After 6 months of working together, we sat down and interviewed Diligent’s former Director of Product Marketing and the current Senior Director of Product Marketing at Optoro, Mckenzie Harper to get her thoughts on our work together.

There’s no sugar-coating it; product marketing is a challenging job. At their best, PMMs are the internal bridge between product, sales, and marketing, driving messaging and positioning for the entire go-to-market strategy. It requires stellar communication, creative, and executional prowess. But for all the importance placed on Product Marketing’s internal expertise, a similar level of attention must be paid to the wider industry and, specifically, the competitive landscape surrounding your business

You have a new product that you want to take to market, so it’s time to figure out what you should say about it. Building that messaging for the market is not just huddling with a bunch of copywriters and throwing together the most popular buzzwords. Even the best-written marketing and best-designed campaigns can go awry if they’re missing a foundational piece: product positioning.

Operating at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales, product marketing drives much of the go-to-market strategy, but what happens once the product and its campaign are launched? It’s the sales team’s turn to bring the product message to potential customers and drive revenue. Whether they are qualifying leads or closing deals, sales reps need to be equipped with the right knowledge and supporting assets to be successful. Product marketing can bridge that gap through sales enablement.

As I grow Fluvio and engage with more and more CEOs, CMOs, VP of Marketing, Heads of Product, etc, I often get confronted with one (at times, veiled) question - why should I hire a consultant vs a full-time employee? In this post, I highlight some of the key reasons as to why hiring a consultant (or contractor) could be the best decision for your business.

Founder and Managing Partner of Fluvio, Devon O’Rourke sits down with the Product Marketing Alliance and shares the story of what inspired him to make the leap from PMM at a goliath like Amazon to starting his own consultancy, his top tips for anyone considering making a similar move, plus PMM-specific insights including how he views the role of product marketing varying so much from company to company as a good thing, his views on PMMs sitting in the product or marketing orgs, where his preference lies, and heaps more good stuff.

After 6 months of working together, we sat down and interviewed CM Group’s Chief Marketing Officer, Jason Grunberg, and Chief Product Officer, Cody Bender to get their thoughts on our partnership.

Fluvio’s Devon O’Rourke and How the Fxck’s Ben Goodey sit down and discuss the fundamentals of a successful product marketing team so that you can improve both your product and marketing metrics.

At its core, the book is about how our current business and marketing practices are broken, and that ultimately, we often shrink toward conformity rather than expand toward differentiation. Anyone interested in business, building a brand, or honing their own marketing principles should give it a read. I’m sharing a quick summary of my takeaways to help generate thought, and perhaps drive folks to read the book for themselves.

Without a highly integrated workflow between product and product marketing teams, your business is likely to struggle to uniformly connect with your audiences and fail to build products or services that inherently meet their needs. So how can product marketers help navigate these pitfalls and build a trusted partnership with their product team counterparts? Deliver results and prove your value.

While I do see merit in (and have personally experienced the benefit of) growth tactics such as A/B testing and experimenting to drive traffic, sign ups, or sales; these are short-term techniques that should never come at the expense of foundational product marketing work. Quickly attained, vanity growth is not sustainable. A tree doesn't grow branches without first forming a trunk (I made this phrase up but it feels right). So where do you start?