Product Marketing: How Your Product and Marketing Strategies Should Work Together

October 29, 2012

For a long time, I have wanted to put together a blog post on the often misunderstood function of Product Marketing in fast growing young software companies like our 18 portfolio companies.

Diverse as our portfolio companies are in their sectors, industry focus, product technology, and geographical reach, we find time and again that they sooner or later found it extremely important to have a well resourced, well organized Product Marketing function. In many cases, our recruiting team has helped them — or are actively helping them — find the talents for these positions as well.

Our Research and Analytics team often work closely with the product marketing managers at the portfolio companies because they are at the unique nexus that links the product strategy with the company’s market strategy. With our market research capability and expertise, we provide them with market segmentation, buyers insights, and competitive analysis, and also assist them with turning these insights into information that is used in building both product roadmap and go to market strategies.

Given the importance of this topic, I am very pleased that OpenView Labs is featuring a great series of articles on the role of Product Marketing in startups and expansion stage companies, by Saeed Khan (@saeedwkhan) of On Product Management. In this series, Saeed explains in great detail (and with great visuals) the right definition of Product Marketing, and how such a function should be best built and nurtured within the company. Saeed has been a prolific blogger who has thought long and deep on the challenges of building and marketing successful products, and we appreciate very much his contribution to our site.

Again, I highly recommend  the two-part series for anyone who is passionate about building and marketing great products:

Part I – Defining Product Marketing

Part II – Implementing Product Marketing

 

 

 

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.