Author Archives: Sheryl K.

Why I’m building a product marketing team without product marketers

I’m building a new product marketing team at Mendix, and I’ve hired my first several team members.  They’re talented.  They’re hardworking.  They’re curious.  They’re fun.  They’re technical.  They’re awesome.  We’re going to be the world’s best ever product marketing team. Just one thing, none of these people are not product marketers.

I mentioned this the other day to a colleague, who asked, “why are you doing that?”  

The answer flew out of my mouth before I could think: “Because I need people who speak Customer.”

This team includes people from product management, expert services, sales engineering, and a former customer-side architect.  They haven’t joined the team knowing what a launch plan looks like, how to brief an analyst, or how to write a compelling messaging brief.  But each one of them already knows how to talk to potential customers in a way that resonates.  And if product marketing isn’t about that, what’s the point?

I’m not saying product marketing is easy – it’s not. I just think it’s orders of magnitude harder to teach someone who’s never had the exposure to customers to create content that resonates with them, than it is to teach people who have internalized customer voice and pain how to channel that into compelling marketing.

Product marketing has changed dramatically since I started years ago. Success isn’t measured by number of assets created, amount of time spent on a launch plan, or even happiness quotient of sales teams.  Success in product marketing is about moving the needle on things as macro as global market direction, as micro as customer acquisition, and everything in between.  

Look, I may have buried the lede here, but the truth is that product marketing is the center of the universe.  It’s a critical part of the engine that’s driving the growth of the company.  It sits in the intersection of product strategy, product launch, messaging, competitive positioning, and sales. 

And some of the best product marketers aren’t career product marketers at all.

On Delegating

My kids are learning to share and to play together.  The other day, Big (5) wandered over toMagformers Image Little (3) and asked if she could also play with their magnet toys that he was actively using. They were spread out on the ground and he was trying to build something. The conversation went like this:

Big: Can I play too?

Little: Sure!

Big: What can I do?

Little: 

Little had no idea how to answer that question.  And it wasn’t because he didn’t want to share. It was because he didn’t know what he was doing yet – he didn’t know how to delegate because he didn’t know what he was building yet.  He wanted to give Big a job, but he didn’t want to give her the honor/responsibility of figuring out what they would build together.

I think it’s really important as a leader to understand what I’m doing before I delegate. This is relating to the rock fetch post I wrote a while ago – how sometimes you don’t know what you’re asking someone to bring back until you see what their first specimen looks like.

Delegation is related, but different. If you’re going to trust someone to do part of a task for you, I think you do need to know what you’re goal is before you can delegate.

OMG, retail, can’t you keep it together for the sake of the kids?

Over the past few years, predictions around the demise of retail have reached a fever pitch.

As a consumer, I’ve switched much of my shopping from brick and mortar to online – I’m a rabid customer of Amazon (Prime of course), and barely visit Target anymore.  We’ve started using Instacart more often in favor of a trip to the supermarket.  And twice this month I used Drizly for alcohol delivery. This is the First World, people.

But I guess I didn’t realize how bad retail was until a few trips to the mall I made recently.  I was looking for placemats.  I started at TJ Maxx, where I knew right where they were.  They had five of one kind that I liked, but I needed six. That’s par for the course for TJ Maxx, so I wasn’t too disappointed.

Next I tried Macy’s. There was a sign near the door that said, “This Macy’s has Women’s clothing and Children’s clothing.  For Menswear and Housewares, visit our other store located in this mall.  OK, except there was no map, no indication where the other store was, and nobody to ask. I mean, can you imagine going to a website and having it say, “For Menswear and Housewares, visit our other URL.”

Finally I tried Sears. Disaster. No signs, nobody to ask, and I gave up when I got to Washing Machines.

On a more recent and equally disappointing shopping trip, I was looking for black sandals.  I went to DSW, only to find that the majority of the shoes on display were available only in size 5 and size 9 or 10.  C’mon man!

I get it. Retail is dying, so stores can’t afford to hire as many employees, so the quality of service goes down.  But this is a vicious cycle. This lack of service means that I won’t shop retail again for a long time.  I will order multiple items from Amazon and Zappos and return what I don’t want. So much for going green.

I think what will happen is that retail will bifurcate to the super high-end (like Gucci, Louis Vutton, and Prada) and the super low-end (Walmart and Target).  The midrange will disappear.

It makes me wonder whether there’s a viable model similar to the old Best or Service Merchandise stores.  These were stores popular (at least in NJ) in the ’80’s. There’d be one of each item in a showroom, then you’d go to a salesperson, tell them what you wanted, and it would be waiting for you at checkout.

What if I could go to the mall, see and touch merchandise, then have it arrive in my house using 2-day Prime shipping in the right color, shape, and size. I still might do what retail wants me to do – that is, leave with more than I came in for, but I’d be assured it’s the right stuff.  There’s no way return rates wouldn’t drastically plummet with a system like this compared to today’s online model.

So come on, retail, keep it together.

Why I’ve never screamed in my car, but I’ve cried in the bathroom

I was talking to a colleague the other day about a bad work situation at a previous job.  He said, “You know, it’s just one of those things where you go out to your car at lunchtime, shut the doors, and scream.”

I didn’t know what that felt like. I had never done that. But I have cried in a bathroom at work. Many, many times.  Cue the Tom Hanks.

Anyway, It got me thinking about gender at work, and what’s considered “the norm.”  When this colleague made this comment about yelling in his car, he said it as if it were a typical thing that people do on frustrating days. Conversely, while I would have shared “crying in the bathroom” with a woman, I wouldn’t have volunteered it to a male colleague.  (I know, I’m sharing it with the entire internet right now. But that’s besides the point.)

What it boils down to is that in most of business and high-tech, men are “the norm” and we woman are “the other.”  It doesn’t mean we’re categorically discriminated against, or that we’re held down, or even that we’re unwelcome.  But it does mean that we censor our recap of Scandal while we listen to hours of fantasy football talk. It does mean that we feel sheepish coming back to the office with a TJ Maxx bag or manicure after lunch, even though guys come in with a haircut after lunch with no shame.  It means we wonder how many pictures of our kids are “too many” while the guys have no problem practicing their golf swing during a conversation.  (And COME ON, how much better can your golf game get when you’r practicing your swing with an air club??)

(As an aside, I am a football fan only because I work in tech. When I was first in tech sales, I found that I couldn’t talk to the guys at work or to our customers from August until February unless I watched the Pats game each week.  I am 100% serious.  So I started.  Then I realized Tuesdays were tough if I didn’t watch Monday Night Football, so I started.  I came home from work one day and asked MrDiva if he knew that there was such a thing as Thursday Night Football?  And I knew I had fully converted when on a Sunday night, during a nailbiter, I shouted “Sshhhh – I’m watching the game!” at him.)

A few weeks ago I was on a panel for new moms who were returning to work after maternity leave.  We were talking about how to handle negotiations with your boss about a schedule that enables your coming in late or leaving early to manage daycare drop-off and pick-up.  Many of these women were really stumped as to what to say, or if it was ok.  They were concerned about the perception their peers and management would have about them.

My advice was simple.  Simple to give, that is, not as simple to follow.  Think of every time you heard a guy say, “I gotta get going, kid’s got hockey tonight,” “I’m leaving early for my son’s baseball game,” “I can’t make that meeting, I’m coaching at soccer tonight.” And then ask with that degree of “normal” and confidence.

There’s a major religious war around whether we as women need to fit in with the norm or we need to change the norm. I don’t know the answer. But I do think we need to start with recognizing that there is a norm, and that it isn’t always us.  And that this norm is sometimes expressed in very subtle but pervasive ways.

Uh-oh, it was a success and I don’t know why

We did a marketing program a few weeks back that was, by all accounts, very successful.  We got a great ROI with immediate sales opportunities, and an excellent set of leads in our core target market with which to build our database.

The only problem?  I have no idea why it worked.

It wasn’t that different from things we’ve done in the past. We marketed to a similar audience, with similar messaging, over similar media.

The thing about marketing is that at some point, it needs to become repeatable.  At some point, it can’t just be about finding something that works and getting excited, it has to be about finding something that works, getting excited, and then figuring out how to do it again. And again. And again and again and again.

Much like you can’t trust scientific results that are not replicable, you can’t build a marketing strategy around programs that are not scalable.  There are some easy wins available early in the game, but at some point scalability becomes just as important as success, because the economics of not having scalable marketing programs don’t work anymore.

So I’m off to analyze the project more completely.  Was our follow-up better?  Did we market on a different day of the week?  Was the offer worded differently?  The CTA color different?  Or has something changed externally in the market that is driving a different response to the same offer?

Because until I know the answer – know why this was successful so I can execute it again – I can’t truly call it a success.

Understanding Starbucks 10-year renovation system

I’ve read somewhere that Starbucks updates each store every five years, and does a more complete facelift for each store every ten years. I used to think this was for cosmetic reasons. However, with the introduction of pre-ordering drinks from the mobile app, I’ve changed my mind – redesigning stores is necessary for this sea change in how we buy coffee.

If you’re not familiar with ordering Starbucks on your mobile app, it’s pretty simple. You can choose any Starbucks drink or food item, customize however you’d like, choose your local store, pay on your phone, and then go to the store. Your drink is waiting for you on the bar when you arrive!

It’s nice because it’s fast, there’s no waiting for a barista to prepare your drink, and if you happen to like a half-caf, skim, no whip, three pump white chocolate mocha with a caramel drizzle, well then you skirt the shame of needing to order that out loud in front of other humans.

The latest estimate I found was that 7% of orders were mobile orders last September, but in some locations up to 20% are mobile at peak time.  I’d bet you a Frappuccino that number has gone up.

This has created two interrelated problems at Starbucks stores. One, the stores are currently staffed and managed to handle multiple people walking in and ordering drinks. With increasingly more people using mobile ordering, I’ve noticed several times when there are one or more cashiers waiting for customers to arrive, while the barista(s) are behind on drink orders, since so many are coming in through the mobile app.

The other problem is one of store layout. This is why Starbucks’ policy of updating stores every few years will be crucial to this working out. The thing about walking into a Starbucks is that most of them are designed with a lot of thought put into the experience of walking in. It’s clear where to go to order, it’s clear what direction the line goes in, it’s easy to browse merchandise while you’re waiting (which is good for Starbucks, I’m sure), and then it’s clear where to go to wait for your drink.

Now, however, many customers are coming into stores to pick up drinks they’ve already ordered. It’s not always obvious how to wend one’s way through the tables to get to the bar. It’s not always obvious who to talk to for your drink. There’s not always enough space at the bar for the proper number of people to wait for their drinks. There’s not always enough counter space to store the drinks that are ready.  And while you’re waiting for your drink, you can’t easily browse merchandise.

The square footage of stores is probably not the problem here, but the layout is. It’ll be fun to see what the newest Starbucks stores look like that are designed to optimize for mobile ordering rather than an exclusive in-store experience.

That time I got an ad for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare in a meditation app

This isn’t a post about meditation – not really, it’s about online advertising – but it starts with meditation.

The part that is about meditation

I’ve been trying to learn to mediate/practice meditation/begin meditating. Whatever you call developing mindfulness. It hasn’t been going too well, which people tell me means that it’s going very well. OK, then.

One of the issues I have is that I thrive on reading things, rather than listening to them. True, I used to have a long commute and lived on podcasts, but other than that I’d always rather read something than, well basically, do anything else.

There are people who tell me I should sit with the discomfort of listening because that’s part of the package. And I trust them. But I don’t think many people understand my relationship with reading, so I also started looking for apps that have a daily written meditation I could read.

I stumbled on this set of apps from a company called dailypedia. It’s cool, they have a daily quote from people ranging from Gandhi to Steve Jobs. I chose four apps – one is quotes from Mother Teresa, one is quotes from Marianne Williamson, one called “Living Spiritual Masters” and one called “Life Wisdom.”

With me so far?

The part that’s not about meditation

I open the first app, and an ad pops up. It’s for Amazon. I don’t think about it. The next app I open shows an ad. It’s for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

The koan

Why, I mean WHY ON EARTH, would I sign into a meditation app and get a Call of Duty ad? Is there any reason that there would be a correlation between people who download meditation apps and people who play first-person-shooter video games?

How online advertising works for complete beginners because I’m not qualified to tell anyone else

Now I know a little about online advertising. That’s not sarcastic – I literally know only a little about it – enough to place Google Ads, manage a budget, and somewhat evaluate how it’s doing. I hope to get better at this in the coming year, but that’s where I am right now.

I thought about it. First off, most ad networks (companies like Google who place ads all over the web and mobile apps) use pay-per-click advertising. That is, you only pay for the ad if someone clicks on it. Just showing the ad doesn’t cost the advertiser (in this case Call of Duty) anything.

Next, I realized that usually when you create an ad, by default it’s shown all over the network you purchase it on – that is, all over the sites that have chosen to get revenue from that particular set of ads.

Now if you’re the app publisher, you want to maximize revenue. So you might start by accepting any kind of ad that the network wants to put in your app. Over time, you’ll whittle it down to the ones that people click on, not wasting real estate on un-clicked ads.

If you’re the publisher, you want as many people as possible to see your ad. So you might start by showing your ad everywhere. Over time, you’ll whittle it down to the places that you get clicks, avoiding places like meditation apps where the only clicks are accidental bleary-eyed mistakes by well-meaning consumers of the app just trying to get to their damn Mother Teresa quote because it’s only January 5th and they’ve already forgotten twice this year.

It’s even possible (and let me say that I think this is unlikely) that there is a large number of people downloading meditation apps because violent video games have made them feel unsettled, and it’s a major untapped market. Call of Duty doesn’t pay unless someone clicks, so they’ll advertise everywhere. The publisher wants to maximize revenue, so they’ll see what works.

And if you’re the ad network, you just want as many ads in as many places as possible to start, then you want the publishers and the advertisers to tweak as necessary for their needs.

Except.

Where this breaks down is that the app has just totally lost me as a customer. I’m new at meditating but I’m also self-actualized enough already (imagine that!) to know that if I am trying to be mindful by reading a quote by Mother Teresa every morning, seeing a video clip of Call of Duty feels Wrong.

It’s time to stop hating on marketecture

It’s time we stop hating on marketecture.

For those of you unfamiliar, marketecture (a portmanteau of marketing + architecture) was originally defined as “any form of electronic architecture perceived to have been produced purely for marketing reasons.”  However, it has grown into a more general derisive term used to describe semi-technical diagrams.

Here are a few examples of marketecture.

winshuttle-connect-marketecture-fullvmw-dgrm-vreal-cld-plat-marketecture-type1-final2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

big_data_with_days

 

 

 

 

 

People who dislike marketecture criticize it for being lightweight, not technical enough, and slide fodder. They want real technologists explaining real technologies in a really technical way.

But I’m here to speak up for marketecture. First off because it’s part of my job to create it, and also because I’m a real technologist explaining real technology in a really technical way.

The thing is this – the right way to teach someone something new, about a new system, or process, or (dare I say) architecture, is breadth-first.

A small detour into search algorithms, but don’t tune out – this won’t be too painful, even if you’re not technical.

There are two categories of how computers search for things. As an analogy, think of how you might attack a crossword puzzle. Let’s say you fill in a word, “PRODUCE”. The first thing you probably do after that is start trying to fill in the word that crosses with the P in PRODUCE.  Let’s say that’s the word “PACKAGE.”  But what do you do after that? Do you try to fill in the other words perpendicular to PRODUCE? That’s breadth-first. Or do you try to fill the word that crosses the A in PACKAGE? That’s depth-first.

So going back to marketecture, I would put forth that we learn (and should teach) breadth-first: Here’s the entirety of the thing I’m going to explain to you, next, let’s zoom in one level and examine that next.

And that’s what marketecture is great at: breadth-first explanations. Here’s an overview of the concept/process/system. It doesn’t depict every detail at every level. It’s not complete, but it’s not inaccurate. Think of a block diagram for a CPU, or a diagram of the human circulatory system, or of the electrical wiring of a skyscraper. Not complete, but not inaccurate.

I’ll also add this completely unscientific study of every presentation I’ve ever delivered. When I’ve been asked to skip or hurry through the marketecture slides, I am invariably peppered with questions 4-7 minutes later that were addressed in my marketecture slide.  When someone is texting through the beginning of my presentation, their first set of questions once we’re into the technical depth is invariably marketecture content.  And when someone is looking over my shoulder to find someone more “technical” to talk to at a tradeshow, their questions are always, always, covered in my marketecture diagram.

Just like it’s time to stop trivializing marketing, it’s time to stop hating on marketecture.

Careeriversary

Today is my 17th careeriversary.

That’s right, 17 years ago today I started my first job in the storage industry, as a technical trainer for Legato Networker, working for Cambridge Computer Services at 355 Western Ave.  I had no idea what storage or data protection were, I hadn’t really ever had a “real” job prior, and I was living in someone else’s apartment until September 1, when my own lease started.

Here are some things I’ve picked up along the way.

On Learning

      • Always be learning.  My dad is not the only one to have given me this advice, but he’s the one whose saying it I remember the most clearly.  And it’s true.  When I stop learning in a job is when I get bored, complacent, dissatisfied, and unmotivated.
      • Take time to learn.  My boss Kevin at Dell taught me this.  He put unprecedented amounts of time for learning into plans for onboarding new employees, as well as into ongoing plans for existing team members.  He truly saw it as part of one’s job to do that learning.
      • Learning means making mistakes. Publicly. I’ve had to do a lot of learning – and failing – in front of other people.  But I’ve found that It’s important to get comfortable doing this, or I don’t learn quickly enough to get anywhere.

On the home front

  • Outsource everything possible.  As a working mother, I’ve paid close attention to advice from female senior executives.  This was the best piece I’ve gotten, from various people – outsource whatever I can: laundry, dinner, transportation, cleaning, etc., so my time with my family is my time with my family.

On not being intimidated

  • Everyone is a person.  I am almost never intimidated.  Everyone is a person with concerns, with goals, and with a world outside of work.  So I just talk to them as I would anyone else – I’ve developed the confidence to know that I have a right to be heard if I’m in a conversation with someone.  Also, I try not to forget about the actor-observer asymmetry fallacy.  TLDR: It might be you, not me.
      • Speak up.  My best opportunities at work have come from going to someone with an idea to solve a problem or to improve something, when it wasn’t my job.  My best contributions are often asking questions that nobody else wants to or thinks to ask.

“Maybe we should manage our tech support cases on a bulletin board visible to everyone”

“I can project manage our 12-person team into producing two whiteboard videos apiece.”

“Sure, I’ll figure out how to get 80 people on a tour of our labs, in 10 groups, one of which only speaks Japanese.”

And when I didn’t ask for a title or a higher salary, I didn’t always get one.  When I did, I did.

On Career Trajectory

      • Get through unpleasant times by picking a date in the future.  When I’ve been thrashing in a role about whether to stay or not, I stay put. Then I pick a date in the future and forget about leaving until then, at which point I can re-evaluate, knowing it’s not a split-second decision.  I’m happier during the waiting time too, knowing that it’s finite.
      • A network decides a career.  What everyone says about having a good network is true, and then some.  After my first job, all my job offers and opportunities have come from my network. I landed here at Infinio because it looked like a cool place, and mrDiva was connected to Matt who worked here because I had introduced him to Gina several months earlier.  So, I try to keep in touch with people, maintain relationships, and be generous with favors.
      • Know when you get the call.  Sometimes opportunities come up that are unexpected or not exactly what I want. I’ve had to recognize which of these are opportunities I shouldn’t turn down, even if they take me on a different path than I expected, and figure out how to say yes.

Years ago, right when we found out I was pregnant with babyDiva, and mrDiva had just graduated from his MBA program, he got a job opportunity of a lifetime. The timing was strange, it would mean a cross-country commute, and he had never done what they were asking him to do. But it was so obvious to me that it was “the call” and he had to say yes. He did, and it has been more than he ever expected.

      • Say yes then figure it out.  I recently read a great blog post that now of course I can’t find anywhere about always opting to move into a role where you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s scary as hell, but great advice.

When I was on maternity leave for each of my children, I got a call about coming back after leave into a bigger job – a job that I didn’t know how to do.  Sure, I said, both times, wanting to get back to Netflix.  Shit, I said, both times, when I came back.  And Got It, I said, both times, 90 days in.

Let’s see what the next 17 years have in store.

Bucket List Item: Edward Tufte course

A few months back, I finally had a chance to take the Edward Tufte course.  Edward Tufte Envisioning InformationTufte is an academic, well-known for his work on how information is visually presented.  You may be familiar with one of his books, like Envisioning Information.   I went into the course thinking I’d learn about how to draw better diagrams and make slides more consumable.  But the point of view presented was much more sophisticated than that.

All day, he kept saying “the information is the interface,” but it wasn’t until towards the end of the day that I understood what he meant.

He gave the example of a touch-screen guide to the National Gallery about which he proposed a major overhaul.  You can see the two versions here.  Rather than using a lot of screen real estate for menus and have multiple layers of menus to get to a particular piece of information, he let “the information be the interface.”  His argument is that information comes with its own hierarchy, and technology’s capabilities have encouraged us to make unnecessary complex architectures in how we access it.

An even more striking example was this one.  It’s an image of different styles of music along with representative artists, and links artists who influenced or were influenced by one another. It’s a beautiful chart.  When Tufte projected it in class, he had a version of it where when you touched an artist’s name, it played a song of theirs. I was struck by the magnitude and variation of information that could be accessed with nearly no overhead of menus, labels, or orientation.

It would be incomplete to describe the content of the course without also describing Tufte and the setting itself.  The course was held in a giant room, with at least 500 attendees, significantly larger than any course I ever took in college.  Interestingly, it was one of the only professional environments I’ve been in that didn’t skew to one gender or another – like pure tech or marketing – the mix was pretty even.

Tufte is obviously accomplished: Obama appointed him to the independent panel reviewing how the funds from the 2009 Stimulus Package were allocated, and his analysis of the presentation of information about the Space Shuttle Columbia’s readiness for flight was included in NASA’s official report of the crash.  Many of his ideas are important counter-cultural recommendations in the face of technology. And he knows it.

However he lacked two major qualities – one was his lecture style was disorganized – he seemed to jump from topic to topic, meandering for different amounts of time on different topics, without a clear agenda.  I don’t think I left the course feeling like, “OK, these were the topics he wanted to cover today.”

The other criticism I had was that he gave the audience no real tools to implement any of the things he suggested.  For example, he had several recommendations that would require massive organizational change, such as providing reading material at the beginning of a meeting and dedicating the first 10-20 minutes of a 60-minute meeting to quiet time where participants could read the content.  A good idea (maybe) but pretty impossible for most people to bring back and implement.

Some of what he reviewed with us was too basic for my taste.  One example is when he brought up various images of graphs used in New York Times articles and other publications.  He encouraged us to do things like look at the scale and consider who authored the graph.

All of that said, I was happy to have taken the course.  It got me out of “the everyday”, and makes me think more critically about how I present information in my daily work.