's how I would treat it.

Luis Liu: Sometimes product marketers are not involved very early or early enough in product development process. In your opinion how much does that impact the success?

Kate Obiidykhata: Uh yeah been facing such I would say miscommunication not like role uh mismatch of what like you can call it how you would like it. But yeah when the marketing jump quite late on that like specifically pmm I would say that's the root cause of many fails many problems in the future. The but the reason for that when the PMM plays not proactive but kind of reactive role within the company in general. And imagine you got on your plate some almost like ready research product even like at some point maybe MVP or uh alpha uh stage. You are basically been told that all uh research been done. We prove the theory and everything. And yeah just pick up from the stage of the alpha or beta or like requirements and this is where the actual process goes wrong. When the product marketing manager takes this as like the truth as takes this initiative as already proven concept. Unless you've been already shown the numbers and in my experience people avo this and showing just like because you. You can work with metrics how you like you can. You can really if to try. You can show that this uh. You can find the metrics that would support some theory uh or you can find uh some evidences that this is really needed and you really need to work with someone I wouldn't say antagonist but someone who will try to disapprove this theory who to argue to. Because if you are taking everything as a truth. If you are like basically agree to all the concepts that being brought to your table. You are then putting your end user into this role the role of the first evaluator. So all the objections should be tackled as early as possible. And in my experience how it works if it is a tech company either PM or engineer someone been working on the concept testing, talking to a few users and then bring it as the kind of ready to work with project to the marketing side without enough evidences. And I've been in different situations when I had to drive the marketing initiative for such product and it was then extremely painful to uncover those concept mismatch with the real uh market expectations later on because all the job been done and the whole company thinks that we are on the right track. And you have to tell the truth that no we are not in the right track. And basically I disagree with many folks in your organization. It was quite hard. And in the same time I've been in positions where in the like at the very beginning I had a chance proactively jump into the research and prove that we don't have unfortunately enough evidences to make significant investment in that unless you guys uh show me that like something that I missed. So yeah my stance on this. The PMM should be proactive here and it is very rarely when someone would come to you and say hey we are now initiating the project and just be ready that uh, like in a couple quarters we will bring something for you to the table. Usually they just working on their own. And it is your pain to make sure you aligned with all other departments and with technical department product, uh manager department agenda, making sure that your goals align with theirs.

Luis Liu: Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit more about the story where I guess the marketing you were not involved early during the ideation. It kind of like you said it was kind of painful process you had to go through. Can you tell us a little bit more about um what happened as well is how did you address this situation in the end.

Kate Obiidykhata: Right. So m can't tell the exact name of the product but um. I can describe the whole situation. When I uh joined like the initiative, the launch already when all the research has been done, uh all the concept being internally approved and the team were leading in a specific direction and I was discussing just yeah I just had to do this heavy lifting with bringing this to the market uh in their circumstances that like I've been put it to. But as more I was talking to end users as more I was doing the my research uh within like the market. Um I realized that we are. We're missed a few important points. While the product itself is just brilliant but and it does solve uh the pain point the problem and it's great solution like that um not exist on the market nowadays. So yeah the idea is brilliant, product is great. But then it was the mismatch with the GTM plan in general. We were completely missing the targeting Personas. We were trying to target those people who would be the antagonist in the organization we were targeting. And um another thing that we were trying competing in the absolutely wrong niche where you have like the market of open source SaaS products and big corporations. It is quite hard to bring product from one niche and compete in the battlefield of the like big corporates or at least like SaaS products who have heavy investment behind it. So there is a different rules for different games on the different battlefields. I would say if uh, you have some heavy corporation behind you and you have those resources to play aggressively, that's absolutely different games and all of that should be considered in your strategy. Otherwise ah, after like years of development, like year or two have investment of all the company resources, you will realize that you are not catching up with those rules, that it require more resources and you already expect some returns but it's too early. You just can't afford those uh game rules as other place on this market ah set. So that was the issue I faced and my role was clearly not just saying hey it doesn't work because you do not talk in such ways regarding like business case. You should put real numbers, real reasons if it doesn't work quite exactly the pipeline mismatch, what our end users saying, uh, what exactly the revenue of those companies who are saying those things about us. So you have to quantify absolutely each piece of evidence to bring it to the table and say hey this is what our target audience says, this is what they're ready to pay or this is uh what they're ready to commit to and this is what we're asking them to, this is what we are saying in our strategy internally and here is where the mismatch and if we will proceed in this path, this is uh what we lose and this what it will take to change the actual strategy. And in that case uh, it was complete strategy change. We had to basically change as I said the playing field for that uh product and not uh trying to put features and capabilities to beat like the heavy players on the market but regroup our efforts to community level that would adopt this product. That's what we actually did and I can see that product is now growing.

Luis Liu: Earlier uh, you just talked about translating this technical feature roadmap into a uh more revenue related or go to market perspective roadmap. Can you tell us a little bit more about the process, what does it look like and the impact?

Kate Obiidykhata: It is something that I wasn't doing during all my career and just started at my existing company and I found that it is extremely helpful thing and serves like extra sales enablement when you have a separate PM team engineer stack that delivers uh functionality to the market and and you have the commercial part that generates the revenue with this functionality, with these new features and how it uh usually works. Tech rolls something out. They just Say to marketing, hey, that's time to market this. They make general announcement. Sales team looks at this depends on the product technology and how. What is the level of um, like uh, complications behind that? I believe the PMM role to make sure that all of that, all of new functionality, all of new technologies, all the innovations within your product brought to sales people a few times in the right wording. Uh, and in a way they can actually use it. Not just we just released this feature. Look at it, it is so cool. Now customers can do A, B, C. No, that's not enough. How it compared to our competitors feature? What uh, competitors users say about the feature, what our XYZ customers said about this feature. Who exactly were uh, demanding it? What's the reason? What's the business pain behind it? All of these questions bring to the table the real user story that that sales team can leverage for revenue generation later. And it is in your interest to make sure that they get full list of benefits out of this launch. How I would suggest to do that based on my experience is to own the gtm, uh roadmap or specifically targeted sales depends obviously on the product. In my case it's always some heavy technical stuff and you need to have some place where the sales team would click and see what he can promise to the prospects to be delivered in this and this and this time. And yeah, the GTM roadmap is more sales oriented and focused to the revenue.

Luis Liu: So let's say if a product marketer they wanted to move from being a launch manager to a more strategic role in this whole journey, what kind of important skills do you think they should develop?

Kate Obiidykhata: This is important question for every marketer that want to grow. I would say that being proactive but yeah, I would elaborate on this a little bit more. What does it mean for PMM to be proactive? Uh, there is usually a set of specific responsibilities that people expect you to do to cover. And it is always a lot of projects on your plate and there is always will be a huge backup. But this um, skill to understand what is actually important and what will be important in specific time. This is just the key to the success I would say and how to carry this tool, how to learn how to use it. You need to prioritize and you need to allocate time for researchers to bring the market insights internally to the company, to executives, to people who make a decision within your organization with a specific solution. So this productivity together with allocating a free time for you to go and do a proper research to stay on top of the things. This is the key element to the growth. I would say otherwise you will always just catch up, just do good enough. But what is actually uncover the growth to think outside of the box and to bring something that other people was not paying attention to be the person who sees, see what it is important and what is not and it's quite hard. You need to allocate time for that. You need to allocate time to think, do the research and say hey guys, this is what is really important. Uh, when you do this exercise couple times people start seeing in you a strategic ah, asset to the business. Not um, just um, task taker.

Luis Liu: Yeah, that's very helpful. So we're getting to the end of our time here. Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to share?

Kate Obiidykhata: Um yeah, the final thoughts and summary would be. Is uh PMM is the great role if someone just evaluates um should, should you go there? I would say this what enables you with a big hard skills a uh lot of techniques ah and at the same um, the soft skills to communicate and collaborate and deliver actual results in crowded uh, you know, corporate environment. So um, I would say this is um, amazing role. We need new PMMs, we need drive success within this position. Uh, and um. Yep. Uh, would love to hear anyone's thoughts on our today's discussions, what they think, if it was helpful and if someone may argue you with some ideas.

Luis Liu: Thank you, thank you for joining us.

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