Your team has worked tirelessly to build and refine a new product, and you're nearing your target launch date. But even if you've used customer feedback to guide your work, how do you ensure it matches their needs and expectations?

In-house testing can help you stress test a product's functionality, but eventually, you'll need to evaluate it in real-world circumstances. A beta program can help validate your early-stage product with end-users and give you insights to continue iterating your development.

Have you ever worked with a product that has a very broad set of potential customers? Or do you have so many potential customers that you don’t know where to focus? Here is a framework to help you select and prioritize potential markets to pursue.

We’ve seen the increased focus on establishing and growing product marketing teams, and with that the complexity of the question ‘why is it so hard to staff product marketing roles!?’ So, what are the skills that you should look for when aiming to hire a stellar product marketer? Focus on candidates who have experience in foundational product marketing skill sets.

A Marketecture (or Marchitecture) not only forms the foundation for how your products are packaged, marketed, and sold, they also provide the vision for how your products will evolve. Product teams can and should use Marketectures to plan roadmaps, with each launch representing a new building block. Despite its importance, there isn’t a standard, universal definition of what constitutes a Maketecutre. So let me have a go at it:

Humans love a good story; it's wired into us as a way of connecting and sharing our knowledge. Stories help us learn, connect, and feel. Stories inspire us to be better and do better. We use stories to understand the needs and wants of people so that we can build tools to help them achieve more.

So, how do you tell a great product story?

Product marketing focuses on developing strategy around introducing products into the market. Product marketing, however, can only take a product as far as the market wants it; a well-designed product won’t be successful if it doesn’t address an existing market problem. This is where product marketing’s visibility into customers’ demand and needs can help identify product-market fit.

As product marketing consultants, our team at Fluvio is tasked with quickly onboarding and assimilating with our clients’ products and businesses. Our goal is to become part of - or the sole member of - each client’s product marketing team, knowing and understanding their business, objectives, product and service offerings, competitive market and customer insights, in a matter of weeks. This is no easy feat, and in order to do so successfully we must use the time wisely to learn and get up to speed quickly, so we can begin making an impact.

Quick referenceable guide to launching a new product

The win-loss analysis is an important tool to better understand what customers are thinking during the shopping process. When done properly, teams across the entire organization can gain additional insights to improve their own processes, and ultimately, increase customer acquisition and retention.

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.