Partnering with Product Marketing
3 myths that prevent product managers from collaborating
When is your feature work as a product manager done? You’ve been working hard on your features with engineering for the past few months. Development is finished and testing is starting. Are you done now?
Lots of product teams have technical writers and product marketing managers that write about the new features. Also, lots of product teams have sales enablement teams, CTOs and system engineers to communicate to sales and customers. With all these teams, what more can a product manager do?
Product managers are key to communicating the value of new features to marketing, sales and customers. There are 3 myths that prevent product managers from communicating the value of new features.
Myth 1: Too Busy Handling Urgent Issues
Product managers do have a lot of demands on their time. Interruptions to product managers can be reduced by documenting feature value and feature limitations internally. Instead of explaining how a feature works to 10 different sales engineers, you can prepare slides to explain how to configure and use a feature. When an API changes or a port changes, you can let customers know ahead to prepare for the change.
Myth 2: No one Asked for Feature Information
There are a few reasons product managers don’t get requests for feature information:
Feature isn’t visible to customers
Feature isn’t useful
Feature isn’t “sellable”
Value of the feature is unclear
In these cases, it is up to the product manager to communicate the value of the feature. After working hard on a feature, you don’t want the team to perceive that any features are not worth documenting for sales and customers!
Myth 3: Product Marketing Never Uses Your Material
Your product marketing manager has been monitoring the market and communicating about the value of the product daily. Messaging about the new features has been set based on product strategy. When you show up with feature and technical information that doesn’t fit the overall messaging, then product marketing doesn’t have time to adjust the material to fit the messaging. Product managers that stay close to their product marketing teams understand the overall marketing direction and adapt their feature documentation to fit the product marketing strategy.
Conclusion
It’s easy to partner with the product marketing team because they constantly need fresh material to amplify to the field and customers. Product marketing focuses on overall messaging and sparking customer interest in your product. Documenting the value of your new features helps marketing and sales understand the features, increases the use of the features and reduces escalations to product managers.