In my capacity as an EIR at London-based Balderton Capital, I spoke earlier today at SaaStock in Dublin on What Founders Need To Know About Product Marketing. In the session, we discussed four key questions:
- What is product marketing? (Surprisingly vague and varied.)
- How do you know if someone’s good at it? (Surprisingly difficult.)
- To whom should it report? (There are three good options.)
- How can you support product marketing? (A question too few founder/CEOs ask.)
This presentation briskly runs through these four questions with particular emphasis on the first two. Since product marketing is both critically important and frequently misunderstood, please take a minute to click through this and see if anything resonates. Once a video is available of the session, I will share it here.
I’ve embedded the slides below as a PNG carousel. You can download a PDF of them to see the detail. If we Baldertonize them, we’ll post that (surely more attractive and professional) version to the Balderton Build blog. Meantime, here goes:
Thanks to everyone who attended and to Alex Theuma, David Umpleby, and SaaStock for inviting me.
I really enjoyed this, it made me realise that as a start-up founder this is actually the role I’m currently fulfilling in my team. Having the framework in your slides has brought extra clarity to the value I add and how it works with the skills my fellow founders bring. Thank you for the slides, Anna
Thanks Anna, a founder friend of mine who reviewed the slides raised this very issue as well. Maybe I’ll do a follow-up on how to do the PMM role early (which this deck kind of does) and then how/when to hand it off as you grow.
Really enjoyed the talk Dave. Reinforced points in other sessions on the day about focusing on value and differentiation, and a great new insight into measuring helpfulness…