How a Guy Who Graded Film Got Tricked Into Product Marketing w/ Jason Druss

Speaker A: We are podcasts for product markets and B2B SaaS who feel misunderstood of what

Speaker B: they do from someone who truly gets

Speaker C: what you do and basically help you feel less like a misfit, being unignorable in your role.

Speaker B: All right, what is up, everybody? We've got another episode of We're Not Marketers and a one of a kind guest today. And before we do the intros, we got to give a little bit of insight on who we are, in case you haven't heard of us yet. So I'll kick it off, got Eric Holland, the Franken marketer of the group, sliding it over to Zach for his intro.

Speaker A: Hey, hey, everyone, this is Zach. Uh, the sales water lab on the mic. Let's pass it over to Gab.

Speaker C: Gab, Sales deck, Internet still doing sales deck. Bringing up, uh, back to Eric.

Speaker B: Yeah, one day we're gonna kill those things for good, but maybe that'll be season six. So now we've got the band of misfits out of the way, we are gonna roll it over into why we're all actually here to listen this episode. So I'm gonna give you a little bit of context here. Most of us come into the PMM world as product marketers. We have some sort of energy and pull towards that space. But here we've got someone who's actually been cherry picked out of the ICP lane and pulled directly into product marketing because they said, hey, you're killing it, man. You know exactly what our customers need, how they feel, what they want. Why don't you just become a product marketer? Welcome, everyone. Jason Druss, former colorist and now product marketer at Adobe. Welcome.

Speaker D: Thank you, Eric. Zach, Gab, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker A: Happy, uh, to have you on, Jason.

Speaker B: Yeah, man. Really excited. And honestly, I've had you in my. Like, we gotta get him on sites for a while. Now we can talk to 10 different product marketers and get a very similar story on how they have lived their career. But coming outside of product marketing, and from my understanding, even getting actually pulled in there and asked to do it as opposed to being interested in it, I thought it would be a great topic for us to dig into. But before we talk about any of that, there is one question that we always ask our guests, and we let the man with the mustache do it. So, Gab, take it over.

Speaker C: Thank you, Jason. Our product marketers.

Speaker B: Marketers. Why or why not?

Speaker D: I've been thinking about this. I've been prepping, thinking about this. I've been on both sides of the fence. I keep going back and forth and the conclusion I have come to is that this is a very loaded question because what is a, uh, marketer, right at the end of the day, we're all storytellers. That's what we're really doing. We're telling stories, uh, about the value we can provide a customer with a product. And sometimes that story is more emotional and directly user facing. And sometimes that story is, is woven into the thread of how do I get this person to open this email or get my click through rate higher or to get this decision maker to sign on to a deal to a, uh, B2B SaaS product. But whether you're more on that B2B SaaS side of product marketing, that's a lot more enterprise focused or whether you're more inbound and directly like in the hub of product development, at the end of the day, if I really had to pick one, I'd say yeah, at the end of the day because we are bringing products to market and we are responsible for ushering in that story and making sure that the positioning and the messaging is razor sharp across the dozens of channels it can go through. So we are marketers, but before we're marketers, we're storytellers. And that's why it's a tricky question. And I think that's the special thing about the craft and discipline of product marketing. Because we probably are marketers, but we are able to truly represent the product, represent the voice of the customer and lean on our storytelling and creative skills before leaning too much on the idea of just being a marketer.

Speaker A: That's incredible. Guys, I have two questions for you real quick here. Jason, to that piece, like you're the first person that's actually said we're not this, but this is who we are. No, actually you're the second person. I think Yihuan was the first who came in like business strategists. So with the first piece here around storytelling, I'm curious from your point, like with every story we write as product marketers, who should be the main character? The product or the customer?

Speaker D: The customer. The user. I don't even like to say the word customer. I think the word customer is icky and cringy. Customer gives me the ick. User. Someone who has a problem that finds a solution through the product that we're making and marketing. Yeah, user, absolutely. Always first and foremost.

Speaker A: Got it. And here's my second question for you. One thing I really struggle in, when in previous in house Roles when as product marketers we want to craft that story around the user. And a lot of times we're getting feedback of really leading with the product, of really talking about the features, talking about the capabilities. And something that I've noticed that's really hard is that, uh, then we lose who is this being built for? I'm curious if that's something you've noticed in your day to day or previous roles too as a product market yourself, or if this is just solely a me problem.

Speaker D: Yeah, no, that's a good one. When it comes to like features, I feel like it's really easy to get lost in the weeds of feature. Like sometimes when I'm working on a product launch or if I'm like in the development phase or crafting market requirements to figure out how we're going to build some or why we should build something and why now. Um, it's really easy to get over indexed on like the feature. Right. That's our world. When we take ourselves out of our own shoes, we truly put ourselves in our customer shoes. Um, customers don't. Oh, I caught myself saying customers, users, sometimes they don't care about features, they care about workflow, they care about user experience. And especially in Pro video workflow is a very key term. So I like to think in terms of workflow. If we're doing a new color management feature in Premiere Pro that allows video editors to normalize their log video faster and more efficiently than they ever have before with less confusion and more confidence, I'm not just thinking about that feature. I'm thinking about every step they get to before, during and after. That makes their overall workflow experience better than what it was before.

Speaker B: You know what's funny? You might know this. I came from Lucid Link, so I've got an affinity for the creative world a lot more than most. And that was the first time I've ever heard the term workflow. And I fought. I don't know. Uh, yeah. Oh yeah. Because I came from manufacturing before that. So workflow was not for the roofers who get up on your Home Depot and lay down commercial roofing for three weeks and then move on to their next. I do believe that is exactly how people think. They may not use that term workflow, but that is exactly how they're viewing software products and how that fits into their world in terms of everything's built within the workflow. There's multiple steps within the workflow. Where can we insert ourselves and be different?

Speaker D: Yeah, I think it's always been an Inherent belief ever since I first started getting into product marketing, from my first role at, ah, Frame IO, the collaboration, review and approval and creative work management, platform and application. Um, but when you're doing video, when you're doing anything, really, even if you're targeting a user who is looking for a B2B SaaS app, looking to close more deals or expand their pipeline or figure out a way to, I don't know, amplify the way they sell insurance, it could be anything. There are literally billions of variations of small independent choices that any user can make from how the product fits into their overall experience of how they live their life and how they do their job. And then within that product also, you have even more variations of where you could go, what you could do, what button you click on. I think all of that complete path, that journey, that's workflow. So, yeah, we love that term a lot because in Pro Video, there's a lot you can do. There's lots of formats you can shoot with cameras you can use editing platforms, you can go with decisions you make inside the app to tell your story and to make art, but it's all workflow.

Speaker B: Uh, so you mentioned Frame IO and a lot of our listeners may not know this, but go ahead and look up their famous campaign camera to Cloud. And really what that was a new workflow step in which you could go directly from shooting something on scene to getting it immediately in the cloud so people can start editing it, reviewing it, whatever kind of that next step in the workflow was. So, Jason, I know you were there during that period when Frame IO was really hot, really taken off, and eventually got acquired by Adobe. So walk me through that and how you saw that transpiring.

Speaker D: Absolutely, yeah. Camera to Cloud is one slice of the pie. That about, uh, everything that makes Frame IO incredible and amazing. Um, but working as a colorist for over a decade, when you send a piece of work to someone to review, what you end up getting is text message, email threads, Excel spreadsheets with incorrect timecode on when you need to go in and fix the look on Tom's face. And you're like, I'm not that connected to the production. I haven't been working on this on five, five months like you folks have. Who's Tom? I'm just seeing images in front of me. The beauty of Frame IO is that it centralizes every single revision and decision around the creative work itself, whether it's a video or a photo or a design or a document. Um, and the tools are extremely efficient for the video editors because they're directly integrated into the editors you're using. And it's also really easy and simple to use for producers and stakeholders and people who aren't super technical. And everyone has the surface of their choice, the product and the, uh, app comes to you where you are, and you can collaborate and make these decisions together. And you end up slicing and reducing so much churn and so much nonsense out of the workflow. In a world where budgets are smaller, creatives have to make more work than ever before. The special thing about camera to Cloud is that the company decided to take a really big swing and just took a step back and noticed, like, hey, what? Whether you were shooting on film in the year 1920 or you're shooting on an 8K movie or ad in 2025, there's about a day that goes by before the people who. Before the people who work with the content can get the content from the people who shoot the content. And we call that term dailies. And even most people outside of film and television are familiar with that term dailies. And we thought, what if you could take the clip from the camera and instead of taking the SD card or the mag and dumping it onto 20 different hard drives and shipping those hard drives all over the world and then sending it to a lab for it to be processed before the video editors get it, what if you could just shoot the content straight into a secure professional cloud designed for creatives and their producers and stakeholders and executives. And that way, hypothetically, you could have an editor in Los Angeles, a production in New York, and by the time the production in New York is finished, wrapping up their gear, the Edge editing team in LA already has a rough cut of the project ready to go. And if you are a remote stakeholder, watching the dailies flow in, you can catch critical components or critical messages or critical errors that you can then comment on frame and fix and say, hey, by, oh, nope, supposed to be a red lamp, not a yellow lamp. This is very important for the brand campaign, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a really cool technology. And now it's like it's natively embedded camera to cloud in a bunch of Fujifilm and Canon and Panasonic cameras. If you're a video nerd, if you have an Atomos device that works in that. And yeah, the whole frame IO product just fascinated me. And I was a very early user of it, an early adopter, way back in 2016, 2017 when it first launched. And at that time I had my Boutique that I called good grades was like a color boutique in Philly and I ran the entire infrastructure of my small business off of it.

Speaker B: What I got most from that, like hearing it from you firsthand was they didn't just go and jump and create the category of camera to cloud, right? Like they identified this major problem and then you went and said, and then they thought of this idea of putting it into this, you know, custom made cloud for it, right? You start with this core problem and identify the workflow and then you go and say hey, how could we solve that? What is the feature that we built for all of our listeners? I just, I really hope you get some time, listen a little bit more of what Jason just walked through and then go to take a look at their camera to cloud campaign and how it really changed the trajectory of their business.

Speaker A: Jason, I have two questions. I want to take a second to zoom m out here because one, I'm not a, I'm not a video creative buff right here. So I'm going to be listening to this recording twice to m get to your level maybe three times or four, first thing you messaged about you earlier was workflow. One thing like I've heard of workflows too as uh, you're one of your competitors Dropbox working there. One challenge I've observed is that workflow tends to become jargon because when you might ask a product marketer or product person you say hey, describe this video approval workflow from the user point of view. I'll be candid with you, I couldn't articulate that. And I'm curious like what's your observations of what that's looked like when you've worked cross functionally.

Speaker D: So that leads into one of my, I guess one of my spicy takes on product marketing and that's if our job is to represent the voice of the customer and if our job is to represent the best interest of the user and the product throughout, cross functionally throughout every form of ideation, to development, to positioning and messaging, go to market and then post launch analysis for success metrics. Metrics, pardon me. If that's our job, then we need to eat, live and breathe the product. And a product marketer should inherently be not only an expert in how to use the product, but an expert in what users need today, what they're going to need in five years from now and what is the current status of the never ending chess game that we're playing with alternatives on the market and with new emerging technologies that are coming out for our users, I think it's then and only then you can have an ultimate depth for customer empathy. The way we call it. We lean on that term a lot. Customer empathy, the way that ties into your question, Zach on like how do you talk about workflow moving it to like Premiere Pro, the number one pro video editing app in the world. That's the app that I'm on right now. I think of the needs of our users and how they have shifted dramatically in the past five, 10 to 10 years. I think about the history of Premiere Pro and the target markets and users that it supported for most of its existence. Like Premiere Pro was like the pro app that you would use for if you were a long form video editor and you knew that if you were getting something color corrected, you would always hand it off to a colorist. You'd hand off the sound to a sound mixer, you'd hand off the graphics to a motion designer and you just focused on the editing. But that's not the world that video editors live in anymore. It is the complete opposite. Everyone is working end to end. Short form is king with outputs going to social media. Users are in this very complex app and they have to figure out I shot with this very advanced footage. I have to do all of this work myself throughout the complete video editing workflow. How do I deal with this as a rookie, as an intermediate user, as an advanced pro or as an industry veteran? What choices can I make when it comes to importing media management, my video editing, my audio mixing, my color grading? How am I incorporating assistive and generative AI into my workflow? Where do I want that in my workflow? How do I cross the line between what's busy work in tedium that's prone to be accelerated through AI and what's. What are those crafts where it's no, don't touch that. That's my job. This is where my human creativity comes into the mix where I don't want to be touched. When you are able to understand the customer, when you routinely communicate and spend like half of your day talking with customers, I think you're then able to take that term workflow and be and be authentic with it without throwing it out as jargon. And we're human, it'll be jargon. Sometimes I love saying the word workflow. Said it for the past 20 years or so. But it's through that boiling it down. It's through that true product and industry and user knowledge that allows us to use a term like workflow with the care and attention that it deserves to truly provide our users with the solutions that they need to get that product market fit. And that's what our jobs are all about.

Speaker A: I love how you casually dropped in Premiere Video, number one video editing app in the world. I'm like, uh, this. My M. The salesperson hat picked that up.

Speaker B: So I'm like, hey, you see his pillow? You see his pillow back there? You guys might have not peeped it because he's got the blur on, but I see it. That's the Premiere Pro logo on a pillow. That's pretty badass.

Speaker D: I bought that pillow. Uh, yeah, I bought that pillow the day that I learned that I was being promoted and being moved over from Frame IO to Premiere Pro. And After Effects, it actually has an After Effects logo on the other side. But that was my. Like, I got the job. I'm buying a pillow.

Speaker A: I hope you expense it back to the company, because I'm a. That's your. You shouldn't be buying no pillow for people.

Speaker B: Yeah, you put in the promotional bucket for finance. That's great.

Speaker A: Jason, here's my question for you. What I really so like, I love that piece of Talk to the customers to understand the workflow. 1. One former client I was working with, they had a tagline and they were a payroll platform that says payroll that automates itself like it will do everything. And they're talking to customers, they're talking to users. They are, uh, this product is built for them. But then it seemed like there was a gap of, hey, like payroll, that should do everything to what you're saying. There's. The product should be injected in certain parts of the workflow and allow the user to collaborate because there's going to be some instances where you got to step in. So going back to that customer talking to customer piece, what are we missing? Are we not asking the right questions? Are we not listening?

Speaker D: Yeah, totally. We all know talking to users is one of the most important parts of our job. To gain insights on where we can increase our messaging, increase the outbound marketing side, but also tie in deeper with executives with product management, with design, with engineering, with program management on the inbound dev side to influence the overall business strategy. Because I also believe fundamentally that we are business strategists, and my team is very lucky and fortunate to have an impact on business strategy for the video business at Adobe. And that's because we're so customer obsessed and customer focused. We communicate with customers and users at a deep level. When we do our product launches, they're normally at these Field marketing events either a trade show. We show up every year to the Sundance Film Festival and have a big announcement. We have Adobe Max and in a couple months. And while we're there doing the launch, we hold meetings and we hold retreats where we get all of our customers in and we spend days with them at a time. I have a WhatsApp thread on my phone with a, uh, private NDA community of hundreds of users that we routinely connect with. Even just so much as, hey, we're thinking about this thing. If we did something like this, like, we're thinking about it like, like this, what do you folks think? And you get the immediate raw feedback on that reaction. We have weekly webinars where we invite these users to come talk and hang out with us about something that we are about to put in public beta, something that we're recruiting for a private beta. All of these users are in our private and public betas when we're with them and when we're talking to them. And I think, Zach, this is the most important part. We're not just talking about the product. We're not just talking about what feature or workflow can we make to serve you. We're asking questions like, hey, how is business? How are you finding jobs? How are you getting jobs? What's better than it was 5 years ago? What's worse than it was 5 years ago? What'S the state of the industry that you're facing right now? The pro video world is in a transition phase in a transition period right now. And lots of the economics are shifting rapidly around everything from the world's largest enterprises, to the recent college grad who is determined to become a professional video editor, to the graphic designer who decides that she's going to make TikToks and long form, like 20 minute YouTube videos because she wants to make a personal brand that's going to empower her entire career outside of her 9 to 5. We're asking questions about, like, how can we help you make content to help you monetize yourself? We're challenging our hypotheses that have been standing for a long time about, like, how do artists and creatives and pro video editors and filmmakers, how do you make money? Is it just you get a job and you do a job using our app and then you give a video output? Or is it so much deeper than that? How can we serve you there and what are your needs? It's by asking the zoomed out, holistic question, what? Not only what do you need in your product? What do you need in your life and your career right now? And we take it through that lens. And that's why over all of these years, and especially in recent years when I've been on the team, pretty much every single significant major and small quality of life update we put out in Premiere Pro and After Effects, it's directly related from user feedback, and we make sure we validate that through every phase of the process. Like, we have just an army of users who are helping us steer the ship along with us. And it's through remaining user obsessed that we're able to create products and workflows and launches that customers love.

Speaker C: I love that. Uh, and it's so key, right? Like, the more you talk to them, the more you talk to users, to customers, the easier it is to create something they care about, instead of being in a fog of world when it's just feature and then you're. You're doing the opposite of. We launch something, we try to find people to buy it, Just find stuff people want to buy and launch it afterward, right?

Speaker A: Yeah. And there was one tactic that really quick you mentioned here that I think is really cool to call out private WhatsApp group with your users. I was like, what?

Speaker B: We're already doing it.

Speaker A: I was like, you're the first person I've ever, ever heard that says, yo, we have a WhatsApp group just to talk with our users before we put something out the door. And that. And that's like a shift for me where if I ever were to, like, do this over again, I want to do what Jason just mentioned here. I'm like, yo, guys, we got to create this WhatsApp group. And we, we got, we just got to get the band together. Shout out to you if you want to give me roses on that. Really quick.

Speaker C: It just makes so much sense because you said, even if it's a big company, it feels crappy. I think this is a perfect example of that. Right? Having a WhatsApp group with users, I think is the definition of being scrappy to shift gear a little bit. I have two questions for you. So the first one, you said that earlier you were in Philly, you were a colorist there, working for yourself, if I'm not mistaken. I'm trying to just put out the timeline of you working for yourself, going to Frame, Hire and ending up at Adobe. So I want to clarify that a little bit. And then the second question is, you're part of one of the few PMM who has been their own icp. How would you Consider that being an unfair advantage in your work today. If, if that's the case.

Speaker D: Oh, okay. Oh, good. I'm gonna Tarantino that and start at the end. I'm gonna loop back to that beginning. But I'll say it's an advantage. It can also be a disadvantage if you're not very careful. But we'll hop back to the start now. But yeah. Originally my first job, I worked at a company called Blackmagic Design. They make an app called DaVinci Resolve. They also make, they make cameras, they make video switchers. They make a whole bunch of stuff. And I had a dream of being a film colorist. It was the only thing I cared about in the entire world. And I was committed to becoming a colorist. And you apply to jobs at post houses and you start as a runner. I couldn't afford to live in New York City on that, on, on that salary. I was having a hard time finding a way to just break into the industry as a complete outsider. So as a, as an obsessed user, I found myself getting a job at blackmagic driving a, uh, Mercedes Sprinter van up and down the east coast giving demos. And over the course of my five years at blackmagic, I helped my role there got a lot deeper. But my role was called product specialist back then. And I had a mentor. A mentor. His name was, his name is Paul Saccony. I work with him at, uh, Adobe now. And he is one of those guys who was like the product marketing lead for Apple Final Cut 2 through 7, like back in the day. And just like a veteran and a maverick for like pro video product development and marketing. And he took me under his wing and he taught me a lot of stuff. But I was at blackmagic to be a colorist. I was moonlighting at NFL Films, doing their Sunday game day overnight shift. I had my own boutique in Philly. Good grades. And I was working full time at blackmagic. And then I got my actual first time full time colorist job as a senior colorist at WarnerMedia, which is now Warner Brothers Discovery. After that, conglomerate shifted. So I was in Atlanta actually for a couple years working on stuff for HBO Max and Turner Classic Movies and TNT and CNN and NBA tv, all the Turner properties. And I thought I was going to sit in that chair for the rest of my life because you find a studio colorist job like that, like you don't leave under any circumst. But then Paul knocked on my door and he was like, hey, I'm running product marketing at Frame IO and I was like, oh dude, I love Frame. And he was like, yeah, I know, I see you posting about it, we should talk. And he just looks at me and he goes, we didn't call you this at blackmagic but like you're a product marketer, you should leave this job behind and you should come join the circus at this crazy startup and we'll teach you how to be a product marketer. He was going in on the time that had these extremely talented B2B SaaS, formal product marketers. I'm still friends with a lot of them, they're phenomenally talented people. He said. But the thing about Pro Video is there's, it's such a niche. And we figured in, instead of, in addition to taking B2B SaaS product marketers and teaching them the idiosyncrasies of uh, Pro video and post production, let's take a Video Pro and turn them into a B2B SaaS product marketer instead. And the CEO went for it. And I interviewed, I didn't think I was ever actually going to take the job. I thought I was going to use that job as like a way to get some concessions from what I wanted from my other job. But it all just ended up happening. It was actually a big crisis of faith. My whole identity, my existence for 15 years was built around this concept of being a colorist and this concept of having a creative life and being a creative person, being a craftsperson, um, but it wasn't until I just sat down and really thought about it and I thought, okay, I have the opportunity to influence the roadmap and the go to market and the storytelling of a product that is used by millions of people and help them get their work done. And I just remembered the 19 year old version of myself who was just confused and terrified. How am I going to make a living, let alone how am I going to make a living being creative? And I thought, what if I can tell stories that help every 19 year old version of myself today and beyond and enterprises and everyone in between. I thought what's more creative than that? That sounds like the most creative thing way I could ever possibly spend my time. So I took the le of Faith and I joined Frame IO and then 10 months later we were acquired by Adobe.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's something that I've been observing within our uh, PMM space. And this is not a, it's not a critique. After. Is that the level of passion that I hear in your voice when you're talking about your users and why that's so unique is that I can feel like I can see you just shooting the with just like at Sundance, and no one's ever going to question that. Oh, this is Jason from Adobe. This is Jason that just wants to hang out with me. There's been some instances where I've seen some product marketers, when they're talking about their products they're offering, where I'm like, oh, you're selling a online, uh, trade show, but I could never see you at a show. Do you really care about this product? And I understand there's some aspects of this is a job for us, but I feel like just hearing these stories just from you for the last 30 minutes is like, from just like the private WhatsApp group for just the casual stories you've been dropping. Who this is for. It just, I can't put my, I can't put my finger on it, but it's just incredible to hear that. So I just want to call out.

Speaker D: I appreciate that, Zach.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker D: Um, that's really, that's really nice to hear. I think, I think there's an inherent human desire and need to be creative and to express yourself creatively. Now with technology, the way it's progressed and the way this advanced technology has been democratized and made so affordable, video is the vehicle that more and more people choose more than ever. And we, we care very deeply and very personally and very passionately, like you say, about helping people find those ways to express themselves, to make a living. And when you are in that job making a living, to leave work on time so you can get home and see your kids and see your family and see your friends, we, we care about this a lot. And that's because many of the people, not only on our product marketing team, but a lot of people on the Premiere Pro team came from industry. We have engineers and product managers and most of our PMM work, we're like, a lot of us are former or current filmmakers and video professionals. My, my manager, Megan was a documentary, um, filmmaker and editor for a long time. She took a movie to Sundance. My colleague on my team, Kylie, a long time video editor, she worked in dailies for a very long time. She led an innovation team at Netflix. So we are able to just dig into it. And that's why the customer and the user, pardon me, always comes first. That's why being a user of the product, being the icp, being the subject matter expert before you're a PMM, is a really great advantage. It can be a disadvantage because Especially in my early days when I was at Frame, I didn't approach some things. My first year as a strategic data driven product marketer and business strategist. I came into the room as an emboldened, empowered customer who would be like, oh my God, you guys would be so cool if we made this. If we made this button where you put this over here or we created this new workflow, the implications for the post production industry would be massive. And you get people looking at you like you're, oh, okay, we have an 18 month roadmap, dude, catch us at annual planning. And also, what data do you have to support this hypothesis? Which is a really great shield in any corporate environment. You can always pop up when you need to. But I had to learn the chops to make sure that my, my instincts and my strategies were correct and really build the chops as a product marketer and a strategist to make sure you were backed by data. The independent individual quotes you have from your users that you're talking to all the time, your qualitative research that you're doing and your big quant data studies. And you got to tie that narrative with your intuition and your lived experience and the lived experience of your team. Because if you want something actually done in this world at your company with your product, you better have data to back up that story. Um, so it's a huge advantage. But sometimes it's impossible not to think something would be so cool. But you have to remember, okay, to do something in a major product like this takes significant investment of people's time and resources and the energy of the business unit. Do you know, are you going to have people go off and make this giant investment like on a lark? Because like you and a bunch of people who were video editors think it'd be so cool? No, that's not how the world works. That's not, that's not how you run a business. You need to make sure that you are data driven. And when the data lines up with that hunch and with that hypothesis and you make that crystal clear, razor sharp vision to cross functional stakeholders at first and you get the buy in and then you bring it to leadership and then leadership takes it to their leadership and you realize it's actually going to happen. We're actually going to be able to build this. And then you get, and then you get to write the messaging and you get to write the strategy and you get to teach and enable all of the marketers and all the different, dozens of different types of teams you work with, here's what this is actually going to do in the market and here's how we talk about it and here's its impact. Here's the product market fit and then you get to go to the trade show, to the product launch, whether it's virtual or in person. And then you get to see the look on the customer's eyes as it actually comes to life after this whole trajectory of planning, data and analysis. And then you're back at home after it's all done and you're kicking back and you're looking in your dashboards and you that you hit your KPIs and you're helping to grow the business and there's no feeling like it in the world. Went on a little bit of a rant there. But yeah, it's, that's why a big part of why it's a huge advantage to be the subject matter expert before you become a pmm. And if anyone out there is thinking about becoming a pmm, I highly recommend if you want to go to school, go to school, join pma, take their certification courses, join all the great communities that are blossoming up all over the place. But think to yourself, like, what do I love more than anything in this world? Whether it's a craft, a trade skill, something. Find the companies that make the stuff that those people use, become friends with the companies, make yourself seen, make yourself known, get yourself on a customer advisory bureau. That's how a lot of people end up here at Adobe because they're friends of the company and we know they can do a certain thing really well. So that's, I think in this day and age, as AI becomes more relevant for, for a lot of the go to stuff that you can just get a prompt and get some nice competitive analysis out of and all that jazz being truly strategic, your superpower. What makes you dangerous is knowing the product and knowing the user inside and out. Be that subject matter expert. Figure out where you are there right now and go be friends with those companies and start your product marketing career there.

Speaker C: I love it. You speak with such passion, dude. Like it's just firing me up right now.

Speaker B: I know it's truthfully something that like and Zach kind of pulled on it earlier. More of us have to get in this mode and I know right now I'm about to put my two weeks next week or wait, no, this week, this Friday and this is going to air after this. But that's something that I have always tried. I've get very hard on myself on and uh, definitely haven't done a good enough job in getting better. But like that passion that you're bringing, if every product marketer had that, there would be better messaging, there would be better launches, there would be better feedback loops, there would be better retention. Because what you're saying and how you're saying it, that reflects back into your work and then it's coming back into the product. And that whole cycle is just so beautiful to hear. And I'm not sure if you like compliments or not, but you're about to get one. So here we go. For someone who hasn't had years and years of formal product marketing knowledge, it is so impressive to see someone run product marketing the way that in my opinion, should be run end to end. So just really good job. Man.

Speaker D: Y' all are making me blush.

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: Yeah, I'm gassing you up over here.

Speaker D: I'm feeling things. I'm veklempt. Thank you. I do have to give a lot of the credit to the whole team that I work with. I work with the best team of product marketers in the world, from my direct colleagues to my manager Megan and our head Kyle, who, uh, who leads product marketing with tenacity and represents us to the rest of the org with such skill and fervor and integrity and all the marketing teams we work with. It is a real. I feel like I'm on a high performing team and it's through just spending time around these people that have been the number one driver to getting myself up that curve, reaching like higher, deeper levels of product marketing. So it's the team. It's always the team at the end of the day.

Speaker B: Love that good quarterback answer. Get him in the pros right now. All right guys, we got 10 minutes left and I want to pivot hard because we touched on it a little bit. Creativity. And Jason, we could hear it coming out of your voice how excited you are about that side of things and being able to bring that skill set into product marketing. So I'm launching a business called Mojo that stemmed off a post that I saw from a certain product marketer who says product marketers don't have Mojo. We don't have a lot of creativity. So my, my pretty blank question to you is what type of value should we put on creativity as a product marketer who traditionally thinks more analytically?

Speaker D: Yeah, creativity is everything because thinking analytically, that's how our mind works. But how do you present that information and get it across? How do you get buy in from the cross functional stakeholders and from Leadership, that is all creativity. Your strategic skills, your presentation skills, and your design and or video making skills. These are the channels that you use. If we're PMMs and we think, okay, email, social, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, these are all the channels we can activate as an individual, as a product marketer, okay, the way I speak, the way I present, the way I am clear and to the point, and the way I create visually stunning content that easily aligns people towards my vision. And the way that I ensure that my stakeholders to my stakeholders and executives that what I'm doing also serves you and the org and our overall business goals and our overall strategy. The simpler and easy, easiest way you can do that is through amplifying your creative skills. And it's never been easier to do that. Like anyone who's my age, I'm aging myself right now. I'm just like in the middle of my 30s. I'm 36. We had to learn these really hard, complex apps because we had no choice. There was nothing else out there in the market. And now it is easier to than ever, especially with the help of AI, to express yourself. Even if you don't have 10,000 hours of experience as a graphic designer or a video editor, anyone can download Premiere Pro and get started right away and have a nice time. Anyone can use Adobe Express or any other tool out there in the universe. And if you're making a deck, make it beautiful or don't make it. Make it beautiful, make it stunning, make it clean. And the ability to articulate your vision is creativity. I don't understand how you influence an org without that really special part of the job and our workflows as PMMs. So I'd say creativity is everything. And if you are out there feeling behind or feeling like you can't do it, or if this sounds intimidating to you, that's fine and that's good. All the analytical stuff was really intimidating for me, but I saw it through the lens of if I want to be successful, like, this is a part of it. And in today's day and age, you cannot be a knowledge worker without having those sharp creative skills. So just go out there and do it and be bad at it and then get better and better at it. That is what's going to differentiate us from being a craft and a discipline. That's very hard to compete with what some AI things can do. It's in one's individual ability to. To express themselves creatively.

Speaker A: One thing I want to call out, Jason, is that throughout this conversation, we didn't hear anything about ROI business efficiencies. I did notice that Eric had a moment of shock when he told us to m make beautiful decks because for the last five seasons we've been trying to get rid of slide decks.

Speaker B: I know. I'm, um, I'm editing that line now.

Speaker D: Oh, man, I'm sorry. I worked Enterprise B2B on the frame side. I know the drill of a CSM being like, hey, can you print out a one sheeter, one pager real quick? Make it pretty. I've been, We've all been guys, we've all been there.

Speaker B: You said make it beautiful. There's a difference.

Speaker D: There's a difference.

Speaker B: There's a difference. Getting dolled up for the night versus everyone snapping their necks. Take a look at that slide deck. You know, there's a difference.

Speaker A: We, we are looking into the future right now and whenever, if we are ever facing a disposition around, uh, us, uh, saying kill slide decks, that clip is going to be played right in front of us. You said kill slide decks. But look what Jason said here about make it beautiful. Y' all didn't say anything about it.

Speaker D: Oh, I appreciate that. I hope everybody get in trouble. You bring up another. I love you brought up another really good point about, you know, about ROI and the business metrics. Because we are business strategists and we are business people, we can feel passion and excitement and creativity for the way we work, the outputs we make, the products that we bring to market and analyze afterwards and develop all that jazz. But you as a product marketer, I think if we want to be truly effective, if we want to get that seat at the table that is very coveted, that I know a lot of PMMs feel like they don't have that or they're trying to strive for that, to grab that at their organization. You need to mix the sharp business metrics with everything else that we've been talking about. But you have to be there at the very beginning. We, um, we think we could make something, anything. When we get to the question of why or why. Now that's when our, my PMM team comes in and we set up market requirements and we talk about, okay, if we were to make or build this thing, what would it have to look like? What would it have to feel like? How would it evolve and shift the never ending chess game that we're playing with everyone else out there and with our users and who is the target segment and Persona and user? And out of those, out of those people, if we build to these market requirements and we tell the story this way, then we can expect this projected or desired output and result. And your job as a PMM isn't only to make sure that the story stays true, but to state, make sure that the market, the pardon, uh, me, the product development and the marketing of that product or workflow or feature does stay true to those initial market requirements. Because if you can't do that, then you lose track and you break a link between the idea and the desired output, which is where all of your okrs and your KPI and your org wide goals and strategic planning and long term vision come in. So if you can just prove, prove your value and your merit and your value as a product marketer, product marketing team in that early stage with the data and the passion and the creativity that we've been talking about for the past hour, then you can see it from end to end. And once you do, that's when you end up existing in that beautiful circle that you see on the PMA website that has uh, this very idealistic narrative and picture of what product marketing is or can be or should be.

Speaker B: Yeah, that big old circle circle right in the middle of everybody. Right?

Speaker D: No ego involved.

Speaker A: It's a beautiful circle. Despite many of the PMMs living outside of this.

Speaker B: Uh, boys, we're right up at the top of the hour, so this is the time where I ask, does anybody have any more questions?

Speaker A: No. This has been a incredible conversation. This has been my favorite conversation to see. Oh yeah, I'll have to say.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's just, I feel because we're fractional, because we've been through it all, because we've been having lots of guesses, I feel like sometimes we, we tend to look out the passion and like just that last hour with you, Jason, has been putting us right, uh, back on track. Like it's not a question that we don't feel passionate about product marketing, but if there's someone right now who's listening, who's a bit unsure about that career path, you definitely put them back on the right track.

Speaker D: Thank you, I appreciate that, all you folks, that's so kind. It's been really fun hanging out with you folks. It's just fun to nerd out and geek out about this stuff. We're, we're a lucky group of people to have this job and this role, to have this impact on the products that we build and ship and, and market. It's a fascinating craft and discipline product marketing and it's relatively new compared to most of the other major ones. When it comes to making apps and building products physical and software. And I think we're just getting started and cracking the tip of the iceberg of where this craft and discipline can evolve into in the coming years. Yeah, thank you for just nerding out with me and digging in and having me hang out with you guys.

Speaker C: Thank you for joining us.

Speaker B: This was a no brainer for us. And then, uh, Jason, right before we wrap up, you got anything coming out you want the world to know about? You got anything that Adobe or Premiere Pro is coming out with that you might want the world to know about or just where they can come and find you and follow along your journey?

Speaker A: Absolutely.

Speaker D: There's always amazing stuff happening in the Adobe world. Pay attention and keep your ears tuned and check out all of our websites, the Premiere Pro and After Effects websites, to check out the latest releases and launches. We have, uh, some really exciting times ahead of us and I can't wait to talk about some m. More stuff that we can talk about more later that we can't talk about now. That's one of the most. Because you just want to talk about it, but you can't. But hit me up on. On LinkedIn. I have a, uh, and I have a little bio site on my link in LinkedIn and that I can give you folks to link to if you're out there thinking about product marketing or how to get into tech or how to get into product marketing. I mapped out my, like, journey in this presentation and it's a free download and there's some other stuff on there too, but just reach out. I'd love to talk and hang out and dish about product marketing, video editing. Again, we're fortunate to do what we do and I love connecting with folks and talking more about it.

Speaker A: Hey, here's a product feature request for you guys to consider. It's not a product feature request, but you mentioned that you guys already put out what events that you guys go out to throughout the year. Y' all just need to update the website and say where Jason dress is gonna be. What the fence he's gonna be. Ah, at. Because yo, if you at Sundance, I'm coming. I'm like Pedro Pascal. Excuse me. I'm here to talk to Jason.

Speaker B: Come on.

Speaker D: Come on over, guys. It's great. It's a. It's, uh, chocolate.

Speaker B: Oh, oh. Now, now, Jason, you got to figure out how to get me tickets to Adobe Max, because that's one thing. I don't want to attend virtual anymore. I want to be there in person.

Speaker D: So that that is a hard chestnut to crack, but we will see what we can do. That is also a thank you so

Speaker B: much for joining us knuckleheads. This was really awesome. And I think, like Gab said, we're all feeling super juiced up. Um, so guys, make sure you check them out, go find them on LinkedIn, and let's wrap this up for another episode of We're Not Marketers. Catch you next time.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: See you guys.

Speaker D: Thanks guys.

Speaker C: Thank you for listening to Win App Marketers. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe, review our podcast and share this episode with other PMMs. Thanks again and see you soon.