A note from the team

This edition covers Clayton’s insights into the two AI positioning traps he’s seeing across every prospect conversation this quarter. The AI-native founders who can explain their architecture beautifully and their value not at all, and the twenty-year-old companies quietly panicked that the market moved without them.

Opposite symptoms. Same underlying mistake: both are spending their energy proving what they are instead of what they deliver.

Alongside it: a tool for getting cited in AI answers, a positioning audit you can run in an afternoon, where we landed on Clutch, and a fresh batch of open roles.

Let’s get into it.

Too Technical or Too Late: The Two AI Positioning Traps

Every prospect I’ve talked to lately falls into one of two camps. Not most of them. Every single one.

Camp one is AI native. Founded after 2023, usually by engineers, and the founder can explain the architecture better than anyone else in the room. What that founder can’t do is explain the value to a buyer who doesn’t care about the architecture.

Camp two was founded well before ChatGPT existed. Real customers, real revenue, and a quiet fear that the market moved without them. One company we spoke with recently has been in business for twenty-five years and doesn’t mention AI anywhere on its website.

On the surface these problems look opposite. One sounds too technical. The other sounds outdated. I treated them as separate conversations for weeks before realizing I was giving both the same advice.

Identity positioning vs. outcome positioning

Identity positioning tells the market what category you belong to. Outcome positioning tells the market what changes for the buyer when they choose you.

Nearly every company believes it’s doing the second. Most are doing the first, because category language is faster to write and almost impossible for anyone in a review meeting to argue with.

“AI native platform for enterprise workflow automation” is identity. Nobody in that approval chain will object. It also tells a buyer nothing about what will be different on Thursday.

This is a positioning problem before it’s a messaging problem, and the two constantly get collapsed. Positioning is the decision about what you’re for and who you beat. Messaging is how you say it. Better wording won’t rescue a decision that was wrong to begin with.

Camp one: when the architecture becomes the pitch

“AI native” stopped being a pitch and became a category descriptor. Every product has AI now. Saying you’re AI native in 2026 is like saying you’re cloud-based in 2016. It puts you in the room, but it doesn’t distinguish you inside it.

I saw this firsthand with Anvai, an AI research platform for asset and wealth management called AIRA. The founding team is scientists and engineers, and the product is genuinely sophisticated. But their buyers are financial professionals, not technical ones. That’s not a messaging problem, it’s a buyer persona problem. Once we rebuilt the positioning around the buyer’s world instead of the platform’s architecture, engagement and demo reactions improved immediately.

The fix isn’t dumbing anything down. It’s sequencing. Lead with the outcome, then use the architecture as proof of why you can deliver it when others can’t. Same facts, reversed order. The technical depth becomes evidence, not the opening argument.

Camp two: the relevance scramble

The second camp does the opposite and fails for the same reason. They add AI to the homepage. They ship an AI feature nobody asked for. They sprinkle the word through copy written for a different decade, and the result reads like a company trying to convince itself.

That’s AI washing, and buyers have gotten fast at spotting it. The tell is always the same: the AI claim floats free of any specific outcome. It sits next to the benefit rather than explaining it.

My advice to the twenty-five-year-old company wasn’t to start talking about AI everywhere. It was the opposite. Twenty-five years of solving a problem is the single hardest thing for a company founded in 2023 to claim. This is proof across edge cases, integrations that already work, switching costs that make leaving expensive. When an incumbent buries all of that under AI language, they trade their most durable advantage for a claim every competitor is making at the same volume.

Trend-based positioning has a shelf life. Benefit-based positioning doesn’t.

The test that works for both camps

Take any sentence in your positioning and ask whether a competitor could put their logo on it and publish it unchanged. If yes, you wrote identity, not outcome. Cut it or rewrite it.

Then run the second half. Ask whether the sentence names something the buyer can verify after they buy. “AI powered insights” can’t be verified. “Surfaces the three accounts most likely to churn this quarter, before your CSM has read the ticket queue” can. One of those sentences survives contact with a renewal conversation. The other doesn’t.

Most positioning fails this test on the first pass. That’s not a sign the team writes badly. It’s a sign the copy was built to be approved rather than built to be true.

What to do this week

• Camp one: take your three strongest technical claims and write the buyer outcome each one produces. Not the feature, but the change in the buyer’s week. Rebuild your homepage hero around the outcome and move the architecture down the page as proof.

• Camp two: run the reverse audit. Find every place AI appears in your copy and ask what specific outcome it improves. Where you can name one, keep it and make it concrete. Where you can’t, delete it. An honest page that says nothing about AI beats a page that says AI without saying why.

• Both: take the rewritten language to three customers and three reps and read it out loud. If nobody reaches for it naturally, it isn’t finished.

TL;DR: Every company positioning around AI is either leading with architecture buyers don’t care about, or bolting AI language onto copy to look current. Both are proving what they are instead of what they deliver. The fix is the same for both: lead with the buyer outcome, hold the technology back as proof, and cut any sentence a competitor could publish unchanged.

Read Full Article

PMM Toolkit: Tool, Template, Trend

🛠 Tool: Noble

Noble gets your brand mentioned in the third-party articles that AI models actually cite. Roughly 85% of the sources AI cites when answering a question aren’t your own website. Noble identifies the articles LLMs already pull from, handles publisher outreach and negotiation, places new mentions, and refreshes existing ones that describe you wrong.

Why PMMs use it: last issue we shared Profound, which tells you how AI describes your brand. Noble is the other half where you do something about it. And it’s the natural companion to this issue’s article: if your positioning isn’t clear and consistent enough for a human to repeat correctly, an AI model repeating it in a third-party article will make it worse, not better. Fix the positioning first, then go make sure the internet says it right.

📄 Template: Build-A-Box Workshop

The premise: pretend your product ships in a physical box. Everyone gets an hour, a cardboard box, and a pile of magazines, markers, and glue. The front of the box carries your descriptor in five words or less, a headline, and four benefits. The back carries the features that deliver them, plus the testimonial your ideal customer would write in a perfect world. Then everyone gets five minutes on stage to sell their box, and the room votes.

Why it works: a website has infinite scroll, so vague messaging survives there indefinitely. A box does not. The physical constraint forces the brevity that “AI native platform for enterprise workflow automation” is designed to avoid. You cannot fit a category descriptor and a real outcome on the same panel, so you have to choose. Camp one gets forced out of architecture-first. Camp two finds out how much of their AI copy is filler when there’s no room for it.

It’s also a consensus tool. You can pull in stakeholders well beyond the website project team, and by the end the room has argued its way to shared messaging themes before anyone writes a landing page, an email, or a pitch deck.

📈 Trend: Vague AI claims are becoming a legal risk, not just a credibility one

Regulators have started treating AI washing as false advertising. The SEC has settled cases against firms that overstated AI in their products, and the FTC holds AI claims to the same substantiation standard as any other ad claim. Law firms report a rise in consumer class actions, competitor suits, and securities fraud claims over the same thing.

Buyers are getting stricter too. Forrester expects a Fortune 500 company to sue a B2B provider over false AI claims this year, and says most business buyers now want a trial before they commit.

What it means for PMMs: the question behind every AI claim on your site is shifting from "does this sound impressive?" to "can we substantiate this if someone asks?" Naming a specific, observable outcome is no longer just better copy. It's the version legal can defend and a customer can confirm at renewal.

Inside Olivine

🎉 We landed in the Market Leaders quadrant on Clutch’s product marketing agency matrix, making us the top ranked product marketing agency!

Clutch plots agencies on two axes: focus and ability to deliver (built from verified client reviews, project history, and market reputation).

We’re in the top right corner, ahead of every other product marketing agency on the board. The result of a 4.9 out of 5 rating from the teams we’ve worked with.

Thanks to every client who has left a review!

See our Clutch Profile

📣 We're hiring for Hypori: Senior Manager, Product Marketing

We're running a search for a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Hypori, a Series B endpoint security startup.

If you have experience with an endpoint, MDM, or device-security product, then this is your chance to own the positioning and narrative from end to end. No dependency on other teams or drawn-out review processes. You’ll be working directly with the leadership team to set the strategy and drive execution.

You’ll own:

• Company-wide positioning, messaging, and buyer personas

• Competitive intelligence, battlecards, and win/loss analysis

• The entire sales enablement library (one-pagers, decks, case studies, objection handling)

• The DIB/CMMC narrative specifically, from white papers to executive bylines

Who fits: a product marketer first, not a generalist content person. Endpoint, MDM, or device-security experience is ideal, and any exposure to defense, federal, or regulated markets is a bonus.

📍Remote (US) | 💰$130k–$150k base + bonus | 🕐 5-8+ years B2B PMM experience

Apply Here

Open marketing roles in our network

Looking for your next opportunity? A few open marketing and GTM roles worth a look.

• Senior Manager, Product Marketing @ Hypori

• Senior Product Marketing Manager @ Mercury

• Senior Manager, Product Marketing @ ServiceNow

• Global Industry Marketing Lead @ Trimble

• Senior Field Marketing Manager @ Siteimprove

• Marketing Coordinator @ DBM Vircon

• VP, Enterprise & Field Marketing Dilligent

That’s this month. If you read the article and thought “that’s us,” we want to know which camp!

See you in September,

👋 The Olivine Team

A note from the team

Every PMM we talk to is using AI. Fewer of them have figured out where to stop.

That’s the question running through this issue: which parts of the job AI can genuinely take off your plate, and which parts still need a person with real judgment behind them. We’re also sharing some open roles to check out, a client win, and a tool and template worth adding to your stack.

Onward.

AI Won’t Replace Great Product Marketers

AI has changed product marketing permanently. Summarizing interviews, writing copy, researching competitors and markets: work that used to take hours now takes minutes. That doesn’t make product marketers less valuable. It changes what they’re valued for.

Execution is becoming commoditized. Judgment is not. AI isn’t taking product marketing jobs from strong PMMs. It’s coming for mediocre ones.

Where AI actually earns its keep

AI is a great assistant, not a replacement. It’s excellent at processing information. The trouble starts when that information needs to be interpreted, prioritized, and turned into strategy.

Take interview summaries. On a recent project building 20+ personas across two business units, AI summarized dozens of stakeholder and customer interviews in minutes, saving hours of admin work. But the summaries didn’t tell a story. Reading the actual transcripts surfaced the golden nuggets AI completely missed. AI summarized what was said. It didn’t understand what mattered. The final personas were built from experience and judgment, not AI summaries.

The same pattern shows up everywhere: AI drafts copy fast, but the language is often generic enough that every company in a category starts to sound the same. It can map competitors and generate SWOTs, but it can’t tell you which adjacent product sales keeps losing deals to. It can get a PMM up to speed on a new market, but “learn” is only the first step of learn, do, teach. AI helps with the first one.

Where AI still falls short

Safe positioning. AI optimizes toward consensus, so it produces a balanced, reasonable answer that offends no one. Strong positioning isn’t balanced. It makes choices about who the product is for, who it isn’t, and which hill is worth dying on. That takes conviction, and conviction still comes from people.

Broad ICPs. AI-generated ideal customer profiles tend to look remarkably similar to each other: logical, defensible, and hard to argue with. The best ones come from win/loss data, NPS, and customer success stories, not industry descriptions.

Pleasant, forgettable messaging. AI-generated messaging tends to sound nice: optimistic, complimentary, conflict-averse. Real products have real gaps, tough pricing, and crowded categories. The companies that stand out rarely have the safest messaging. They have the clearest point of view, and AI isn’t very good at having one.

Reality over hype. Left alone, AI tends to overstate strengths and underplay weaknesses. The strongest PMMs build trust by being honest about limitations, not smoothing them over. Credibility beats smoke and mirrors

The move

Every product marketer should be using AI. The advantage now comes from knowing where to stop. Use it to summarize interviews, but read the transcripts. Use it to draft messaging, but write the positioning yourself. Use it to research competitors, but validate the findings.

TL;DR AI has commoditized execution in product marketing, not judgment. It’s a strong first pass for interview summaries, copy drafts, and competitive or market research, but it still can’t take a real position, build ICPs from lived experience, or tell the truth about a product’s weaknesses. The PMMs who use AI to clear out repetitive work, and spend the time they save on judgment, are becoming more valuable, not less.

Read Full Article

PMM Toolkit: Tool, Template, Trend

🛠 Tool: Profound

Profound tracks how your brand shows up across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, and Google AI Overviews, showing you exactly which prompts surface your brand, how you’re being described, and where competitors are winning the citation instead.

Why PMMs use it: as more buyers start their research inside an AI answer instead of a search results page, knowing whether your product even gets mentioned (and how) is becoming as core to the job as tracking rankings or web traffic.

📄 Template: Internal Product Positioning & Messaging Guide

One of our own Playbook templates: a structured guide for documenting your product’s mission, vision, ICP, differentiators, and messaging pillars in one place.

Best used as the human-written foundation this issue keeps coming back to. Let AI draft around it, but make sure the positioning itself, the point of view, the tradeoffs, the conviction, comes from your team first.

📈 Trend: Answer engines are becoming a visibility channel of their own

SEO used to be the finish line. Now it’s one stop among several, as buyers increasingly get their first impression of a product from an AI-generated answer rather than a list of blue links.

That shift, often called answer engine optimization (AEO) or generative engine optimization, rewards brands with clear, structured, citable content and a track record of being talked about accurately elsewhere. It’s less about gaming a new algorithm and more about making sure your positioning is consistent and well-documented enough that an AI model can repeat it correctly.

PMMs who start monitoring how their product gets described in AI answers now will have a head start on a channel that’s only going to matter more.

Inside Olivine

📣 Confidential search: Senior Manager, Product Marketing

We’re running a search for a Senior Product Marketing Manager for a Series B endpoint security startup.

If you have experience with an endpoint, MDM, or device-security product, then this is your chance to own the positioning and narrative from end to end. No dependency on other teams or drawn-out review processes. You’ll be working directly with the leadership team to set the strategy and drive execution.

You’ll own:

• Company-wide positioning, messaging, and buyer personas

• Competitive intelligence, battlecards, and win/loss analysis

• The entire sales enablement library (one-pagers, decks, case studies, objection handling)

• The DIB/CMMC narrative specifically, from white papers to executive bylines

Who fits: a product marketer first, not a generalist content person. Endpoint, MDM, or device-security experience is ideal, and any exposure to defense, federal, or regulated markets is a bonus.

📍Remote (US) | 💰$130k–$150k base + bonus | 🕐 5-8+ years B2B PMM experience

Apply Here

Client happenings

The SambaNova team announced the first close of its $1B Series F financing at an $11B valuation, led by General Atlantic, with participation from new and existing investors. Huge congrats to the team, we’re grateful to be part of the journey!

Read More

Open marketing roles in our network

Looking for your next opportunity? Here are a few open remote and in-person marketing and GTM roles from companies in our network.

• Senior Manager, Product Marketing @ A Series B cybersecurity company

• Performance Marketing Manager @ Kustomer

• Marketing Coordinator @ DBM Vircon

• Senior Manager, Product Marketing - Telecommunications @ ServiceNow

• Product Marketing Manager @ Trimble

• ABM Demand Generation, Senior Manager @ Arc XP

• Sr. Principal Product Marketing Manager @ Siteimprove

• Head of Field Marketing & Strategic Events @ Workvivo (acquired by Zoom)

Thanks for giving this a read! Until next time,

The Olivine Team 🥳

A note from the team

Hey there! We’re happy to be in your inbox this month.

We’ve been thinking a lot lately about the space between great positioning and what actually gets said in a sales call. Spoiler: it’s a bigger gap than most teams realize. Plus we’ve got some Olivine news, tools, trends, and open roles in our network to share!

Let’s get into it.

You spent weeks on positioning. Sales ignored it.

You spent weeks on it. Customer interviews, competitive audits, five rounds of edits. Your messaging finally says what you do and why it matters. Then it goes to Sales, and reps keep describing the product their own way.

The messaging usually isn’t the problem. Sales just wasn’t part of building it. And without that relationship, the story never makes it to market.

Nine times out of ten, it comes down to one of three things.

Messaging was built without them. It gets drafted internally, reviewed by leadership, then “socialized” with Sales. By that point, reps are being asked to adopt language they had no hand in shaping. Adoption that feels imposed tends to evaporate fast, especially when a deal gets hard.

Launches skip the preview. A new product update or messaging shift hits mid-quarter. Reps find out the same time everyone else does. By the time deals are active, they’ve fallen back on whatever felt comfortable before.

Field feedback has nowhere to go. Reps know what’s working and what isn’t. But if there’s no consistent way to surface that, it dies in a Slack thread or gets raised once in a team meeting and never acted on.

The reps who “go rogue” on messaging are usually trying to tell you something. Most companies just aren’t set up to hear it.

Here’s what that gap looks like in practice:

SafeGraph ran into exactly this. Their data could be used in a dozen ways, and their messaging said as much. It described, broadly, everything the product did well. The trouble was that the buyers who actually closed didn’t think about the product broadly. They came in with a specific job and a specific use case, and the wide-angle story wasn’t speaking to them. As their product manager put it, they wanted to state how the data works well for certain people rather than just saying broadly what it did well.

The language wasn’t wrong. It just didn’t match how their best-fit buyers framed their own problem.

That gap is easy to miss from the inside, because the internal version always sounds right to the people who wrote it. It only shows up when you put the messaging next to how customers actually talk, and the two don’t line up. Reps feel it first, because they’re the ones watching a value prop not land in real time, and they quietly start rewriting it.

That’s exactly what a closer PMM-Sales relationship helps you catch before it costs you a quarter.

What stronger PMM-Sales collaboration looks like:

Know what reps are actually selling against. SDRs and AEs have different jobs, different pressure points, and different definitions of useful. A brand messaging framework that ignores that gap tends to sit on a shelf.

Bring top performers in early. The reps closing the most deals have heard every version of the buyer’s problem. Getting them into messaging working sessions before anything is finalized saves significant rework later.

Show up as a revenue partner. If Sales sees product marketing as a content shop, that's usually because it's been positioned that way. Own the full scope: positioning, pricing input, and sales enablement that actually gets used in deals.

Get in before the launch. A short preview call with Sales a few weeks out does more for adoption than any playbook sent the day of.

Enable sales leadership first. It lands differently coming from a trusted manager than a shared doc dropped into Slack.

Go where the conversations happen. Shadow calls. Listen to recordings. When reps start rewriting your messaging in their own words, that’s your most honest feedback loop. The PMM’s guide to customer conversations covers how to get more out of those interactions.

If you don’t have a PMM, someone still owns this.

At early-stage companies, someone is always responsible for how the product gets described to buyers whether or not they have “product marketing” in their title. Whoever it is needs a real working relationship with the people selling. Not a quarterly sync. Ongoing contact, where messaging gets tested and updated based on what’s happening in deals. The best go-to-market strategy stalls when it doesn’t survive an actual sales conversation. If you want a starting point, our positioning and messaging guide walks through how to build a foundation your whole team can use.

TL;DR Positioning breaks down in sales conversations for three predictable reasons: reps weren't involved in building it, launches happen without a preview, and field feedback has no place to go. The fix isn't better messaging docs, it's an earlier, more collaborative process. Bring your best reps into working sessions before anything is finalized. The reps who go off-script aren't the problem. They're your best source of market truth.

Read Full Article

PMM Toolkit: Tool, Template, Trend

🛠 Tool: SignalRise

SignalRise helps gather richer customer insights without the scheduling overhead of traditional interviews. Instead of booking video calls, participants respond through AI-guided voice conversations, with follow-up questions adapting dynamically based on their answers.

Why PMMs use it: it makes customer research more scalable, helping teams uncover motivations, pain points, and buying criteria faster while preserving the depth of qualitative feedback.

📄 Template: Jobs to Be Done Worksheet

A worksheet for documenting the situations, motivations, and desired outcomes that drive customer decisions.

Best used after customer interviews/surveys, when patterns start emerging across customer situations, motivations, and desired outcomes to turn insights using the JTBD framework. The goal is simple: understand what customers are trying to accomplish and why they choose a solution in the first place.

📈 Trend: AI is making customer insight more valuable, not less

AI can generate a positioning statement in thirty seconds. It can produce messaging frameworks, campaign briefs, and persona summaries on demand.

But when every company uses the same AI tools, the quality of the output becomes a function of the quality of the training material. The customer interviews you’ve run, the market patterns you’ve observed, and the positioning work you’ve refined over time. AI doesn’t close that gap. It amplifies it.

The companies investing in customer research now are building an asset that AI cannot replicate: a genuine, current, nuanced understanding of why buyers do what they do. Those who treat qualitative research as a core competency, not a nice-to-have, will be the ones producing work that actually stands out.

Client Spotlight: Why branding projects really succeed

Most branding projects don’t fail because of design. They fail because teams aren’t aligned on who they’re selling to, what makes them different, and how to communicate it consistently.

That’s the challenge Cyber Guru brought to us as they prepared to unify two products, one brand, and three core markets ahead of a global launch.

Together, we worked through customer research, interviews with customer-facing teams in Italian, French, and Spanish, competitive intelligence, positioning, messaging, and brand strategy to create a stronger foundation.

The outcome wasn’t just a refreshed brand. Michel Ruefenacht, VP of Marketing: “We saw better internal alignment around personas, market segments, and GTM strategy.”

We are grateful to the Cyber Guru team for trusting us with this important chapter of their growth and for their continued trust as they embark on their new chapter as LibraCyber!

Read Full Review

Inside Olivine

After our announcement welcoming Clayton Pritchard as CEO, the story has been featured across several local and regional publications, including print coverage in his hometown paper, The Sanford Herald.

Here are a few of the places where Olivine has been featured:

📰 Jacksonville Daily Record

📰 Jacksonville Business Journal

📰 News4JAX

📰 Sanford Herald

📰 Ponte Vedra Recorder

Client happenings

The Jedify team announces a $24M Series A led by Norwest, with participation from Snowflake, S CAPITAL, Cerca Partners, and Oceans.

Open marketing roles in our network

Looking for your next opportunity? Here are a few open remote and in-person marketing and GTM roles from companies in our network.

• Product Marketing Manager @ Elation

• Performance Marketing Lead @ Kustomer

• Field Marketing Manager @ ServiceNow

• Graphic Designer @ Vultr

• ABM Demand Generation, Senior Manager @ Arc XP

• Customer Marketing Director @ Siteimprove

• Sr. Field Marketing Manager @ Siteimprove

• Senior Marketing Data Analyst @ Darktrace

Thanks for reading! We’ll see you next month.

Until next time,

The Olivine Team 🤩

We have some big news to share. After nearly a decade, Olivine is entering a new chapter.

What started in 2016 as a small consultancy grew into a leading B2B SaaS product marketing agency, helping launch 60+ products and partnering with companies from early-stage startups to brands like LinkedIn and Meta. But more than that, Olivine became a company defined by its people, its craft, and the way it approached work.

When it came time to think about the future, Co-Founders Ashley Wilson and Raechel Lambert knew they wanted more than a traditional sale. They wanted someone who truly understood the team, the work, and the values behind it.

That’s why we’re excited to share that Olivine has been acquired by longtime collaborator Clayton Pritchard. After stepping in to lead the business last fall, it became clear he was the right person to carry Olivine forward.

This moment feels less like an ending and more like a continuation. The work remains the same: helping B2B SaaS companies with positioning, messaging, and go-to-market strategy. Especially in a world where AI is changing everything, strong product marketing fundamentals still matter more than ever.

To everyone who has been part of the Olivine story so far, thank you.

And if you’re building in B2B SaaS and want help with positioning, messaging, or launching something new, we’d love to work with you.

🔗 Read the full story

Clarity compounds and our work with Vsimple is proof.

Vsimple, a process automation platform connecting people, systems, data, and AI, came to us with a clear goal: strengthen their messaging and positioning for a vertical push into the mid-market industrial space.

Together, we built a stronger foundation, from core messaging to persona, giving their team the clarity to communicate more effectively as they grow.

As their VP of Marketing, Bronson Cordle, put it: “We’ve seen a lift in clearer messaging, optionality in positioning, and progressive improvement in our company communicates about itself.”

They also rated the engagement 5 stars across the board on Clutch.

That’s not just a messaging update. It’s what enables better selling, stronger alignment, and more confident growth.

If you’re expanding into new markets and your messaging hasn’t kept up, we can help.

👉 Read the full Clutch review

PMM Toolkit: Tool, Template, Trend

🛠 Tool: Amplitude
Amplitude is becoming a go-to for PMMs who want to connect messaging to real user behavior. With AI-powered insights and predictive analytics, it helps you understand what users actually do, not just what they say.

Why PMMs use it: it closes the gap between positioning and product usage, so you can refine messaging based on real engagement, not assumptions.

📄 Template: Brand Positioning Questionnaire
A practical, workshop-style template to help you define what your company does, why it exists, who it’s for, and where it’s going.

Set aside 2–4 hours with your founders or leadership team and work through it together. The goal is simple: get alignment on your core story so your messaging, positioning, and GTM efforts have a stronger foundation.

The impact: clearer positioning, better decisions, and a shared understanding of how to talk about the business.

📈 Trend: PMMs Are Becoming Systems Builders, Not Just Storytellers
The biggest shift right now is not just using AI, it is operationalizing it.

High-performing teams are moving from one-off prompts to repeatable systems where AI supports competitive intel, messaging validation, and GTM execution on an ongoing basis. Teams doing this well are seeing significantly faster launch cycles and stronger alignment across product, marketing, and sales.

The implication: PMMs are no longer just crafting narratives. They are designing the systems that generate, test, and distribute those narratives at scale.

Some things never change…

“Make it look pretty.”
“Can you make a one-pager real quick?”
“We’re launching tomorrow.”
“The product sells itself.”

If you’ve worked in product marketing for more than five minutes, you’ve heard at least one of these. Probably all of them. Probably this week.

It’s funny because it’s true but also a good reminder of where PMMs actually create value. Not just making things look good, but bringing clarity, shaping the story, and making sure what gets launched actually lands.

Sometimes that means pushing back. Sometimes it means translating chaos into something coherent.

Either way, you’re not just surrounded by noise. You’re the one making sense of it.

Interested in working with Olivine?

If you’re a B2B SaaS company looking for expert help with positioning, messaging, product launches, or go-to-market strategy, Olivine is ready for its next chapter and ready to help you build yours.

Contact Us

Until next time,

The Olivine Team 🥳

Letter from the Editor ✍️

Sometimes the best insights don’t come from the latest trends; they come from timeless advice that just sticks.

This month, we’re going back to the article that’s been viewed more times than any other on our site: Rae’s takeaways from Seth Godin’s This Is Marketing. Whether you’ve read the book or not, these lessons hit home for PMMs navigating the noisy world of product launches, positioning exercises, and everything in between.

So if you need a reminder of what marketing really is, and why you’re doing this work in the first place, this one’s for you.

PMM Tips: 4 Takeaways from This Is Marketing by Seth Godin

In our most-read blog post of all time, Olivine co-founder Rae Lambert broke down the most powerful insights from Seth Godin’s This Is Marketing. We’re revisiting four that continue to guide our product marketing work today:

1. What marketers do. We make change happen. That starts with identifying the smallest viable market, and reaching them with anticipated, personal, and relevant messages they actually want to receive.

2. People like us do things like this. Behavior change happens when people believe “people like me do this kind of thing.” Powerful marketing taps into our internal narratives and our desire to belong.

3. Marketing vs. the market. The marketing department leads a marketing-driven organization. A market-driven organization is led by what the market wants. The latter is where you want to be.

4. Start with a worldview. Your audience isn’t “everyone.” The most successful brands speak to a clear worldview and invite others who share it to join them.

Want the rest of Rae’s takeaways, including the 3-sentence marketing promise and the tyranny of perfection?

Read the full post here

Olivine Success Story: Heartland Levels Up Messaging Across Their Product Suite

Following the revisit of timeless marketing principles, we’re highlighting a project that brought those principles to life, at scale.

Heartland Payment Systems, a payroll and software platform with over 750K customers, partnered with Olivine to refine messaging and positioning for several of their small business products. With a massive portfolio and distinct buyer types, they needed messaging that was clear, relevant, and ready for sales enablement.

What we delivered:

• Strategic workshops to define personas and map jobs-to-be-done

• Positioning and messaging tailored to each product’s audience

• Refreshed website and landing page copy

• Sales enablement assets, including decks, emails, and one-pagers

• Copywriting for a new product demo video

“The Olivine team is top notch. They took the time to understand our business, customers and products, and then delivered killer materials our marketing and sales teams loved. Plus, their team is absolutely amazing. Loved working with Olivine! Thank you!” — Alli McPhail, Former Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Heartland

Whether you’re refreshing legacy products or launching something brand new, we can help you craft a story your customers and your sales team will actually use.

Let’s talk

PMM Toolkit: Tool, Template, Trend

🛠 Tool: Guidde
Guidde is an AI-powered video documentation tool that lets you turn any workflow into a narrated video in seconds. Perfect for training, support, or showing off new features, without needing to be a video editor.

Why PMMs love it: it makes internal handoffs and product walkthroughs a breeze, and looks polished every time.

📄 Template: Persona Validation Questions
This ready-to-use Google Doc helps you validate your personas by guiding you through a structured set of interviews. Share it with your team and sync up on who you’re really building for. (Don’t forget to document what you hear!)

📈 Trend: The Rise of AI Agents + n8n Workflows
It’s not just about writing copy anymore—PMMs are increasingly turning to no-code tools like n8n and AI agents to automate research, draft competitive summaries, scrape data, and even send Slack alerts when a new review goes live.

Whether you're tracking sentiment, setting up alerts, or enriching competitor pages, AI agents are becoming a quiet superpower in the PMM toolkit. This isn’t the future. It’s already happening.

Meme of the Month 🎉

We couldn’t resist this one. Every product marketer knows the feeling of trying to tame competing priorities and somehow making it look intentional.

If you’ve ever felt like Chris Pratt wrangling raptors, you’re not alone.

Know a meme that captures the chaos and joy of PMM life? Reply to this email and send it our way. We just might feature it next month.

Until next time,

The Olivine Team

Launching something new, especially in AI, feels a bit like being handed the mic at a live show... without a script. Everything moves fast, expectations are high, and your window to make a lasting impression is small.

This month, we're diving into how early-stage AI teams can go to market without burning out or blending in. It's for the founders refining their pitch decks at 2 a.m., the PMMs crafting stories that stick, and the sales teams turning those stories into revenue. In other words, it’s for anyone bold enough to hit "launch" before everything feels perfect.

PMM Tips: 4 GTM Lessons for Early-Stage AI Products

In one of our most-shared blog posts of the year, Arielle Shnaidman outlines four smart, scrappy, and strategic lessons for gen AI startups going to market. Here’s a quick hit of what we learned:

Go back to first principles

Focus on a narrow set of personas and start your messaging from scratch, based on real conversations, not assumptions. Understand their Jobs to Be Done and the switching costs they face.

Differentiate beyond features

If you’re building in a crowded space (and who isn’t?), don’t just compete on functionality. You can carve out a winning position through brand, use cases, platform integrations, customer experience, or pricing strategy.

Double down post-launch

Your launch is just the beginning. Sales calls, website performance, and nurture campaigns are your best feedback loops; use them to tighten your GTM motion, fast.

Balance being reactive with being strategic

Fire drills will happen. But don’t let them replace intentionality. Strategic PMMs know when to react, when to pause, and when to steer the ship.

Read the full post here

Olivine Success Story: SketchUp Goes to Market with a Future-Ready AI Offering

SketchUp, a global leader in 3D modeling software for architecture and design, had something big in the works: a new AI-powered product designed to supercharge workflows with generative design, photorealistic rendering, and conversational assistance. They turned to Olivine to bring it to life.

For five months, we partnered with their product and marketing teams to build a launch-ready strategy, from naming and messaging to pricing and design. The result? A differentiated AI offering that fits cleanly within SketchUp’s brand and product ecosystem.

What we delivered:

• A naming strategy framework for scalable AI offerings

• Competitive pricing evaluation and sensitivity survey

• Product brand architecture for seamless integration within the SketchUp ecosystem

• GTM strategy and content, with clear phases, owners, and KPIs

• Validated positioning and messaging across key personas and features

• Visual identity options and moodboards to support launch and beyond

"Another very stimulating, very helpful engagement that stretched us beyond our typical bounds. The quality of input has been incredible and we're very grateful—it's been a great run." — Sumele Adelana, Product Marketing Manager

"I've learned a lot working with the Olivine team. We've come a long way and done a lot of things. I'm going to miss our meetings—we've really accomplished something special together." — Michael Tadros, Director of Product Management

Planning to launch your next big bet? Let’s build the GTM together.

Get in touch

PMM Toolkit: Tool, Template, Trend

• Tool: Tofu Pages

  Ranked #1 on Product Hunt for good reason, Tofu Pages lets you generate infinite personalized landing pages from your existing website, no new tool, no extra dashboard. Whether you want pages for individual prospects, personas, or ad keywords, Tofu makes hyper-relevant landing pages in minutes.
  ✨ Bonus: Chrome extension included.

• Template: Landing Page Content Template
  If you're not using Tofu, use this no-fluff template to define the content and copy it for your next landing page, ready to hand off to design. From headlines and product assets to testimonials and feature callouts, this one keeps you structured and conversion-focused. Get the template

• Trend: Strategic restraint in feature marketing

  We're seeing a shift among early-stage startups, especially in AI, toward showing less, better. Instead of overwhelming audiences with every capability, companies focus on a smaller set of compelling use cases and crisp messaging. It's not about hiding features, it’s about packaging your value in ways people can quickly understand and act on. Less noise, more clarity. And it’s working.

Meme of the Month 🎉

When everyone has a different idea of what PMMs actually do

From Mad Men dreams to cash-burning nightmares, we know the truth lies somewhere between messaging workshops and enablement decks. This gem was spotted on LinkedIn via Stefan Gladbach. Thank you for the end-of-the-week laugh!

Have a meme that made you feel seen? Tag us on LinkedIn or reply to this email with your favorite. We just might feature it next month.

Until next time,

The Olivine Team

We're excited to hear from you!

There’s something uniquely tricky about first impressions.

Whether it’s walking into a new room, joining a call with someone you admire, or trying out a product for the first time, our brains are fast to judge and slow to forget. As marketers, that truth hits close to home. We craft landing pages, write onboarding flows, and obsess over copy because we know: if the start doesn’t land, the rest might not matter.

This month, we’re digging into what it takes to make a great first impression, not just in life, but in your product’s onboarding experience.

PMM Tips: Make a Great First Impression

In her post, "Make a Great First Impression: A Step-by-Step Guide for Successful User Onboarding," Lindsay Tabas breaks down how onboarding is less about features and more about feelings. Here are a few actionable takeaways:

Start before sign-up

• Onboarding begins on your landing page, not your dashboard.

• Ask: What’s the one promise you’re making upfront, and are you delivering on it once users sign up?

Treat onboarding like storytelling

• Use the structure of a three-act story: setup, development, resolution.

• Guide users from “What is this?” to “I get it” to “I’m getting value.”

Keep copy clear and human

• Tiny tweaks in microcopy can dramatically change activation rates.

• Less jargon, more guidance. Nudge users step by step.

Test early, test scrappy

• You don’t need a full usability lab; paper prototypes or simple walkthroughs can reveal where users get lost or overwhelmed.

Pro tip: One client increased paid conversions 2.8x just by simplifying the initial onboarding steps. Big wins often come from simplifying, not adding.

Thoughtful onboarding is more than UX. It’s a marketing strategy, and a first date your users will want to go on again.

Read the full guide here

Need help crafting onboarding flows or aligning your marketing to product moments? That’s exactly what we do. Get in touch if you'd like support from our team.

Olivine Success Story: Helping SafeGraph Attract the Right Leads

When your product is top-tier but your pipeline isn’t full of your ideal buyers, it’s time to rethink how you’re telling your story. That’s exactly what SafeGraph, a global POI data provider, asked us to help with.

In just three months, we worked with their product, marketing, and sales teams to refine their positioning and messaging, define target personas, and overhaul their website and sales collateral. The goal? Attract more qualified leads, and help their team close them.

What we delivered:

• A fresh positioning and messaging framework tied to the needs of innovative product builders

• Copy for new product and pricing pages, with clear differentiators like service quality and flexible pricing

• A revamped sales pitch and proposal deck, plus an ADR email sprint and nurture edits to align sales with the new strategy

“Working with Olivine was a very productive experience. Everything was very organized and the interaction really forced us to think hard about key questions and fundamental strategies.” – Michael Taylor, Product Manager at SafeGraph

The result? More alignment, stronger storytelling, and a tighter connection between SafeGraph’s messaging and the people most ready to buy. Need help refining your positioning or sales strategy?

Let's Talk

PMM Toolkit: Tool, Template, Trend

This month’s picks are all about sharpening your strategy and saving time:

• Tool: Gamma
  Move over static slides. Gamma is an AI-powered tool that helps you create sleek, interactive presentations and docs in minutes. Whether you're pitching a product, recapping a launch, or enabling sales, Gamma helps you go from outline to beautiful deck, fast. Explore Gamma

• Template: Olivine’s Positioning & Messaging Guide
  Clear positioning isn't just a nice-to-have; it’s the backbone of a scalable GTM motion. Our free guide + template walks you through how to define your product’s value, write clear messaging, and align your team on what you say (and don’t say) to the market. Get the guide & template.

• Trend: PMMs as Strategic Translators
  More companies are realizing their PMMs aren’t just marketers, they’re translators between product and market. The trend? Shifting PMM roles toward internal alignment and external clarity. Expect to see more PMMs embedded in product pods, influencing roadmaps and enabling sales from day one.

Let us know which of these was most useful or what you would like us to include next month.

Meme of the Month 🎉

This month’s PMM meme hits a little too close to home 😅

When your enablement docs are so outdated, even the new sales hire is surprised you had them in the first place 😅
(Somewhere, a rogue one-pager from 2019 is still haunting a prospect's inbox.)

Have a meme that captures your product marketing reality? Tag us on LinkedIn with your best, and you just might be featured next month!

Until next time,

The Olivine Team

We're excited to hear from you!

If you're reading this, you've probably been with us on this journey for a while. And if you're new—welcome to Inside Olivine! We’re shaking things up. Our newsletter is evolving to be sharper, more engaging, and packed with insights that not only inspire but also drive action.

We’ve always believed in going beyond surface-level marketing advice. That’s why, moving forward, Inside Olivine will bring you:

• PMM Tips to sharpen your strategy.

• Success Stories from Olivine's client work.

• PMM Resources to fuel your toolkit.

• And a fun community spotlight, because marketing should never be boring.

Let’s dive into this first edition of our new era!

PMM Tips: Betting Smart with Horizontal SaaS Products

How do you decide which verticals to focus on when your product could serve... everyone? That’s the million-dollar question for marketers with horizontal SaaS products. In a recent blog post, Briana Brown shares practical advice on narrowing your focus without leaving growth opportunities on the table.

Key Takeaways:

• Start with the numbers. Find which use cases have the largest market opportunities and allocate resources accordingly.

• Check the competitive landscape. Identify where you have an edge—or where competitors are already winning.

• Look for overlap. Once you’ve nailed a vertical, see where those insights can be “plugged and played” into similar markets.

The secret? Don’t try to win everywhere. Start with a few focused bets, measure their performance, and iterate. }

Read Briana’s full take here.

Are you navigating this challenge, too? Reply and let us know how you decide where to place your bets.

Olivine Success Story: How Smallstep Secured a Seamless Product Launch

We love a good challenge—especially when it involves helping a lean team turn big ideas into tangible success. Smallstep, a leader in automated certificate management for DevOps, came to us with a clear ask: help them shape and execute a winning go-to-market strategy for their latest product launch.

The Challenge: Smallstep's Head of Marketing and Head of Sales needed support to sharpen their messaging, strengthen their GTM strategy, and prepare marketing and sales materials that would resonate with their target audience. As a small team, they were stretched thin. That’s where we stepped in.

How We Helped:

• Built Strong Foundations: From refining personas to defining messaging, we anchored the strategy in Smallstep’s unique value.

• Crafted GTM Strategy: We didn’t stop at launch. We mapped out post-launch activities that nurtured engagement and growth.

• Delivered Actionable Materials: New solution pages, an updated onboarding email series, and a refreshed sales deck empowered their team to sell with confidence.

Don’t just take our word for it:

“Olivine really partnered with me to dial in our sales motion... and gave our reps the confidence to have conversations with prospects.” - Head of Sales

From strategy to execution, we love seeing our clients launch with clarity and confidence. It’s a reminder that great product marketing is as much about partnership as it is about process. Do you need help launching your product?

Contact Us

PMM Toolkit: Tool, Template, Trend

This month, we’re arming you with a trio of resources designed to sharpen your PMM edge.

• Tool: Fathom – Say goodbye to manual note-taking. Fathom is an AI-powered meeting assistant that records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings. It's perfect for capturing insights from customer interviews or internal strategy sessions. Check it out!

• Template: Persona Development Framework – Building personas? Use this template to nail down demographics, motivations, and pain points. It's a simple, actionable tool to ensure your messaging lands every time. Download here.

• Trend: Lean Marketing Teams – More teams are working with fewer resources, leaning into agency and consultant partnerships. It's shifting how brands build strategy and execute campaigns—and why agility is the new superpower in PMM.

Meme of the Month 🎉

This month’s meme comes from Sairus B, perfectly capturing the daily chaos of product marketing.

Got a meme that nails the PMM experience? Share it with us on LinkedIn; you might just be featured next month!

Until next time, keep marketing smart and bold.

The Olivine Team

We're excited to hear from you!

Hi there! I’m Daniel, better known as “Coco” around here, Olivine’s VP of Ops and an Argentinian expat enjoying life in sunny Portugal. As we closed out another incredible year, I couldn’t help but reflect on my almost four years with Olivine—watching it evolve from a small agency into the dynamic, multifaceted company it is today. So, what better moment to bring you this special 2024 recap edition of our newsletter?

I won’t sugarcoat it: 2024 wasn’t always smooth sailing. The tech industry faced turbulence, clients tightened budgets, and we navigated more than a few unexpected curveballs.

But if there’s one thing Olivine has proven time and again, it’s that resilience is part of our DNA. The big, shiny metrics we’ve celebrated in years past didn’t always move in the direction we wanted, but this year taught us how to evolve with intention, creativity, and grit. Let’s dive into the numbers and the stories behind them.

Our Team

In 2023, we were a team of 24. In 2024, we became leaner at 20—a 17% decrease. Saying goodbye to some truly wonderful colleagues was tough. But this wasn’t about losing ground; it was about recalibrating. We tightened our core to stay nimble, support one another, and focus on the work that matters most. If anything, 2024 reminded us that going lean often sparks efficiency, creativity, and deeper empathy in how we collaborate.

Our Search Visibility

On the SEO front, we held our ground and then some. We snagged 32 keywords in the top 1-3 —an 18.5% increase from the previous year—and skyrocketed our top 4-10 keywords to 108 (a 151% jump!). Our total tracked keyword universe also grew nearly 27%, reaching 1,815. While SEO is not a direct reflection of pipeline or revenue, these metrics signal something bigger: our thought leadership, brand authority, and consistent content quality continue to rise above the noise. In a year when everyone was scrambling to stand out, we kept showing up–and it’s paying off.

Website Traffic & Leads

Our pageviews fell by 35%. Ouch. But there’s more to the story. Unique visitors increased by nearly 37%, reaching 32,564, suggesting we’re attracting a more focused and relevant audience. While inbound leads dipped slightly –about 5%– the fact that they’ve remained steady despite economic headwinds is a win. Serving a market grappling with uncertainty means every lead we get is more precious, and we’ve learned to tailor our offerings accordingly.

Social & Newsletter Growth

We saw strong growth on the community-building front. Our total social following grew by 30.5%, with LinkedIn leading the way as our top channel for engaging with B2B audiences. Our newsletter also gained traction, with subscribers increasing by 46% to over 4,000! These aren’t just numbers to us–they represent trust and engagement. When we share honest stories, actionable frameworks, and insights, people stick around, and that’s something we’re deeply proud of.

Clients & Our Evolving Services

Here’s the tough one: we went from 17 clients to 9 in 2024—a 47% decrease. Some budgets were cut, some projects wrapped earlier than planned, and some partnerships simply never took off. But every challenge brought an opportunity to adapt. We used this shift to diversify our services, rolling out growth marketing and customizable proposals to meet clients where they are. Instead of expecting clients to fit a rigid mode, we became more consultative and flexible. Each ‘no’ and ‘not right now’ taught us something new, and we’re emerging stronger with a toolkit designed for a rapidly changing market.

Major Launches & Bright Spots
We’re makers at heart, and even in a challenging year, we stayed true to that spirit. In April, we launched The PMM Cookbook, which saw 700+ downloads—proof that there’s a real appetite for practical, high-quality resources to help marketers and founders sharpen their product marketing skills. Our team poured time and intention into making it valuable and accessible, and we’re excited to see it in print next year!

Reflections & Looking Ahead
2024 didn’t unfold the way we envisioned. It tested our resilience, pushed us to rethink old ways, and showed us exactly where we could grow. At times, it was humbling. But it was also freeing— challenging us to question assumptions, break away from outdated molds, and reimagine how we deliver value.

If 2024 proved one thing, it’s that while we can’t control market conditions, we can control how we respond. We closed last year a little leaner, a little sharper, and more determined than ever to guide our clients through uncertain waters with empathy, strategy, and creativity.

If 2023 was about riding the wave, 2024 was about learning to navigate in stormy seas. Here’s to 2025—taking the lessons we’ve learned and building something even stronger together.

If you’d like to explore how Olivine’s new service models can support your product marketing journey, we’re here. Let’s talk.

Fresh Finds

• Tool I love: Lovable.dev. Its simple UX allows you to turn your ideas into apps in seconds.

• Shallow dive: This thread by @levelsio: Known for his insights into product development and marketing, Pieter Levels often shares quick, engaging threads about new tools or techniques in product management. This thread shares his excitement about the current times we get to live in, considering the AI landscape and endless possibilities, comparing it to the early days of the internet.

• Deep dive: 20VC episode with Harry Stebbings and Guillaume Moubeche, lempire Founder. Harry Stebbings, host of "The Twenty Minute VC," frequently dives into deep discussions on product-market fit, scaling strategies, and go-to-market tactics. In this episode, they talk about how to scale a business through content

Inside Olivine

Content gems

• Olivine by the numbers — the 2023 edition

• Olivine by the numbers — the 2022 edition

• Olivine by the numbers — the 2021 edition

Job openings

• Headspace is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• Sift is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager

• Ramp is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager

Hello from London 🇬🇧 I'm Shaz Muradova, Olivine's Product Marketing Consultant based in the UK. My favourite thing in the world is being involved in a launch (of any shape or form), so throughout my career, I've naturally gravitated towards startups and launch-prone industries.

As the season’s first frosty temperatures settle in here, I'm switching up my maximise-the-outdoors, cycle-everywhere routine for cosier pursuits like experimenting with new recipes (results vary), tackling a 3000-piece puzzle (halfway there) and returning to paperback reading (current nod-off point: page two).

In this newsletter, I’m diving into a truly undervalued trait that every successful PMM has (even if they might not realise it) — and it’s something you can’t easily quantify as a KPI.

In the world of product marketing, technical skills, data-driven insights, and strategic thinking are often celebrated — and rightly so. However, one essential skill is sometimes left out of the spotlight: empathy. For Product Marketers, empathy isn’t just a “nice-to-have” — it’s a superpower that can transform how we understand customers, align cross-functional teams, and ultimately, could sway the success rate of your product launch. At its core, empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and genuinely understand their needs, frustrations, and desires. Let’s have a look at why empathy matters so much in product marketing and where it can make a real difference.

1. Truly understanding your customers

Let’s start with the most obvious place: understanding your customers. Sure, you can build customer personas with demographic data and research, but empathy brings it to life. When you’re genuinely curious about what your customers are going through — their challenges, their needs, and what they’re really trying to accomplish — you start to see things differently.

Listening closely to customer calls, reading between the lines in feedback, and thinking about the “why” behind their behaviours helps you build messaging that isn’t just on target but truly resonates. And it goes beyond messaging; empathy helps you make strategic product decisions because you’re no longer guessing what matters to them. Instead, you’re making educated decisions rooted in an understanding of their world. 

2. Navigating Conflicting Priorities

As a PMM, you’re not only juggling your own priorities but balancing the needs of multiple teams: product, sales, customer success, and leadership. Each team has its own goals, and sometimes those goals don’t perfectly align. This is where empathy can make a massive difference.

When you take the time to understand each team’s pressures — whether it’s product focusing on feature delivery timelines or sales needing clearer positioning to hit their quotas — you can approach conflicts with a genuine desire to find common ground and the right solution. Empathy enables you to acknowledge each team’s perspective and find ways to bridge those gaps. When teams feel heard, they’re more likely to support the overall strategy, making your job much easier and creating a more cohesive, aligned organisation.

3. Stepping into the sales team’s shoes

A strong relationship with the sales team can make or break a product’s success. But if you’ve worked with sales, you know that their world is fast-paced, highly goal-driven, and often under intense pressure. To truly support them, it’s crucial to understand what they deal with daily — from prospect objections to tight deadlines.

When you have empathy for their experience, you can create resources and training that actually help them rather than overwhelm them. This might mean providing concise, easy-to-digest collateral, hosting regular Q&A sessions to understand their needs, or even joining sales calls to hear firsthand what they’re up against. Empathy helps you craft tools that aren’t just well-made but truly valuable, and it positions you as a partner who gets what they’re up against and is there to help.

4. Fostering effective collaboration across teams

Product marketing lives at the intersection of so many teams — product, engineering, customer success, and more. Serving as a connector is a natural part of the role, but effective collaboration doesn’t happen automatically. It requires trust, open communication, and, yes, empathy.

Take the time to listen to each team’s perspective on what they’re working on and how it impacts the customer experience. Engineers, for example, may want more context on how a feature impacts users, while customer success might need insight into what’s coming in the roadmap to better support customers. Empathy helps you act as the bridge between these teams, giving them visibility into each other’s work and showing them how they each contribute to the bigger picture. When people feel connected and aligned, collaboration happens naturally — and the end product is better for it.

5. Communicating with leadership

Finally, empathy plays a key role when you’re engaging with executive leadership. Presenting to leadership isn’t just about sharing data; it’s about knowing what they care about most. Executives are often juggling high-level priorities and need information that cuts to the chase. By putting yourself in their shoes, you can tailor your insights to show them what they need to know — without drowning them in unnecessary details.

This empathy-driven approach builds trust and makes your voice as a PMM stronger and more impactful within the organization. You become a trusted advisor who understands the pressures they face and supports their decision-making with concise, actionable insights.

Empathy as a competitive advantage

In a world where metrics and data often dominate the conversation, empathy gives PMMs an edge. It deepens your connection to customers, helps you bridge internal divides, empowers your sales team, and strengthens collaboration. Empathy isn’t just about being nice or understanding people’s feelings; it’s a strategic tool that helps you make smarter decisions, deliver more impactful messaging, launch better products, and align your company around shared goals.

Top LinkedIn Post

I love this post so much because if done right, the initial listening tour can set you up for much stronger success within the team, have stronger relationships and gravitas, and help you navigate all the cross-team challenges when the time comes.

Fresh Finds

• Tool I love: Grammarly, such an obvious helper to invest in. As a person that is always trying to finish off that bloody email before the next interruption or brain pivot, Grammarly’s corrections and suggestions are just invaluable in keeping your sanity intact and checklist clear. 

• Shallow dive: Advertising has been my all-time favourite university subject (mostly because we watched endless amounts of ad content instead of reading heavy books), so I always keep an eye on any new emerging tech in ad space, or just something fun and eye-catching, like bagvertising. Virtual Replacement Technology is not very new, but it broadens the horizons of how events can attract a wider range of audiences and brands that want to collaborate with them. 

• Deep dive: My go-to podcasts are The Futur with Chris Do (you can find a variety of interesting topics, including marketing, entrepreneurship, and making moneeey), and What Now? With Trevor Noah (anything from travelling, Olympics, sports, politics to banter with friends)

Inside Olivine

Content gems

• Do you really know who you’re selling to? How to build personas and why it matters

• How to build a strong relationship with Product as a PMM

• 4 Steps to Building an Effective Product Marketing & Sales Relationship

Client happenings

• Darktrace has been recognized by KuppingerCole Analysts AG as an Overall, Product, Market, and Innovation Leader in the 2024 Leadership Compass for Network Detection and Response (NDR).

• Yurts CEO Ben Van Roo shares insights on ensuring companies invest in the right AI platform without overspending.

• Benefex surveyed over 2,000 employers and employees across four continents to uncover the top 10 benefits global employees value most. 🌍

Job openings

• 12twenty is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• ServiceNow is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• AllTrails is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

Wah gwarn family!

Jadon Thomas here, a Product Marketer at Olivine, and that’s how we say “Good day sir/ma’am, how are you doing on this fine day?” in the Caribbean. 

Ok, maybe not that formally, but you get the idea.

I’ve been at Olivine for a couple of years now and we’ve worked with a lot of companies in different industries within the B2B SaaS space. This month, we’re giving you a behind-the-scenes look at some of the lessons we’ve learned so you can steal the strategies to deliver more impact in your product marketing.

Warning: this isn’t theory - each lesson comes from a real client we’ve had. And if you read to the end, there may be a bonus lesson. No promises…

Let’s get into it.

Lesson 1: Revisit the Fundamentals (Mercury) 

Mercury, a fast-growing banking platform for startups, saw a surge in users and needed to realign their strategy. We helped refine their Personas and Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) through workshops and research, aligning their product, sales, and marketing, and establishing a solid foundation for future messaging work. 

Key Lesson: Even Established Companies Benefit from Revisiting the Basics. Mercury recognized that even though they are an established company already seeing success, it’s worth revisiting core strategies to uncover new insights that improve overall business effectiveness.

Lesson 2: Patience Creates Impact (Vultr) 

We partnered with Vultr, a cloud infrastructure company, over the course of a year to support the successful launch of the Vultr Cloud Alliance. During that time, we helped develop key marketing and sales assets for each of their 17 partners, from Positioning & Messaging guides to an updated sales deck and event promo video. Our approach helped Vultr execute high-quality work at volume while aligning on a long-term strategy, maximizing the value they got from each partner relationship. 

Key Lesson: Strategic Depth Drives Lasting Impact. Vultr appreciated the extended collaboration because it gave us the context needed to dive deep into strategic development and the technical aspects of the product. This time investment enabled us to own several work streams and produce high-quality, cohesive work that contributed to a successful launch and long-term partnership. While quick wins have their place, a well-paced approach allows product marketing to deliver results that are both impactful and sustainable.

Lesson 3: Trust the Process (Envoy)

Envoy, a workplace platform, partnered with us over two years to build foundational product marketing strategies and processes, helping them go to market in new and impactful ways. Our work together included Envoy’s new product launch for Rooms, an initiative that uncovered entirely new personas, including security-focused users, sparking an unexpected and profitable revenue stream. Additionally, we led strategic workshops with Envoy’s leadership on core topics like defining proto-personas, messaging, and marketing with Jobs To Be Done, setting the stage for future growth.

Key Lesson: Trust the Process to Discover Hidden Opportunities. By embracing a step-by-step approach to product marketing, Envoy uncovered valuable business opportunities they hadn’t initially considered. Trusting in a proven process and working alongside product marketing experts can reveal untapped markets and disguised pain points, often with a greater long-term impact than quick wins.

Bonus Lesson: You Can’t Read the Label from Inside the Jar (Loqate)

Congrats for reading this far (if you just scrolled down and skipped ahead… we know who you are). Either way, you’ve earned the bonus.

This one comes from Loqate, a global leader in location data intelligence. They brought us in to refine their product messaging and ensure company-wide alignment. By holding workshops with different teams to align on product positioning and messaging, we helped Loqate gain a new perspective on how to enhance their messaging. Something that’s hard to achieve with an internal team that works on this stuff daily. 

Loqate gained from having someone with no dogs in the fight (Olivine) come in, listen objectively to the various teams, and offer recommendations based on industry best practices and outsider observations.  The result – a fresh perspective that brings new energy to the team. 

Sound like something you’d like to do? We can help with that.

TL;DR 

In case you didn’t have the 132 seconds it takes to speed-read this, here’s the summary:

1. Don’t forget the fundamentals 

2. Be patient

3. Trust the process 

4. Get an outside perspective

Think Olivine can bring some outside perspective for you? Reach out today and let’s start the conversation.

Top LinkedIn post

Fresh Finds

• Tool I love: Apollo.io: Great for building targeted prospecting lists.

• Shallow dive: The Full-Stack Product Marketer's Playbook, by Mariska Burger, includes an overview of the 10 most essential domains to master, as well as a playbook, guide, and course for each.

• Deep dive: Make It Punchy by Emma Straton, a practical guide to writing awesome messaging for B2B tech.

Inside Olivine

Content gems

• Before & After: How we evolved positioning & messaging for our clients

• What our clients achieved in 2023 (and how we supported them)

• How a product marketing consultancy can help you build alignment & execute faster

Client happenings

• Compete Week is just around the corner! Explore the full lineup and secure your spot here.

• Siteimprove has signed a definitive agreement to acquire MarketMuse! This powerful addition means SiteImprove now offers a seamless, all-in-one solution for content strategy, SEO, accessibility, and marketing performance.

• ConductorOne has been named "Access Management Solution of the Year" by the 2024 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards! 🎉 🏆

• Ashley Wilson and Moiz Virani from Momentum.io rang the opening bell at the NYSE with FirstMark. 🔔

Job openings:

• EvenUp is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager.

• Scribd, Inc. is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager.

• Zendesk is hiring a Product Marketing Manager.

At Olivine, we’ve been getting a lot of requests for help with product launches. I gathered stories from some incredible product marketers who’ve led successful launches to show you how we get it done. Whether you’re launching your first product or rolling out new features, this guide breaks down the steps to ensure your launch is a win.

Oh, and if you want to dive deeper into each story, check out our latest blog post!

Step 1: Lay the Groundwork with Research

Before a product launch, preparation is everything. Michael Greene of Klaviyo and Jessica Allen of Experian both emphasized the importance of thorough research to understand market needs.

• Michael Greene, Klaviyo: Michael’s team at Klaviyo identified key gaps in the SMS marketing space by researching their competition, such as Attentive. This helped shape Klaviyo’s positioning and differentiation.

• Jessica Allen, Experian: At Experian, Jessica worked with analysts to get a macro-level view of the data quality industry. Understanding the market helped Jessica create use cases that aligned with real customer challenges.

Pro Tip: Solid research forms the foundation of your messaging and sets you apart from competitors.

Step 2: Craft a Compelling Story

Your product launch doesn’t exist in a vacuum—there’s a story that needs to be told. Clayton Pritchard from Momentum and Raechel Lambert from Olivine both stress the importance of creating a narrative that resonates with your audience.

• Clayton Pritchard, Momentum: For the launch of Momentum’s Upsells & Renewals product, Clayton emphasized tying the launch into an existing company story rather than introducing a completely new one. This ensured the product felt like a natural continuation.

• Raechel Lambert, Olivine: Rae’s story-first approach is about focusing on a Minimum Marketable Product (MMP) that delivers clear value from day one, a lesson she learned when launching Intercom’s Help Center against Zendesk.

Pro Tip: Start with a product story that ties into customer pain points and clearly shows how your product solves them.

Step 3: Choose the Right Channels for Your Launch

Your launch channels can make or break your campaign. Testing different approaches, like Dana Salman’s team at Cloudli or Clayton Pritchard’s multi-channel strategy at Momentum, will help you find the right mix.

• Dana Salman, Cloudli: Dana initially tried Google PPC but found it ineffective against large telecom competitors. She pivoted to LinkedIn and webinars, which performed far better.

• Clayton Pritchard, Momentum: Clayton’s multi-channel strategy included Product Hunt, PR, social media, and outreach to existing customers. The campaign’s success was fueled by this diverse approach.

Pro Tip: Don’t rely on one channel. Test multiple platforms to see which generates the best engagement and leads.

Step 4: Monitor and Adapt in Real Time

No product launch goes exactly according to plan. Michael Greene from Klaviyo and Jessica Allen from Experian share how real-time feedback shaped their success.

• Michael Greene, Klaviyo: By soft-launching to early adopters, Michael’s team collected valuable feedback and adjusted their roadmap to improve the product.

• Jessica Allen, Experian: Jessica stayed on top of stakeholder communication, making sure everyone was aligned as timelines shifted. Keeping everyone in the loop ensured they stayed on course despite delays.

Pro Tip: Stay agile and be ready to pivot based on real-time results and feedback from your users.

Step 5: Maintain Post-Launch Momentum

After the big day, it’s easy to move on to the next project—but keeping momentum going post-launch is key. Shweta Ahooja of Cinnabon emphasizes the need for continuous iteration and support.

• Shweta Ahooja, Cinnabon: Shweta’s product launch became one of the most successful in Cinnabon’s history, but she didn’t stop there. She continued to iterate on marketing strategies and refine the product after its release to maintain excitement and boost customer loyalty.

Pro Tip: Don’t launch and leave—make sure you have post-launch plans to support continued success.

Conclusion

Launching a product isn’t a one-size-fits-all process, but by following these steps—research, storytelling, testing channels, adapting in real-time, and maintaining momentum—you’ll set yourself up for success. These product marketers have proven that clear communication, collaboration, and a willingness to pivot are essential ingredients for a winning launch.

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We’ve all been there—the pressure to launch ASAP can be overwhelming. But the key is to pause and question that urgency. As PMMs, we’re not just here to check off tasks; we’re strategic advisors. Our role is to ensure we’re bringing a product to market that customers will love, not just rushing to meet an internal deadline. It’s about quality and impact, not speed for the sake of it. Let’s focus on launching something meaningful, even when the timeline feels tight.

Fresh finds

• Tool I love: Google Calendar - it’s simple and coordinates my four different calendars. My tip for sanity: utilize a shared calendar that’s editable by all your accounts so your calendar is automatically updated and reflected everywhere. 

• Shallow dive: Sharebird - How can PMMs show that they are adding value within the business to the leadership team? Are there any quick/day-to-day tactics that can help to get buy-in from senior leaders?

• Deep dive: Sharebird’s AMA: Asana Director of Product Marketing, Erica Conti on Product Launches

Inside Olivine

Content gems

• The 12 stages of taking a new product to market

• A better go-to-market launch priority framework that emphasizes customer and business value

• Product launches: when should product marketing get involved?

Client happenings

• Compete Week is back, and Klue is excited to host its first-ever in-person event in beautiful Vancouver from Oct 28-30, 2024! Attendees can look forward to a world-class lineup of industry leaders. Limited in-person tickets are available, so register ASAP to secure your spot, or join virtually on The Compete Network. Register here: Compete Week Registration

• Siteimprove.com has a brand-new look 👀

• Got a game-changing idea? It’s time to bring it to life! Join the Vultr and GeeksforGeeks Hackathon and turn your innovation into reality. 🌱

  Registration closes on September 20th – sign up now and be part of this groundbreaking event!

• Loqate scored their first Best Retail Case 2024 award for their #addressvalidation solution! Congrats!
  

Job openings

• Redis is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• ShipHero is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• Goldsky is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

Hey there, it’s Alli, back with another newsletter for you! I’m thrilled to dive into a topic that’s truly reshaping the future of B2B SaaS product marketing: the incredible power of AI and machine learning.

AI and ML aren’t just buzzwords; they’re game-changers. These technologies are transforming the way we understand and engage with our customers, making our marketing strategies smarter and more efficient. In this newsletter, we’ll explore how AI and ML can supercharge your product marketing efforts, from personalizing customer experiences to predicting trends and automating tasks. Trust me, you don’t want to miss out on what’s happening in this space!

Understanding AI and Machine Learning in B2B SaaS

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are transforming how businesses operate, especially in the B2B SaaS landscape. But what exactly are these technologies, and why are they so important? AI refers to the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, while ML is a subset of AI that enables machines to learn from data and improve over time without being explicitly programmed.

Current trends show a significant rise in AI and ML adoption in B2B SaaS, driven by the need for more efficient processes and better customer insights. For instance, AI-powered chatbots and ML algorithms for predictive analytics are becoming commonplace.

Enhancing Customer Insights and Personalization

One of the biggest advantages of AI and ML is the ability to analyze vast amounts of data to uncover customer behavior and preferences—and doing it in about ⅛ the amount of time it would take our brains to do the same. This means you can quickly create highly personalized marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience. For example, AI can help segment your customers based on their behavior, making your targeting more precise and effective.

Imagine launching a campaign that not only reaches the right people but also speaks directly to their needs and preferences. That’s the power of AI-driven personalization.

Optimizing Lead Generation and Scoring

Generating and prioritizing leads can be a daunting task, but AI can make it significantly easier. AI-driven lead generation strategies can identify potential customers who are most likely to convert, while machine learning algorithms can score and prioritize leads based on behavior and engagement.

Take HubSpot, for example. They use AI to analyze lead interactions and assign scores, helping sales teams focus on the most promising prospects. This not only saves time but also increases the chances of closing deals.

Improving Customer Retention and Churn Prediction

Keeping customers is just as important as acquiring new ones. AI models can predict which customers are at risk of churning and why. With this information, you can implement personalized retention strategies to keep them engaged.

For instance, an AI model might identify that customers who don’t use a specific feature are more likely to churn. Armed with this insight, you can proactively reach out to these customers with targeted campaigns to encourage feature adoption.

Automating and Enhancing Marketing Campaigns

AI can automate various marketing tasks, from email marketing to social media management. This not only increases efficiency but also ensures that your campaigns are always optimized. Machine learning can further enhance your campaigns by continuously analyzing performance and making adjustments in real time.

Think about how A/B testing works. With ML, you can run multiple tests simultaneously and get insights faster, allowing you to optimize your campaigns on the fly.

Enhancing Sales and Marketing Alignment

AI-driven insights can improve collaboration between sales and marketing teams. By aligning sales strategies with marketing efforts, you ensure that both teams are working towards the same goals. For example, AI can provide insights into which marketing messages resonate most with leads that convert. Sales teams can then tailor their pitches to better align with successful marketing campaigns.

Leveraging AI for Competitive Analysis

Staying ahead of the competition is crucial, and AI can help. AI tools can monitor competitors and analyze market trends, providing you with valuable insights. Machine learning algorithms can also help you understand competitor strategies and identify opportunities for differentiation.

For instance, using AI to track competitor pricing, product launches, and customer feedback can give you a strategic advantage. This allows your team to quickly adjust pricing, refine product features, and tailor marketing strategies to stay ahead of the competition. By anticipating competitor moves, you can proactively position your product as the better choice.

Ethical Considerations and Challenges

While AI offers many benefits, it’s important to consider the ethical implications and challenges. Issues like data privacy, algorithmic bias, and transparency need to be addressed. Best practices include ensuring data is used responsibly, being transparent about how AI decisions are made, and regularly auditing AI systems for bias.

Future Trends and Innovations

The future of AI and ML in B2B SaaS looks promising. Emerging technologies like natural language processing (NLP) and advanced predictive analytics are set to revolutionize how we approach product marketing.

NLP enables machines to understand and respond to human language more naturally, which means chatbots and virtual assistants that provide more personalized and engaging customer interactions. This leads to improved customer service and more efficient handling of inquiries.

Advanced predictive analytics takes data analysis to the next level by not only examining past behaviors but also forecasting future trends. This allows marketers to anticipate customer needs, optimize marketing strategies, and make more informed decisions. Imagine being able to predict which features will be most popular or identify potential churn risks before they happen 🤯 —this kind of foresight can be a game-changer for product marketing!

The potential of AI and ML in B2B SaaS is truly mind-blowing!  Companies will soon have the power to predict customer needs before they even arise, automate marketing campaigns to run like a well-oiled machine, and personalize every interaction to make customers feel uniquely valued. That’s the reality we’re stepping into.

For marketers, the blend of these technologies with our skills will significantly boost the power and quality of our output. We’re not just creating products; we’re crafting experiences that resonate deeply with our audience. The ability to continuously adapt, innovate, and showcase the value of our offerings is what will set the next generation of successful tech companies apart.

Embrace these tools, explore their potential, and get ready to transform how you approach product marketing. The future is here, and it’s incredibly exciting!

Have you started integrating AI and ML into your B2B SaaS marketing strategies? Share your experiences with us! Want a top partner in B2B SaaS Product Marketing? We’re here for you. Reach out to us and mention this newsletter. 

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Fresh Finds

• Tool I love: ChatGPT - aka my assistant. Don’t we all love ChatGPT?

• Shallow dive: Ever wondered how Trader Joe’s competed with bigger competitors? Klue wrote about it here.

• Deep dive: Women in Product Marketing Podcast | Automation Anywhere Senior Vice President, Product & Solutions Marketing, Claudia Michon on AI and Product Marketing

Inside Olivine

Content Gems

• Comparing AI-writing tools to create real product messaging

• 4 tips on how to approach your early-stage AI product’s GTM strategy

• AI Can Boost Your Product Marketing Skills - Here’s How

Client Happenings

• Momentum scores 9.5 in popularity, activity, and freshness in a Trend Hunter article!

• The Yurts team had a fantastic time at the Ai4 - Artificial Intelligence Conferences engaging with industry leaders and gaining valuable insights.

Job Openings

• Canva is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager, B2B

• Calm is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• Consensys is hiring a Lead Product Marketing Manager

Hey, it’s me again. I’m still out here in Brooklyn, enjoying summer and dancing my heart out; come join me! Dancing decreases your chances of dementia and increases longevity. And if that isn’t enough, a recent study found that it’s cooler and sexier than Pickleball ( jk, I made that last part up, lol). 

Intro: 

A few weeks ago, I had a great chat with Rae Lambert, Co-Founder of Olivine, for an upcoming podcast episode. We talked about River, an in-person events and social platform company Rae started last year. As we delved into the ups and downs of building a product, finding market fit, launching a startup, and pitching investors, Rae laughed and said, “And this is why I think marketers should be founders!”

In the fast-paced, competitive landscape of tech startups, founders play a critical role in steering a company toward success. Traditionally, tech startups have favored an engineering-first mentality where technical skills and coding take center stage, often overshadowing the importance of other departments like marketing and sales. 

We’re here to make the case that while coding skills are valuable, they’re not enough to make a successful founder. And these days, they may not even be a necessity. What is a necessity is being a ‘builder founder.’ Jason Calcanis calls these people those who can get stuff done and get to revenue fast. We have another name for them: marketers. 

Having a clear strategic vision, storytelling abilities, and the skill to effectively communicate what you’re building and why it matters are just as essential. These qualities are crucial for building awareness, attracting investors, and gaining customers. Without them, even the best product could go unnoticed. Or worse, people might know about your product but not be convinced enough to care. 

In this newsletter, we’ll explore why marketers make great founders and why the traditional engineering-first mentality isn’t what will get us our future tech unicorns. But first, let’s talk about why the whole code-centric approach doesn’t always work. 

“If you build it, they will come” is a myth

If a product is created with the assumption that investors and customers will just magically find it on GitHub, will it make a splash in the market? Probably not. 

But what if the coding is exceptional? Sorry, still no. No one will care because the value of the product won't be clearly communicated. Effective messaging that speaks directly to people's pain points and needs is key – and that’s where marketers win.

For too long, we’ve assumed that to be a tech founder, you had to be technical and able to write code. From our experience working with engineers, many believe that marketing is easy to pick up. They underestimate the skill it takes to do marketing well. On the other hand, marketers are quick to admit that learning code seems challenging. This mindset explains why there are more technical founders than marketers turned founders. But the world is shifting. With tools like Bubble and Zapier, marketers can create reliable prototypes without needing to code. 

While there’s a learning curve with these platforms, they make it possible for non-technical people to build functional prototypes that are good enough to use early on. 

Website and product templates are also amazing these days, offering lots of built-in functionality. Many developers don’t realize this yet. For example, the squiggly text on River’s site? It's just a Squarespace feature, but Rae’s dev team thought she coded it herself!

If you’re ever stuck, there are a ton of online communities where people help each other figure out tools, and hiring someone from upwork is an inexpensive option. 

Knowing how to use the resources and community around you is a solid starting point. The next level is effectively communicating the value of your product to a core audience. 

Rae’s experience at Miami Hack Week is a perfect example. With 80 project submissions and 500 attendees, many top projects were impressive but difficult to understand. They spent all their time building prototypes without considering how to explain their value. Rae’s team, made up of two technical members and herself, won first place and the award for Best Use of Open AI. The key wasn’t just their powerful prototype but also Rae’s ability to make it relatable and valuable to the audience. Armed with a polished slide deck, branded t-shirts, and an engaging demo booth, Rae ensured everyone knew exactly what their project was and why it mattered. 

Storytelling, brand, and communicating the value of your product to the world

Building a great product is only half the battle. You also have to be able to tell a captivating story and showcase its worth to the world. 

Engineers might be able to build a product, but being able to communicate its value to the right people at the right time is crucial. 

A compelling story is essential not just for attracting customers but also for recruiting the talent needed to build your project. At the start of your business, you need to inspire engineers and other key team members to join your mission. They need to believe in your vision and understand the impact your product will have. Without a strong narrative, even the most talented engineers might pass on the opportunity to be a part of your journey.

Relationships and personal brand matter 

Marketing for River started well before the product itself was built. Even before any coding began, River had an audience. By manually running All-In Meetups, Rae gained a deep understanding of the market’s problems. That hands-on approach, doing everything manually behind the scenes, informed what was needed to build. Being a deep user of her own product meant she felt the bugs and shortcomings long before customers. 

This proactive approach to audience building highlights the importance of personal branding and meaningful relationships, which many people underestimate. Marketers inherently get this. From the story of being “Brunch Girl” to organizing All-In Meetups and navigating Twitter fiascos to build relationships with investors, it’s clear that connecting with others is key. 

Remember – reaching out to high-profile individuals is an art. Rae used Twitter, LinkedIn and even attended events to get noticed by big investors. It’s not just about the initial contact; it’s about following up and ensuring people know what you do. They might know your company but not realize it’s YOUR company. 

For marketers, leveraging personal brand and relationships is second nature. Success hinges not only the product you build but also on the connections you make and the trust you establish. 

Marketers have a treasure trove of crucial skills and the tools to help fill the gaps, making us well-equipped to be founders.

Let’s end with our top eight reasons why marketers are ideal for founding startups. 

Whether personal or professional, audience building is crucial during a product launch. For example, many experienced marketers have massive LinkedIn networks that can be activated at a moment’s notice to promote a product, drive initial interest, and create credibility that developers might lack.

Most technical founders aren’t social community builders, so they wouldn’t notice the gap in the market that needs filling (like River is doing). Further proof: most innovation reaches developers first because they build for themselves. By being able to identify market gaps, marketers can innovate in areas that aren’t immediately obvious to technical founders.  

Skills in using tools like HubSpot or Salesforce to manage and nurture leads through the marketing and sales process are not easy. And the knowledge to ensure every part of the customer journey is optimized is something many engineers aren’t familiar with – but marketers are!

Value propositions shift based on who you’re talking to, and marketers understand this better than anyone. Tailor your pitch to the audience to ensure your message resonates and drives the desired action.

Whether your audience is investors, potential hires, customers, or end users, effective storytelling and vision casting are essential. Especially when pitching to VCs, Marketers can create a vision that not only highlights the product’s features but also its impact on the market and its potential for growth, making it far more attractive to investors. 

We understand how to use content marketing and social media to build brand awareness while simultaneously running targeted ad campaigns to drive immediate sales.

When product-led growth is done right, it drives user-generated content and creates a flywheel where customers refer more customers. Product can’t just be great; mechanisms must be built to drive action. For example, Dropbox’s early growth was driven by its referral program – a strategy often championed by marketers to leverage existing users for growth.

We all know how important it is to meticulously test a website to ensure every CTA button works and leads to the intended action, avoiding scenarios where potential customers encounter dead ends due to overlooked technical details. We can’t say the same for engineers. Just because a website has fancy animations, if the call to action is a dead end, so is your product.

Rather than just shipping a feature and then finding out if people like it, marketers are writing based on market feedback – and iterating often! Using tools like surveys and social media, we gather customer feedback to refine messaging and ensure it resonates. 

River’s early mistake was positioning the platform solely for podcasts. While podcasters were the first customers, the platform gained traction faster than expected, attracting a diverse range of users. Now, more than half of River’s customers aren’t podcasters, yet they’re still perceived as a podcast-only platform. It’s like saying Google Calendar can only be used for VC meetings. 

River has adapted and continuously revisits and adjusts their messaging to better reflect their evolving customer base and market needs. 

Marketers bring a unique set of skills that make them incredible founders. They know how to build and engage audiences, craft compelling stories, and ensure every step of the customer journey is seamless. As the startup world continues to evolve, the ability to adapt, innovate, and connect with people will be what sets successful companies apart. Remember, it’s not just about having a great product—it’s about telling the story and building relationships that make people care.

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Anthony Pierri shares valuable insights on the importance of clear marketing. Check his examples of use case-based and category-based positioning.

Fresh Finds

• Tool I love: Since we mentioned it above, check out Bubble.io, the full-stack, no-code app builder for everyone.

• Shallow dive: Tamara Grominsky shares strategies, skills, and frameworks you need to elevate your product marketing career in her PMM Camp newsletter.

• Deep dive: Also from Tamara: Day Camp, a virtual summer camp-style event designed exclusively for product marketers to identify your ideal customer profile and build a cohesive marketing strategy.

Inside Olivine

Content gems

• Going “full-stack marketer” — how I launched a brand in one week to win a hackathon

• The 12 stages of taking a new product to market

• How Product Marketers Can Break into DevOps

Client happenings

• Momentum Raises $13M Series A. Huge congrats! 🎉

• Floodbase launches national flood product to help relief and recovery in continental U.S.

Job Openings

• Twilio is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• Consensys is hiring a Lead Product Marketing Manager

• Doximity is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

👋Hola from Brooklyn, NY 

Sheena here, Director of PMM at Olivine. I’m a salsa and bachata enthusiast and lover of these springtime vibez. If you’re in NYC and a fellow salsera/o or bachatera/o, shout out your favorite socials in the comments, and we can meet up for a dance!

Ok, now let’s talk about messaging –specifically, how to create messaging your sales team will actually use. Before I dive in, here’s a bit of background that qualifies me to write on this topic. Before I made the move into Product Marketing, I spent 10 years in sales, with over five years in B2B SaaS. 

Back then, my fellow sellers and I often felt that the marketing materials we received were filled with jargon and fluffy language, making them hardly useful. We’d roll our eyes at the fact that marketing never asked for our input despite our strong customer relationships. Fast-forward to today, and I still hear similar complaints from salespeople. Product marketing teams struggle to get their collateral used by sales. So, I get it. I understand the frustration from both sides.

So let’s get into it. How can you create messaging that your sales team will actually use?

Prioritize Building a Strong Relationship With Your Sales Org

Before you dive into crafting messaging that resonates with your salespeople, you need to connect with them. This may sound obvious, but as product marketers, we invest so much time into our relationship with the product team that we inadvertently neglect our relationship with our sales partners. Every point in this newsletter hinges on the foundation of a strong rapport with sales—it's that important! If you need additional tips on how to do this, we wrote an entire newsletter on how to build better relationships with your sales partners last year, you can check it out here. Inside Olivine #14 - by Olivine Marketing 

Understand Your Audience

Surprise, I’m not talking about your personas. I’m talking about your sales team. Building on my initial point, treat sales like your customer. As product marketers, we know our work relies on understanding our buyers and users. We take the necessary steps to dig deep and understand their pain points and motivations. If we want to create messaging and materials that sales will use, we have to be just as proactive with our sales team. 

Get to know the challenges your salespeople are facing. Regularly meet with them to learn more about who they’re trying to reach and why. Incorporate these insights into your messaging and the collateral you create. 

Develop Core Value Props Grounded in Real Customer Pain Points

Establishing a solid rapport with sales opens doors to direct customer insights. Sales holds the key to these invaluable relationships. Shadow their discovery calls, request recordings, and ask for customer introductions. Pay close attention to what customers are really saying about their challenges and pain points. Then, develop value propositions that align with solving them. By aligning your messaging with these customer-centric solutions, you'll create content that resonates with your sales team because it directly speaks to the conversations they're having.

Invite Top-Sellers into Your Working Sessions

Get top-sellers involved in your messaging development early. These individuals have extensive conversations with customers giving them a deep understanding of who they are and what their challenges are. Inviting top-sellers to your working sessions can save you from having to rework an entire messaging guide later. Plus, it will give you a champion on the inside. If the rest of the sales team knows one of their top-sellers contributed to messaging, they’re more likely to find it useful. 

Use Customer Testimonials as Inspo

Customer testimonials, reviews, and interviews provide valuable insights for crafting effective messaging. They reveal where customers are actually finding value. Last year, we collaborated with a client who needed support with new value propositions. We ran customer interviews to validate their messaging, and what customers were saying differed significantly from what the product and marketing teams believed the value propositions to be. If you can't get customers on the phone for an interview, testimonials and reviews are an easy resource. Remember, sales is in constant dialogue with customers. If you create messaging that doesn't align with what their customers are saying, they won't use it.

Simplify Simplify Simplify 

If you can say it in fewer words, do. If you can say it in simpler words, do. Create messaging that is clear, concise, and easy to consume. Fluffy jargon can be fun to write, but it’s also confusing to read. And, odds are your competitors are using jargon. Standout with simplicity. Make those elevator pitches easy to use because they are easy to remember and understand. 

Collaborate With Sales Leadership on Training

I mentioned the importance of involving top-sellers early in the messaging development process. Now here’s a tip on messaging training. When you’re ready to train the sales team on any new messaging, start by collaborating with sales leaders. Train them first. At this point, you should have total buy-in because you’ve involved their team from the start. Share the messaging you’ve created, and enable sales leadership. Then, have sales leadership train their teams. This approach ensures that messaging is not only communicated effectively by a trusted leader but also embraced wholeheartedly by the sales team. 

Measure, Optimize, and Share Results

Whether you're implementing fresh messaging on your homepage, striving to boost demo requests, or experimenting with sales pitches, it's crucial to test, refine, and communicate your results. Tools like Gong simplify tracking engagement across qualification, discovery, and sales pitch conversations, while platforms like Highspot measure engagement with customer-facing materials and presentations. Regardless of the tools you use, keep your sales team in the loop on the progress you’re making with prospects, customers, and conversions. This collaborative approach fosters transparency and ensures alignment. 

To wrap up, well-crafted messaging that your sales team will use and value begins with cultivating strong relationships. Everything that follows, from inviting top-sellers into your working sessions to shadowing sales calls, interviewing customers, and collaborating with sales leadership on your rollout and training, relies on this foundational step. Establishing these relationships paves the way for easier access to customers and facilitates the creation of messaging that authentically connects with both your customers and your sales team.

Have another tip? We’d love to hear it. Drop it in the comments!

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Fresh Finds

• Tool I love: OMG, right now, I’m totally obsessed with Riverside. It makes video content so easy! I didn’t realize I was a podcaster at heart, but apparently, I am. 

• Shallow dive: Check out this LinkedIn Profile Cheat Sheet by Angel Lau to up-level your profile and get noticed.

• Deep dive: Explore the world of Product Marketing through the lens of women with this podcast episode hosted by Mary Sheehan with April Dunford.

Inside Olivine

Content gems

• The PMM’s guide to customer conversations 

• Building a good relationship with sales 

• How to build a strong relationship with product as a PMM

Client happenings

• IBM THINK was a tremendous success, and Loqate was delighted to be a part of it.

• CDP launched first-of-its-kind data on the production, use, and disposal of plastics across the real economy.

• 78 of the Fortune 100 companies use Smallstep's open-source software. Now, the creators offer commercial versions as a managed service.

Job Openings

• Figma is hiring a Product Marketing Manager, Figma Editor

• Muck Rack is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• Mercury is hiring a Head of Product Marketing

• Arkose Labs is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

👋Hey there - I’m Alli! As a chronic do-it-yourself enthusiast and serial self-starter, my days are a whirlwind of diverse pursuits—from delving into home improvements and baking adventures to navigating the complexities of digital design, real estate ventures, and the intricate world of product marketing freelancing.

Based in Plymouth, MI, my family and I proudly declare our allegiance to the Lions #onepride. If you happen to be in the Detroit or Ann Arbor area, I’d love to connect over a cup of coffee and swap stories.

Amidst my bustling multifaceted life, one thing remains constant: my unwavering belief in the power of effective communication and strategy. It’s this belief that fuels my curiosity about the intersection of human behavior and consumer choices—particularly how the right messages and go-to-market strategies can influence our decisions in a crowded marketplace.

When there are similar products, the better go-to-market strategy wins.

Evolve or Die: Winning GTM Strategies Adapt to Real World Markets

A go-to-market strategy isn't just about launching a product—it's the master plan that dictates how a company will introduce its latest innovation to the world. Think of it as the playbook that covers every aspect of bringing a product to market, from understanding the target audience to selecting the best channels for reaching them.

At its core, a go-to-market strategy involves thorough market research to identify customer personas and pinpoint the specific needs your product fulfills. It's about understanding the "job" your product does for your customers—what problem it solves or what desire it fulfills.

But it doesn't stop there. A successful go-to-market strategy also involves carefully selecting the channels and content that will resonate with your audience, grabbing their attention and driving engagement. And timing is key—knowing when to launch can make all the difference in capturing market share and gaining a competitive edge.

Unlike a one-time event like a product release, a go-to-market strategy is a dynamic and agile approach. It's about staying nimble and responsive, ready to pivot and adapt to changes in the market, customer behavior, and competitive landscape.

In essence, it's about setting your product up for success from day one and ensuring its continued growth and relevance in the ever-evolving business landscape.

Competitive or complacent? What's the truth about your GTM playbook?

Your go-to-market strategy isn't just another item on your to-do list—it's the linchpin of your business and/or product’s success. It's the difference between propelling your business to new heights or plummeting into the depths of obscurity. Without a solid go-to-market strategy, you're essentially flying blind, risking everything on a product that may miss the mark with your target audience.

Picture this: you've poured your heart and soul into developing a groundbreaking product, only to watch it languish on the shelves, gathering dust because it failed to resonate with customers. That's the harsh reality of neglecting your go-to-market strategy.

Fear not, for a well-executed go-to-market strategy can be your ticket to success. It's not just about launching a product—it's about crafting a narrative that captivates your audience and positioning your offering as the solution to their most pressing needs. It's about making a lasting impression that sets you apart from the competition and maximizes your revenue potential.

And when you're competing in a crowded market with multiple businesses offering the same or a similar product, your go-to-market strategy becomes even more crucial. It's your roadmap to success, guiding you to the perfect positioning and messaging that will resonate with and stand out to your ideal customers.

But here's the thing: no two go-to-market strategies are alike. They're living, breathing frameworks that evolve alongside your business and/or product, constantly being refined and optimized for maximum impact. So, enough talk—let's dive into some real-world examples of companies that nailed their go-to-market strategies and carved out their own niche in the market.

1. Slack vs. Microsoft Teams

In the fast-paced world of workplace communication tools, Slack and Microsoft Teams emerged as formidable rivals, each vying for dominance in the digital office space.

Slack, with its sleek interface and intuitive user experience, quickly gained traction among startups and small to mid-sized businesses. By offering a freemium model that allowed for easy adoption and scalability, Slack positioned itself as the go-to choice for teams seeking seamless collaboration. What set Slack apart was its vibrant community and extensive integration ecosystem, which transformed it into more than just a communication tool—it became a hub for productivity and innovation.

On the other hand, Microsoft Teams leveraged its integration with the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite to penetrate enterprise markets. Bundling incentives and a robust sales force propelled Microsoft Teams into the spotlight, positioning it as a natural extension of existing productivity tools. For organizations already entrenched in the Microsoft ecosystem, Teams offered a seamless transition to modern workplace communication.

Lesson learned: Slack's focus on user experience and community-building endeared it to startups and SMBs, while Microsoft Teams' integration with Microsoft Office proved to be a winning formula for enterprise adoption.

2. HubSpot vs. Marketo

In the dynamic realm of marketing automation platforms, HubSpot and Marketo emerged as key players, each carving out its own niche with distinct go-to-market strategies.

HubSpot disrupted the industry with its inbound marketing approach, empowering businesses of all sizes to attract, engage, and delight customers with a comprehensive suite of marketing, sales, and customer service tools. Through educational content, freemium offerings, and vibrant community engagement, HubSpot cultivated a loyal following among SMBs hungry for growth-oriented solutions.

Meanwhile, Marketo set its sights on larger enterprises, offering personalized solutions and enterprise-grade features tailored to the needs of complex organizations. Marketo's sales-driven approach and emphasis on lead management and revenue attribution resonated with businesses seeking scalable marketing automation solutions.

Lesson learned: HubSpot's focus on inbound marketing and SMBs contrasted with Marketo's enterprise-centric approach, highlighting the importance of aligning go-to-market strategies with target customer segments.

3. Stripe vs. PayPal

In the ever-evolving landscape of online payment processing, Stripe and PayPal emerged as titans, each wielding distinct go-to-market strategies tailored to their target audiences.

Stripe, with its developer-centric APIs and transparent pricing, became the darling of startups and tech companies seeking flexible payment solutions. By prioritizing ease of use, scalability, and robust developer tools, Stripe positioned itself as the platform of choice for businesses looking to integrate payments seamlessly into their digital platforms.

On the other hand, PayPal leveraged its brand recognition and wide acceptance to appeal to a broad spectrum of users, from individuals to large enterprises. With a focus on buyer and seller protection, cross-border transactions, and reliable payment processing, PayPal established itself as a trusted and reliable payment solution for businesses of all sizes.

Lesson learned: Stripe's focus on developers and transparent pricing resonated with tech-savvy entrepreneurs, while PayPal's broad appeal and brand recognition made it a trusted choice for a diverse range of users, underscoring the importance of aligning go-to-market strategies with target customer segments.

While those were shining examples of companies that had success with their go-to-market strategies, not every story ends in triumph. Let’s flip the script and look at three instances where companies missed the mark, allowing their competitors to seize the spotlight. 

1. The Battle of VHS vs. Betamax

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the VCR market witnessed a showdown between two competing formats: VHS and Betamax. While Betamax boasted superior video quality and recording capabilities, it was VHS that emerged victorious, capturing the lion's share of the market. How did VHS triumph over its technically superior counterpart?

VHS's success can be attributed to its consumer-centric approach and a flexible business model. Unlike Betamax, which focused solely on technical superiority, VHS prioritized user experience and addressed primary consumer needs effectively. By enabling users to record entire movies and adopting a more liberal licensing policy, VHS became the go-to choice for consumers worldwide.

Lesson Learned: VHS's go-to-market strategy, centered around consumer priorities and adaptability, propelled it to victory in the battle of video recording formats.

2. Fitbit vs. Jawbone

In the competitive landscape of wearable fitness trackers, Fitbit and Jawbone went head-to-head, offering identical features to health-conscious consumers. While both companies aimed to revolutionize the health and wellness industry, it was Fitbit that emerged as the clear winner.

Fitbit differentiated itself by positioning as a lifestyle brand, targeting users seeking holistic health solutions. By forging broad retail partnerships and fostering a vibrant community, Fitbit established itself as a leader in the wearable fitness tracker market. On the other hand, Jawbone's focus on sleek design and technology failed to resonate with consumers, leading to its eventual decline.

Lesson Learned: Fitbit's consumer-focused go-to-market strategy and strategic partnerships were instrumental in its triumph over Jawbone in the wearable fitness tracker market.

3. Slack vs. HipChat

In the realm of team communication and collaboration tools, Slack and HipChat battled for market share with similar offerings. Slack set itself apart with its intuitive interface, extensive integrations, and vibrant community, targeting businesses seeking streamlined communication and workflow automation.

On the contrary, HipChat, owned by Atlassian, offered comparable features but failed to maintain relevance amidst evolving user preferences. Despite initially gaining traction among tech-savvy users, HipChat struggled to keep pace with Slack’s rapid innovation and user-centric approach. Slack's user-friendly interface, aggressive marketing efforts, and adaptability during the COVID-19 pandemic propelled its success, leaving HipChat in the dust.

Lesson Learned: Slack's user-centric go-to-market strategy and focus on integrations and community engagement were pivotal in its victory over HipChat in the team communication market.

As we wrap up, it's clear that these success stories highlight the critical importance of a well-crafted go-to-market strategy. Whether it's navigating fierce competition or resonating with target audiences, the right approach can truly make all the difference. So, as you dive into your own business ventures, remember: it's not just about the product—it's about how you bring it to market that truly counts. 

If you have examples of winning (or failed) GTM strategies, drop them in the comments below 👇 we’d love to hear them!

Until next time, keep innovating and strategizing for success!

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Change is inevitable and if you’re not adapting your GTM strategy to consumer’s preferences, you’ll be left in the dust. Don’t be afraid to innovate and try new strategies.

Fresh finds

• Tool I love: Motion keeps my life organized and I love that it plans and reorganizes my calendar and to-dos for me when a task goes long or a pop-up meeting takes my afternoon.

• Shallow dive: have you ever gotten feedback from leadership that your messaging isn’t aspirational enough? Or it doesn’t convey what the product will do? Emma Stratton of That’s Punchy! Gives some awesome advice in her April newsletter.

• Deep dive: April Dunford’s books Obviously Awesome and Sales Pitch. They’re not the typically boring read on concepts. April keeps it light and actionable. If you’re into product positioning and messaging and/or you struggle to get your sales team to use your messaging - do yourself a favor and read both books. 

Inside Olivine

We are introducing PMM Perspectives – a series of video interviews with industry experts, founders, and the brilliant minds behind the 30-60-90 PMM Cookbook. 

Join us as we delve into the lives and experiences of these individuals, offering you a unique glimpse into their personal and professional worlds through insights, tips, and career advice that will resonate with every level of PMM. Take a moment to explore the video above and share your thoughts with us!

Content gems

• The Art and Science of Product Marketing

• AI Can Boost Your Product Marketing Skills - Here’s How

• A better go-to-market launch priority framework that emphasizes customer and business value

Client happenings

• PEX is introducing Send Card Details to help streamline vendor relations

• Loqate was recognized as a leader in Address Verification by G2

• Vultr will be supporting the Prompting Europe Copenhagen event on May 28

Job openings

• Dataro is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• Osano is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• Brightline is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager

Hi everyone! Welcome to the 26th edition of Inside Olivine! 

I’m Briana Brown, and while I’m a new voice for this newsletter, I had the pleasure of working with the Olivine team a few years back during my time at SafeGraph. Currently, I’m the Director of Content & Product Marketing at Ecopia AI, a mapping company spun out of PhD research in Canada. I’m one of four Americans on the team, based about 45 minutes outside of New York in North Jersey. WFH can get a little isolating, so I’ve been known to frequent a WeWork or two in the city from time to time - let me know if anyone in this community is down to meet up for a co-working day! 

In my spare time, I enjoy traveling (just got back from Ireland 🇮🇪), reading (any historical fiction recs? 📚), and attending Broadway shows (retired theatre kid 🎭). I also freelance occasionally for other tech companies, advising on their content production and GTM strategy. 

I became a tech marketer in a nontraditional way, studying geography and working in a few different roles at various mapping companies before landing in product and content marketing. I hope my experience offers a unique perspective on this month’s topic: marketing a horizontal product. 

How to market a horizontal product

As a subject matter expert turned product marketer, I’ve only ever marketed one type of product: mapping software and data. But before you keep scrolling because you think this is too niche for marketers outside the geospatial space, let me explain why this industry has actually provided me with a mini-master class in product marketing: maps can be used by ANYONE for pretty much ANYTHING. B2B, B2C, you name it.

Think about it: you probably used a consumer mapping application this week to find the closest cup of coffee, while a company developing autonomous vehicles has been busy programming its systems with an up-to-date map of possible routes. At the same time, a local government has been analyzing a map of its sidewalks to understand community walkability, and a retailer is mapping out the optimal locations for a new store. The list goes on, but the point is mapping technology has a pretty broad addressable market.

This might seem like a PMM’s dream; endless topics to cover in content without sounding repetitive, lots of opportunities for cross-collaboration with a diverse set of partners, and abundant audiences to target with the help of your demand gen or growth colleagues. 

But as all product marketers know, doing any of these things well enough to produce winning results requires going super in-depth into use cases and personas. That’s extremely hard to do without strategic focus, even if you have a large team with ample resources. There are a million overused phrases for this in business - boiling the ocean, going a mile wide but an inch deep - you get the idea.

Of course, horizontal products exist outside of the mapping industry, too. Any CRM, project management tool, or video conferencing app is technically horizontal. While some of the biggest names in SaaS fall into those buckets, today’s tech market is increasingly shifting towards vertical SaaS. It now feels like all of the product marketing playbooks, guides, and other educational resources are geared towards highly verticalized products, leaving us horizontal marketers feeling like we’re set up to fail. 

The reality is product marketing looks a lot different depending on whether your product is vertical or horizontal, but both GTM approaches are valid. One is not better than the other, nor easier or more difficult. What matters is knowing what strategy your product needs to be successful and doubling down on that, be it a laser focus on one vertical or a few target industries. 

So while my expertise may be niche in that I’ve only been a PMM for mapping companies, I think it also contains some universal experiences that offer insight into how to successfully market a horizontal product in a world that seems to favor vertical SaaS. 

All that said, without further ado, here are my recommendations for best practices when it comes to marketing a horizontal product.

Placing your bets: how do you decide where to focus?

The number one challenge—or opportunity, depending on how you look at it—of horizontal product marketing is deciding which use cases, industries, or personas to devote resources to. It’s simply not possible (or smart) to create the same exact motion for each possible application of your product. Not only will this stretch resources too thin, but it will also weaken your GTM motion across the board. If your best messaging and positioning gets lost in all the noise, your top prospects will have trouble seeing how your product is relevant to them.

Even the largest horizontal product companies with the biggest budgets and teams strategically focus their marketing efforts on core verticals, use cases, or personas. Whatever your organization’s size or stage, to define your focus, you should:

• Look at the numbers. This one is the most obvious, so we’ll start here. Naturally, some use cases will yield higher results than others, or have a larger TAM for you to pursue. If there is a market that will pay more for your product than others, bring in reliable renewals, or is experiencing growth you can latch on to, it’s a good idea to allocate resources there. Consider this the safe and steady bet to place while you take risks elsewhere.
  

• Check out the competitive landscape. Of course, market opportunity has more to it than pure financials. Doing an in-depth analysis of competitive offerings will tell you which verticals may be oversaturated with a product like yours, where it makes little sense to focus. It may also help you identify untapped opportunities. This could be markets that aren’t currently served by your offering or even places your competition is starting to gain traction in that you haven’t explored yet. Remember, if they’re a competitor to your horizontal product, they are 99% likely to be dealing with the same focus challenges you are, so learn from them!
  

• See where you can plug and play. Once you’ve identified a strong GTM motion for a market or two, dig into where there may be overlap with other industries, use cases, or personas. Oftentimes, content that is relevant for one vertical may also be applicable to another, allowing you to ‘double dip’ your resources. Just make sure to create a few new or unique pieces that tie those existing messages into what makes this market separate from the others. This approach can be applied to ABM or a more repeatable strategy, depending on your specific goals.
  

• Triangulate with your product and sales teams. As with anything in product marketing, it is SO important to collaborate closely with both your sales and product teams. Check to see if sales is getting a lot of inbound for a new use case you haven’t marketed yet, or if they are getting more pushback than usual in conversations with your traditional prospects. It’s also helpful to go back to the basics with your product team; what persona did they develop this product for, or what problem was it originally meant to solve, even if slightly different than what you offer now? There may be product history or early user feedback that can guide your strategic bets.

But what about the other relevant use cases?

Imagine you’ve finally identified which verticals to focus your horizontal marketing strategy on. You also have a clear understanding of where to allocate your resources and how to craft your messaging and positioning. You’re glad you’ve defined your strategy, but in the back of your mind, you can’t help but think about the other possible use cases for your product that you’re essentially leaving out to dry. Are you dropping the ball? Or leaving revenue on the table 😰? 

The short answer is no, you’re not. A good product marketing strategy requires depth, not breadth, and you need to strategically align your resources. However, there are ways to get the best of both worlds and reap the benefits of a horizontal product while following a predominantly vertical-based approach. 

The best way to ensure you’re staying focused but leaving the door open for growth in other verticals is to optimize your outbound motion for your core use cases while providing space for inbound from your other potential markets. For example, while your main SEO keyword targets should be related to your strategic focus, it can’t hurt to have a few landing pages set up that can catch high-intent search traffic for some of the verticals you’re keeping an eye on. But you shouldn’t be running ads or hosting webinars devoted to these verticals; save those tactics for your focus areas.

How do you know if your bets are working?

Once you’ve placed your bets and have put your focused strategy into motion, you need to keep a close eye on their performance to make sure you are informed for your next round of betting. A lot of different internal and external factors can impact the success of your strategy, and in reality, some bets won’t pay off. And that’s ok. Part of product marketing—especially where a horizontal product is concerned—is taking calculated risks and pivoting if they don’t work out the way you’d hoped.

Chances are, some of the verticals you’ve chosen to focus on will see a boost in performance after you’ve increased the resources behind them, while one or two may still lag behind. By keeping close tabs on your marketing and sales analytics, you can dig into why certain focuses are stronger than others and use those learnings to decide where to focus in the future. Just make sure to give your current strategy a fair shot before switching things up again.

A good rule of thumb is to run your focused strategy for at least a quarter before deciding to abandon or swap out a vertical. Of course, the optimal amount of time will depend on your particular product’s sales cycle, any major tradeshows that produce outliers in your marketing performance data, and similar nuances. Generally speaking, a quarter will give you enough time to not only collect data on what works or doesn’t, but also produce a solid amount of content that can be used to attract inbound leads for a vertical you ultimately choose to shift outbound focus away from.

The metrics you look at to measure your strategy’s performance will differ depending on what product marketing is responsible for at your organization (which we all know can be wildly different across companies), but consider some of the following questions when assessing the quarterly performance of your newly focused strategy:

• Has the meeting rate increased for the reps covering your target verticals?

• Have you meaningfully progressed deals with your target verticals?

• Has the win rate for your target verticals improved?

• Have email engagement metrics like open/reply rate increased?

• Are your SEO rankings improving for high-intent keywords (note that this might take more than a quarter to really measure)

Whatever you do, don’t just look at revenue. Doing so could distract you from other really important indicators of strategy performance and disrupt your plan before you’ve seen true results.

When is it time to expand into a new vertical?

The beauty of marketing a horizontal product is that there is always opportunity for growth and expansion. But it’s important to be smart about when to expand your strategy to cover a new vertical. The following three situations are the best times to consider including a new vertical in your focus areas. 

1. A different vertical bet didn’t play out. I covered this one in detail above, so won’t reinvent the wheel here. But if you decide to shift focus away from a vertical that is not performing the way you were anticipating, it’s a good time to reallocate those resources to another promising use case you’ve been keeping an eye on in the background.
   

2. You’ve mastered your current strategy. This should always be a horizontal marketer’s goal: creating a well-oiled GTM machine for a few core verticals that is so strong you generate enough growth to fuel further expansion into new markets. Just make sure your new bets don’t come at the expense of your tried and true strategic focus areas, or you could lose valuable progress. Use the same discretion and reasoning as you initially did when choosing where to expand, and don’t take on more than you can handle just because you have more resources to throw around now.
   

3. A seismic shift has occurred in the market. Sometimes market conditions have a drastic impact on our organizational and marketing focus, which we need to roll with and adapt to. For instance, if a new technical capability has just been unlocked that positions you differently in a given vertical than before, it might be time to shift some focus there or else risk losing increased demand to the competition. Similar situations can arise when competitors break onto the scene or close up shop. All of these external factors should play into your strategic focus decision-making.

Tbh, it’s rare that a situation outside of these three is cause enough to shift or expand your focus.

What’s the best way to structure a product marketing team for a horizontal product?

I mentioned earlier that product marketing looks different at every organization, and the same is true for how these teams are structured. I’ve worked for four different companies with horizontal products ranging from 30 employees all the way to 6,000, and can say that while that is true, there are a few key team structures I’ve seen work well for horizontal product marketing.

• Industry-based. In an ideal world, your team will have enough product marketers to cover each vertical focus area. Many companies are opening up ‘industry marketing’ roles which essentially perform an industry-focused product marketing function. With this structure, each PMM essentially acts as the lead marketer for a vertical SaaS product, while closely collaborating with their colleagues to ensure brand continuity. This allows the PMM to get really in the weeds with their target personas and use cases, resulting in the hyper-focus needed to see winning results.
  

• Product-based. Some companies have product portfolios so diverse that product marketers are best organized by features or capabilities. When teams are structured this way, it’s important for PMMs to do the research to dive deep into each vertical focus area to ensure they aren’t falling into a generalist trap, which could result in less effective messaging, positioning, or content. The advantage here is being able to really focus on what technical capabilities enable specific users, and devising a strategy that shows your target audience why your product is the perfect fit.
  

• Jack-of-all-trades. And of course, many of us work for smaller organizations where PMMs have to do a little bit of everything. Whether you’re a one-person team or just outnumbered by the verticals and product features you market, it’s still possible to execute an effective horizontal marketing strategy with limited resources. After all, the whole point of focusing your strategy is to optimize the allocation of those resources to see the best results. If you fall into this category, it’s even more important to understand all of the aspects of horizontal product marketing I covered in this piece, as you’ll likely encounter most, if not all, of the challenges that come along with it.

Bringing horizontal marketing experience to vertical SaaS, & vice-versa

I hope this has been a helpful guide to marketing a horizontal product. There are certainly many more topics to dive into on this subject, and I’m happy to debate any of the above and hear what others have to say about the diverse world of horizontal product marketing. Let’s connect!

As a parting thought, I want to mention that if you are a horizontal marketer looking to make a switch to one of the many opportunities out there in vertical SaaS, don’t sell yourself short. I know I’ve felt discouraged from breaking out from the horizontal space because of my ‘lack of experience’ marketing to only one vertical. But in reality, horizontal marketers bring valuable expertise to a vertical SaaS organization, having spent time in the trenches of many different industries and creating diverse strategies that win. The same can be said for vertical SaaS marketers looking to join a more horizontal brand; bring your specialized experience and apply it across a couple of strategic verticals to see how you can drive growth in a new way.

TL;DR - maybe there isn’t that much difference between vertical and horizontal product marketing, at least if you’re doing it right 🙃.

Top LinkedIn Post

It’s always been interesting to me how opinions on job hopping differ wildly by industry, location, and generation. Maybe I’m biased by the NY-based tech space, but I feel like switching up jobs every few years is one of the best ways to grow as a professional and expand your skills. As a hiring manager for PMM roles, I’ve always seen multiple company experiences as a positive - it means more exposure to diverse products, audiences, etc. Anyone else?

Fresh finds

• Tool I love: This is so boring and I apologize but I live and breathe by Asana. As a combined lead for product and content marketing, the ability to visualize a content and product roadmap side by side is absolutely critical to making sure everything stays aligned. It’s even better when all other stakeholders have an account so you can tag them in activities requiring their input (product, eng, sales, etc.).

• Shallow dive: This recent HBR article does a great job summarizing what can happen when marketing is misunderstood or undervalued at an organization. Too many companies view marketing as a support department; if you don’t have a marketer on your executive leadership team to drive overall company strategy, you are not set up for success. We don’t just make things pretty 😉

• Deep dive: A rockstar former colleague of mine wrote this guide to navigating sales enablement as a PMM, covering everything from how to work with a dedicated sales enablement team to owning all activities yourself. An awesome resource whether you are building up this function from scratch or trying to revamp an underperforming system.

Inside Olivine

Olivine launched a comprehensive, kickass guide for PMMs that explains how to crush your new product marketing role (or how to revitalize an existing one). Download it for FREE

Content gems

• Your 30-60-90 day plan as a new product marketing manager

• A better go-to-market launch priority framework that emphasizes customer and business value

Client happenings

• Momentum announced its Automatic Churn Risk Detection

• SketchUp 2024 now offers enhanced visuals within the SketchUp interface

• Vultr attended NVIDIA GTC24 where they unveiled their all-new Telecommunications Demo

Job openings

• Anthropic is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• Red Hat is hiring a Product Marketing Manager

• Clarifai is hiring a Senior Product Marketing Manager

Some good and bad news…

We decided to close up shop at Olivine, so we could open a taco truck. 🔥

Just kidding…or am I? It’s April 1st. Trust nothing and no one today. ⚔️

Olivine isn’t closing, but we did cook up something zesty for your tastebuds and PMM “skillet” (or do I mean skillset? 😜). Introducing the first-ever PMM guide that comes with a taco truck theme and real recipes.

The 30-60-90 Day PMM Cookbook 🌮🔥

A while ago, we published a crowdsourced article to help PMMs who were new to their role (or wanting to kickstart an existing role). To our surprise, it became a top traffic driver to Olivine’s website.

Given the growth the field of product marketing is seeing, we felt like this topic deserved more attention. So we collaborated with even more product marketing leaders, compiled more resources, and wrapped it all up in a fabulous “cookbook.”

👉Download the 30-60-90 Day PMM Cookbook for free

What’s inside 👀

Here’s a sneak peek:

• What product marketing is and how it works within the wider marketing team

• Fundamental philosophies, concepts, and tools of product marketing

• How to read product marketing job descriptions

• First 30 days guide

• First 60 days guide

• First 90 days guide 

• From the community: What PMM leaders wish they knew for their first 90 days in a new role 

• Bonus resources

• Secret menu: Mezcal Paloma, Salsa Cilantro, Tacos de Pescado Al Pastor, & more

Jokes aside, here are some snippets from the Cookbook. Highly recommend you download it for full enjoyment. 🌯

1. 🌶️ For every company you apply to, know their flavor of product marketing. 

By Rae Lambert

Product marketing through the lens of company type and stage

2. 🍋 Suss out as many red flags as you can during the interview process.

By Mike Greene

Prominent red flags

• 🚩 Product marketing is not strategic.

• 🚩 Product management is not involved in the interview process.

• 🚩 Product management and product marketing aren’t working together.

• 🚩 Product marketing is the launch machine.

• 🚩 The scope of the product marketing role gets reduced.

Questions to help you identify red flags when you’re interviewing for a PMM role:

• How do product and marketing (or PMM if the department already exists) collaborate to ensure launches are successful?

• How did your last product launch go? What were the successes and failures?

• How do customer insights get fed back into the product?

• Tell me about a time when you had to get buy-in for an initiative or change a course of action at ‘company’?

3. 🍏 From the community: What do you wish you knew for your first 90 days in a new PMM role? 

By product marketing leaders

👉Download the 30-60-90 Day PMM Cookbook for free

I know the taco truck idea was a “too good to be true” situation, so we hope you enjoy the free 30-60-90 PMM Cookbook instead. Keep your guard up, it’s April Fool’s! 

See you next month 😉

By | Angie Ennamorato, Product Marketing Manager

Angie is a product marketing manager passionate about positioning and messaging, copywriting, and product-led growth. She’s helped 9+ B2B SaaS companies (from early stage to publicly owned) with user activation and adoption, GTM strategies, websites, and more.

👋 Hello from Philadelphia

Hey, I’m Lindsay Tabas, Lady Engineer®, founder of LearnProductMarketFit and host of the Make Sense Podcast, where my guests and I simplify complex issues at the intersection of tech and people so we can design the human experience into the future. For 20 years, I have worn every hat between what customers say and what software developers build, refining and developing the most lean and efficient way for teams to iterate towards product-market fit without getting hosed by development costs and ad spend. 

Back in 2019, I taught a graduate-level UX class focused on user onboarding. Today, I’m sharing my framework with you so that you’re armed with all the best practices, how-tos, and steps to ensure your customer onboarding—a key part of your GTM—is successful.

User acquisition and onboarding 101

To make sure we’re all on the same page, onboarding is the journey a new customer takes from learning about your product to registering an account and receiving that first bit of value. It’s a tricky handoff between the “marketing customer experience” and the “product user experience.”

Companies of all sizes can mess this up because they exclusively obsess over two things without thinking about how they connect: 

1. The product, features, and functionality, and 

2. The front page of their website. 

They think their front page is so compelling that people will just sign up and find the magic on their own. Then, when the rubber hits the road and the conversion numbers are low, they’ll resort to tooltips, training pop-ups, and videos. Maybe they’ll struggle through a/b tests, all without really stopping to research or really think about their audience’s “why.”

Let me say this: training is a poor excuse for bad design.

The good news is that the solution is rarely more features. Instead, it usually involves refining the flows and copy that accompany every single step of the onboarding process. 

“Onboarding is like a first date. You’ve discovered each other, and now you’re out for the first time, getting to know the other person. It is the point at which people learn the value of what you have to offer, and decide whether it works for them.” - User Interface Engineering on Medium.

Take a step back and imagine a first date. Do you spill all the beans, telling your date all the good (and bad) about you? Or, do you keep it light and fun to gauge if you have enough interest to go on a second date?

Hopefully, your dating rule-of-thumb is the latter: give away enough information and personality to get the next date 💞.

During onboarding, new customers learn just enough about the value your product offers to decide whether it works for them (and, therefore, if they want to go on a second date).

Practically speaking, the onboarding process spans from marketing landing pages through sign-up forms, new user account creation, and getting started.

User acquisition and onboarding are a universal challenge that both marketing and product must solve, but it can fall through the cracks without the right people or support. In comes you, PMM 🦸.

On the marketing side, you must:

• Find or create demand

• Affordably attract visitors to the website

• Persuade them to sign up

On the product side, you must:

• Streamline sign-up forms to collect only the information needed

• Add clear copy that moves the new user through each step

• Ensure the initial product UX looks and functions as intended

If you ask me, it’s the start of a full and beautiful romance 😍. Now, let’s dive into my step-by-step guide for user onboarding.

Onboarding: A step-by-step guide

FYI: I’m using a project management software example in my framework below, where Sam is the primary customer/champion for the software and now has to ensure their team gets the most out of it. On Sam’s team are Jordan and Jessie. Sam is a Consulting Partner at a Boutique Consulting Company of about 100 people.

Bonus: Use this free bundle of assets to implement this step-by-step framework.

Step 1: Your target customer

In this example, we need to design two onboarding experiences: one for Sam, and another for their team (Jordan and Jessie). 

This is where your persona work comes in. Focusing on Sam, you need answers to the following: 

• What problem are they currently experiencing? 

• How are they feeling? 

• Where do they first look for help? 

• How do they find you?

• What is the one thing they need right now that you can help them with?

Step 2: Evaluate the current state of your onboarding 

Rarely do we have the luxury of crafting user onboarding from scratch, so start with a deep review of the existing user flows on your current product (and a competitor’s product, too, for good measure). 

Establish which user flows you will evaluate. At a minimum, focus on sign-up and activation (the first bit of value). This includes your customer’s starting point, such as an ad, the homepage, or an app store.

For our working example, we would start at the homepage on a phone since that’s Sam’s starting point. We would also evaluate sign-up and the first-time user experience.

With the customer’s hat on from the initial starting point, very slowly step through the flow. At each step/click, answer these questions:

• What are my first impressions?

• What stands out to me?

• What questions are coming to mind?

• What do I want to do first?

• What do I think this product is?

Repeat this twice, documenting your notes and reviewing the problems you’ve outlined.

• Does the problem appear in a single location or multiple places?

• Are there problems with the overall structure of the user experience?

• Is it too much information that you’re overwhelmed? Or, is it not enough information that you’re lost?

• What seems to be missing?

Step 3: Craft a new storyline

The best onboarding follows the structure of a good storyline: set up the story, develop the plot, and reach a resolution. Before we lay out the design and screens, let’s write a story outline.

Act 1: Set up the story  

• Who makes up your general target market? 

  • Ex: Small to mid-sized consulting companies

• What are their big goals irrespective of a specific technology, tool, or product? 

  • Ex: To build and maintain high levels of client satisfaction and maintain a reputation for delivering high-quality consulting services

• What are their biggest problems? 

  • Ex: Lack of structure, chaos in managing a variety of clients and needs, repeated non-billable work

• Who are they working with? 

  • Ex: Coworkers, employees, consulting clients.

• What is your product? 

  • Ex: Collaboration software, project management software

• What are the big benefits (the big market-level differentiators)? 

  • Ex: Small team collaboration tool, workflow automation, reusable project templates

Act 2: Develop the plot

• Your customers’ specific needs (what will help them reach their goals from Act 1? These are similar to “Jobs-to-be-Done”):

  • Ex: Seamless integrations with communication tools like Slack & MS Teams

• The concepts your customers need to know - core but broad activities:

  • Ex: Manage projects, collaborate with coworkers, etc.

• Your specific persona: narrow from your target market:

  • Ex: Team leads at boutique consulting companies

  • Ex: Robust task management capabilities, including task dependencies

• Your product’s specific value props and concepts

  • Ex: Increase visibility, spot blockers, improve productivity

Act 3: Resolution

Here are the quick notes on what goes here. You will refine these in Step 5 below.

• Exact tasks and activities: these are the exact means, methods, steps, and tools they need to take to fulfill the needs outlined in Act 2.  Ex:

  • Connect Your Calendar

  • Add a new project

  • Invite your teammates

• How does the user get the initial value from your product? Ex:

  • Set up a first project

  • Add tasks

  • Pick a view

  • Invite teammates

Step 4: Map this info to your marketing funnel

The marketing funnel is a great framework for thinking about your onboarding. We tend to think of the upside-down triangle as a way to represent the number of people we interact with at each stage of the funnel. We can also use this “big-to-small sizing” to reference the amount of information we give away at each step.

In awareness, the information we share is broad and general. By the time a customer becomes a user at acquisition and activation, the information we share increases in granularity and detail.

Coming back to the idea of being on a first date: at the top, on our first date, we may share our interest in traveling, and closer to the bottom, 1-2 months into the relationship, we reveal our deal-breakers as we’re planning a trip together.

In the image below, visualize your script/storyline from Step 2 to the different stages of the onboarding steps. 

Step 5: Define and refine the Acquisition and Activation stages

For onboarding, acquisition covers account creation. The customer has become a user by supplying an email address and confirming that address. Yet, new users are different from active users. In onboarding, activation represents the user flow this new user must step through until your product delivers and demonstrates its initial value.

The activation user flow requires you to work with technical product managers and designers to identify the simplest activities to hook a new user. Often, products either provide too little information leaving a new user confused, or they overwhelm a user with too many possibilities. 

For example, with a security-first email provider, I was able to increase their converted paid customers at a 2.8x higher rate by simplifying their suggested 3 steps to get started. One of their prior steps was for a new user to import their email and contacts from their previous provider. What a *huge* ask 😅! 

In the new version, we prompted them to send their old email address a message from this new one so they could verify their display name appeared correctly. Far simpler!

For the acquisition and activation user flows:

• List out the step-by-step instructions. (Be literal: see the PB&J Challenge here and here.)

• What is the minimum info users need to know to take that first step?

• How do you want them to feel?

• What can you say to make them feel that way?

• How can you set expectations for what will happen in the next step?

Step 6: Test your onboarding

You don’t need to wait for a formal usability test to get feedback on your new/proposed onboarding flow and copy. Easy and cheap paper prototype testing can bring BIG insights. Use one piece of paper for each step, listing the information (from broad to specific) on each page. Your goal is to:

• Ensure users interpret each page correctly.

• Ensure the order of pages, steps, and information make sense.

• Guarantee the “goldilocks” amount of information—not too much or too little—is available for the user to succeed.

Grab a friend, a partner, or a stranger at a coffee shop (note: if your product is super technical, a developer tool, or something like that, this exercise may not work if you just grab “anyone”). For each page, ask them the same questions you asked yourself in Step 2:

• What are your first impressions?

• What stands out to you?

• What questions are coming to mind?

• What do you want to do first/next?

• What do you think this product is?

Step 7: Repeat steps 3-6 for the invited teammates

Now that we have an onboarding process for Sam, the direct customer and champion of our project management software, we must design the process for Sam’s team. 

As you construct the onboarding for Sam’s team, be wary of assuming they will use it because it’s their job or Sam ordered them to. They need to be handled just like Sam. Meet them where they are, express that your product is there to help, and guide them with motivational and encouraging value propositions until they receive the initial value that lays the foundation for a great relationship moving forward.  

Final Tips: Getting onboarding right

Here are the rules of the road 🛣️:

• Begin with the “pitch” at the top of the marketing funnel.

• Start at a high level, then slowly introduce the customer to your product.

• Treat the journey like a first date: lead with your best foot forward, and don’t give away too much too soon.

• Keep it simple and clear, no jargon.

• Less is more! Don’t collect more user info than you need.

• Small changes in the copy to encourage the user through each step can make a BIG difference. 

• Favor copy changes over brand-new functionality.

• Use this bundle of assets to implement this step-by-step framework

Top LinkedIn Post

When the average software development project goes 3x over scope, your ability to cross the chasm to “speak technical” with your teammates is crucial. There’s a weird energy in tech right now; stay on your toes with this podcast episode:

Fresh finds

• Tool I love: UserOnboard.com: Samuel Hulick posted onboarding & acquisition teardowns from 2013-2021. Though some of the teardowns are 10 years old, the principles behind usability and user experience are solid and timeless. I’ve been immersed in user experience since my second year in college back in 2002. As a technologist with high standards for UX, my respect for Hulick’s website speaks volumes. 

• Shallow dive: How do you do low-cost user acquisition for an early-stage startup’s two-sided marketplace? Watch this ~5-minute video on my YouTube channel.

• Deep dive: I said what I said: ‘Training’ is a dirty word in product design. Read more about how software design can become so bad that training is required, including an example of a public utility that wasted 250 million dollars of taxpayer money.

Inside Olivine

Content gems

• Knowing Your Audience as a Product Marketer - Taylor’s Version

• Personas: your secret weapon to great marketing

• Do you know what your product is hired for? Jobs to be Done can help.

Client happenings

• Momentum just launched their new website.

• Fireblocks has been included on the America’s Best Startup Employers 2024 list by Forbes. 

• Smallstep achieved SOC compliance by Johanson Group

Job openings

• CDP is hiring a Senior Marketing Manager in England

• Kustomer is hiring a Product Marketing Manager (Senior Level)

• Mercury is hiring a Head of Growth Marketing

Hey all! Welcome to the 24th edition of the Inside Olivine newsletter.

I’ve written a few of these in the past, but for those of you who might be new subscribers, I’m Saahil, PMM at LinkedIn. I’ve also been freelancing with Olivine in my spare time over the last 3 years, where I’ve worked with quite a few cool startups building positioning and messaging strategies. My 5-9 looks like a combo of spending time gymming, dancing, or binging Netflix.

Currently, I’m based out of SF but am in the works of planning a move to the city that never sleeps (my deadline is May, please keep me accountable). If you happen to be reading this from NYC, I’d appreciate any moving tips (or if you just want to connect) in the comments!

Now, onto the goods: I’m going to be sharing some of my unsolicited advice on building a strong relationship with Product. My credentials? I was voted “Most likely to become best friends with every single one of his cross-functional partners” at our holiday party last year. And I let both my PM partners follow me on Insta. That’s the realest it can get 😉.

Why Your Relationship with Product Matters

One of the most important relationships a product marketer has is with product management. The word “product” exists in the title, so it goes without saying that being close to Product is part of the job (you really can’t escape it). As we navigate the responsibilities of influencing and shaping the product's path to market, it becomes crucial for us PMMs to proactively foster and strengthen our collaboration with the product team.

In my role (which currently sits in the “Inbound PMM” function), I spend the majority of my time with Product. As an Inbound PMM, I’m primarily responsible for being the voice of the customer to inform product strategies and roadmaps through deep customer/market insights. Essentially, this means I work with my respective PMs to figure out what we should be building and for whom. This means my relationship with Product is critical because without it, I would hate my job (or be out of one). 

FWIW: This “Inbound” role might not be the case for everyone reading this newsletter, but chances are that if you’re a PMM, some part of your role involves working with Product. So, this newsletter will still be valuable and a good use of your time (I promise).

A Fun Little Analogy

Years ago, when I first started my career in PMM, I was told a fun analogy (one that I still reference pretty often today).

A relationship with Product is like being married with a child. You may have different parenting styles, ways of showing love, or how you want to raise the child, but at the end of the day, you want the best for your child. That’s exactly what a PMM and PM relationship is like — you may have different priorities, goals, and strategies you’re working towards, but you ultimately want your product to be successful.

My hope is that you’ll leave reading this newsletter feeling energized about strengthening your relationship with Product — one where you’ll be the first stakeholder to be consulted on a new strategy, where you’ll never have to fight to earn a seat at the table, and where you’ll be known across the biz for your subject matter expertise in customers, the market, and competitors.

So to set the scene, let’s start with understanding some of the overlap between the PMM and PM role.

Similarities Between PMM & PM

While there are tons of articles on the differences between PMM and PM, the similarities often get overlooked (and I would argue there’s more similarities than differences). Understanding how your roles are similar can actually help you be a better cross-functional partner and deliver value.

1. Customer-centric focus: Both PMMs and PMs prioritize understanding the customer; we just bring that understanding to life in different ways. As PMMs, we’re responsible for deeply understanding our audience—their needs, pain points, and behaviors. We then translate that foundational understanding into positioning and messaging that effectively communicates the value of the product to the customer. The PM, on the other hand, takes that knowledge to actually build products that not only solve problems but also align with customer expectations and preferences.

2. Cross-functional collaboration: If you’re a PMM, you’re often in dozens of meetings a day. And while we tend to think we’re the only function that suffers from meeting fatigue, that’s not actually true. PMs are struggling with the same thing, as they’re likely just as cross-functional as us, working with marketing, engineering, legal, bizops, and so many other teams. The nature of both of our roles is that we’re constantly getting buy-in from other teams so we can make decisions for the product.

3. Strategic planning: PMMs and PMs share common ground with strategic planning, serving as the architects of a product's success. While PMMs contribute by developing compelling go-to-market strategies, Product Managers define the overall product strategy, setting goals, prioritizing features, and charting roadmaps aligned with the company's vision. This collaborative, strategic effort ensures that the product not only addresses customer needs but also achieves overarching business objectives, creating a seamless and cohesive roadmap for the entire product lifecycle.

Discovering these shared aspects and common goals isn't just about ticking boxes – it's about building a connection. Recognizing the similarities in how we focus on customers, collaborate across functions, and plan strategically lays the groundwork for a more cooperative partnership. 

Tips for Effective Partnership with PM

Now to the good stuff. So how do you actually build a strong partnership? This list is by no means exhaustive, but if I had to prioritize my top 5 tips, they would be the following: 

1. Lock down clear roles and responsibilities

The roles and responsibilities of the PMM and PM can vary from company to company and may change based on the stage of the company and its priorities. It's important to ensure that the leadership team is aligned on what each team is responsible for and what those charters look like. Who owns product research? Who owns in-product messaging? Who's responsible for legal approval? Getting crystal clear on who does what and who the decision-maker is removes friction and ensures things move fast.

2. Get to know them outside of work

Building a strong relationship with the Product team starts with being human. Take 5 minutes out of your next 1:1 and get to know them for who they are outside of work. What are their hobbies? How do they like to work? What gets them excited? When you invest in this relationship, trust will naturally build up, and they will see you less as a stakeholder they need to get buy-in from and more as a strategic partner that they can go to when they're building a strategy.

I actually asked one of my PMs, Gina, to share what she thinks I (aka the role of PMM) bring to the table. This is what she said:

“PMM plays a critical role in achieving the overall product vision by partnering with PMs to understand the needs of our customers through research, prioritizing projects that will drive maximum value, and crafting customer-first UX and messaging that helps accomplish our customer JTBD, enabling PMs to focus on product development. Our joint efforts can result in cohesive strategies that maximize product value and resonate with target audiences in a way that helps to accomplish our goals.” — Gina Benvenuto, Sr. Product Manager at LinkedIn

Thanks for making me sound like a rockstar, Gina! But in all seriousness, the only reason I’m able to do this is because Gina trusts me, and this trust was built overtime by seeing Gina as a human and friend, rather than just a coworker or stakeholder I need to work with or convince.

3. Unite on shared customer understanding

Shared goals begin with a shared understanding. Both of you care deeply about the customer, so why not bring that knowledge and curiosity together? Develop a shared language around customer needs so that when you're presenting to leadership, you're saying the same thing. 

💡 Try this: In your 1:1 document with your PM, have a section specifically dedicated to "new learnings" that you both take a few minutes to fill out before hopping on the call. This helps you both learn new things about your audience and continue to evolve and shape your customer understanding.

4. Get cozy with the PRD (Product Requirements Doc)

Just as PMMs own a GTM doc, PMs own the PRD which outlines the product strategy and requirements. I used to be guilty of avoiding this doc, and it’s a huge mistake—stop it! While it might seem like a technical document that is beyond your scope, diving into it is an investment in collaboration. Use this as an opportunity to ask the tough questions. Challenge the strategy proposed. Ensure that the solution actually aligns with the actual pain points of the customers. Your role here is not just as a reviewer but as a strategic partner contributing to the success of the product. This is how you can actually deliver value in a way that contributes to the product strategy and build credibility.

5. Research as a dynamic duo

Plan your research collaboratively with PMs. Share your goals and get their insights early on. After all, they’re the ones who will be implementing any of the recommendations you propose. By involving them in the process, you not only gain valuable perspectives but also make them active contributors and get them invested in the research. Tactically this can mean sharing the research brief, inviting them to calls, asking for their thoughts, and so on. When you're prepping your readout, sync up with your PM to ensure your narrative aligns seamlessly with theirs and you both have the same takeaways.

So what should you NOT do?

This could turn into a whole other newsletter, but time's not on our side for that right now. Maybe I'll revisit this topic next year with some in-depth tips 🤓. For now, here are three things I strongly advise against. 

• ❌ Think you know all the sh*t: While confidence is essential, avoid coming across as if you know it all. Embrace a humble and receptive attitude, acknowledging that there's always room for learning and improvement.

• ❌ Micromanage your PM: Avoid micromanaging your product partner. No one wants someone nagging them all day. While collaboration is crucial, trust them to make informed decisions about the product's features and development. And if you do happen to disagree, bring data and rationale to the table to make a compelling case rather than “personal opinion”.

• ❌ Hide your product marketing plan: Keep the product team in the loop and seek their insights on everything you’re working on. The worst thing you can do is develop positioning or a GTM that doesn’t align with your product roadmap. Collaboration ensures that marketing is aligned with the product's true strengths and objectives.

My Final Note

This is a relationship worth investing in. So much of our role as a PMM is to ensure the right product is being built and to influence the direction of it. And we really can’t do that without a strong relationship with our PM partners. If you plant the right seeds for this relationship, you'll watch it bloom into something beautiful and thriving.

Till next time,

Saahil

Top LinkedIn post

Did y'all also see the 3 Temu commercials during the Superbowl?  I did a quick Google search, and turns out they dropped a cool $21 million on that ad blitz. Gotta admit, three ads felt a bit excessive to me. But, hey, it did the trick – got me and everyone I know talking about them. Maybe not all positive chatter, but it worked. Some of us even ended up downloading the app. So, is annoyance maybe not the worst ad move? What's your take? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Fresh finds

• Tool I love: Anyone hear of Perplexity? I just came across it, and I'm totally hooked. Think ChatGPT meets Google search. Instead of bombarding you with a list of search results, Perplexity breaks it down for you, gives you the gist, and even throws in some citations. It's like having a real conversation with a search engine.

• Shallow dive: If you're not already subscribed, I suggest checking out Tamara Grominsky's PMM newsletter. Personally, I enjoy receiving them - they're easy to digest, engaging, and help me stay in the loop and motivated about my career in PMM. I loved this edition, where she delves into transitioning to a Chief Strategy Officer role, really got me pondering my next career move. Worth a read!

• Deep dive: I’ve been working on a segmentation project at work recently and found myself needing to brush up on some old (and very important) marketing skills. This blog post by SurveyMonkey was a great (long) read that helped me think through how to build and prioritize the right segments. Key to both a product and product marketing role.

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Inside Olivine

Content gems 

• Watch our latest reel for a sneak peek at how Olivine helps companies take their product marketing to the next level with our Foundational Workshops

• How Product Marketers Can Break into DevOps

• Product launches: when should product marketing get involved?

Client happenings

• Register for SketchUp's user conference, 3D Basecamp 2024 at Dimensions, which is happening in November.

• CDP shared the “The A-List 2023,” which includes 400 companies for their Climate Change, Forests, and Water Security disclosures.

• Yurts is now available on Tradewinds, offering a seamless solution for quick execution of non-FAR contracts.

Job openings

• Ramp, a platform for modern finance teams is hiring a Lead Product Marketing Manager

• Teachable is hiring a Product Marketing Manager (Commerce)

• HubSpot is hiring a Product Marketing Manager, Customer Stories

See more open roles on Olivine’s job board.