🚘 Nitin Kartik

Collaborating with Design teams is an essential skill for Product Marketing Managers (PMMs). Rather than look at PMMs and Designers as strategists and executioners respectively, we would be much better served looking at the two as partners in crime - as Batman and Robin. In the best projects I've been part of, I always allow the Design team plenty of latitude to do what they do best, while just specifying the essential direction to get their creative juices flowing. Just you try giving designers high level direction and get out of their way - and watch the magic happen!

A temporary Product Marketing contract, it could be for many reasons - maybe your other commitments don't allow for a full time role, or maybe you're covering for an employee on paternity leave. Regardless of the reason, you should be relentlessly growing your personal brand and networking in order to maximize your temporary contract. Post weekly (daily is even better!) on LinkedIn about either a challenge you're working through, or an insight you gained, or even an act of kindness by your coworkers towards you. Others care more about your competence and not your contract, temporary or not. If you play your cards right, you'll have your current company extend a full-time offer or you may even land a job at a connection's company.

The Product Marketing job market has been tough for candidates of late. It seems that each company is trying to one-up the other in terms of amount of layoffs, which can be disheartening. Nevertheless good product marketers know that this is where you can use your tradecraft to your advantage: 1. DEFINE YOUR ICP: Who is your ideal Customer (Company) Profile - do you like small or large organizations? SaaS or hardware? 2. FIND YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: I assure you everyone has something they are uniquely better at than other candidates. Are you great at cross-functional collaboration? Are you a relentless market researcher? 3. NAIL YOUR MESSAGING: Focus your resume, interviews, etc. on highlighting your competitive advantage.

Product Pricing is definitely more art than science in practice. Once we had a new product offering and were banging our heads against the wall on how to price it. Rather than go with a FREE trial, I tested a new pricing strategy of a deeply DISCOUNTED initial offer. This was controversial since we always did free trials in the past. However my hypothesis was that we needed to attract users who not just loved our product, but also had the budget to pay. Although the total signups went down with this new pricing strategy, our retention jumped 31% compared with our company standard. Takeaway: if you are looking to optimize revenue retention, a discounted offer pricing strategy can be superior to a free trial.

Leveraging data insights can transform ordinary marketing campaigns into extraordinary ones. One approach I found works well is to organize communications by customer rather than by promotional campaign. This means we should use data insights to see if a user has never opened an email from us in 90 days of weekly emails, take them off our list - this reduces our chances of being reported as spam. This also means if a user has consistently been clicking on our digital ads, rather than send them another promotional email, we should have our sales team outreach to them with a white glove concierge experience. Remember, ultimately it's not about us, it's about them - our customers.

When one approach fails, we must try try again, iterating continuously. Once I was scratching my head wondering why all my free trial consumer Product Marketing campaigns were failing to hit my numbers despite trying various durations of free trials. Then I realized I needed to find consumers who not only liked deals, but those who were willing to pay a subscription too. So I changed my campaign to a PAID trial with a deep discount. This was a win-win since consumers were getting a great deal but we also filtered out people who never wanted to pay. This campaign achieved 30% improvement in retention rates. Lesson: if you fail at first, try try again!