Loved

Most tech companies get marketing wrong because they don't know how to do product marketing right. The next in the bestselling SVPG series, LOVED shows what leaders like Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, and Salesforce do well and how to apply it to transform product marketing at your company.

The best products can still lose in the marketplace. Why? They are beaten by products with stronger product marketing. Good product marketing is the difference between “also-ran” products versus products that lead. And yet, product marketing is widely misunderstood. Although it includes segmenting customers, positioning your product, creating product collateral, and supporting sales teams, great product marketing achieves much more. It directs the best way to bring your product to market. It shapes what the world thinks about your product and category. It inspires others to tell your product’s story.

Part of the bestselling series including INSPIRED and EMPOWERED, LOVED explains the fundamentals of best-in-class product marketing for product teams, marketers, founders and any leader with a product and a vision.

Sharing her personal stories as a former product and marketing leader at Microsoft and Netscape, and as an advisor to Silicon Valley startups, venture capitalist, and UC Berkeley engineering graduate school lecturer, Martina Lauchengco distills decades of lessons gleaned from working with hundreds of companies to make LOVED the definitive guide to modern product marketing.

With dozens of stories from the trenches of market leaders as well as newer startups with products just beginning their journey, the book shows you:

• the centrality of product marketing to any product’s success
• the key skills and actions required to do it well
• the four fundamentals of product marketing and how to apply them
• how to hire, lead, and organize product marketing
• how product marketers optimize crucial collaboration with other functions
• one-sheet frameworks, tools and agile marketing practices that help simplify and elevate product marketing

LOVED is an invitation to rethink tired notions of product marketing and practice a more dynamic, customer and market-centric version that creates raving fans and helps products achieve their full market potential.

Foreword by Marty Cagan xiii

Introduction: My Story 1

Part One: The Foundation: Understanding Product Marketing’s Fundamentals 7

Chapter 1: When David Beats Goliath: Why Product Marketing Matters 9

Chapter 2: The Fundamentals of Product Marketing 16

Chapter 3: Ambassador: Connect Customer and Market Insights 24

Chapter 4: Strategist: Direct Your Product’s Go-to-Market 31

Chapter 5: Storyteller: Shape How the World Thinks About Your Product 39

Chapter 6: Evangelist: Enable Others to Tell the Story 47

Part Two: How to Do the Role: Who Should Do Product Marketing and How to Do It Well 53

The People and Partnerships

Chapter 7: Strong Product Marketing: Skills of the Good 55

Chapter 8: How to Partner with Product Management 66

Chapter 9: How to Partner with Marketing 74

Chapter 10: How to Partner with Sales 81

Essential Processes and Tools

Chapter 11: Discovering and Rediscovering Market Fit 88

Chapter 12: Product Marketing in the Age of Agile 98

Chapter 13: The Metrics That Matter 105

Part Three: Strategist: Guardrails and Levers: The Tools to Guide Product Go-to-Market Strategy 111

Chapter 14: When Strategy Guides Product Go-to-Market: Salesforce 113

Chapter 15: What the iPhone Shows Us About Adoption Life Cycles 117

Chapter 16: The Brand Lever: It’s Not What You Think 127

Chapter 17: The Pricing Lever: It’s About Perceived Value 134

Chapter 18: Marketing When It’s Not About Product 141

Chapter 19: The One-Sheet Product Go-to-Market Canvas 149

Chapter 20: Understanding in Action: Real Marketing Plans 159

Part Four: Storyteller: Clarity and Authenticity: The Process and Tools to Rethink Messaging 167

Chapter 21: Discover Your Position 169

Chapter 22: How to Listen and Connect: Expensify and Concur 174

Chapter 23: Understanding in Action: Netflix and Zendesk 181

Chapter 24: The Balancing Act: Right Message, Right Time 192

Chapter 25: The One-Sheet Messaging Canvas 199

Part Five: Advanced Product Marketing and Leadership: How to Do and Lead It Better at Any Stage Company 207

Chapter 26: Leading and Transforming Product Marketing 209

Chapter 27: How to Hire Strong Product Marketing Talent 218

Chapter 28: How to Guide a Product Marketing Career 225

Chapter 29: Product Marketing by Stage: Early, Growth, Mature 231

Chapter 30: Mature Company Inflection Points: When to Lean into Product Marketing 238

Conclusion: What You Can Do Right Now 244

Appendix: Marketing Terms Explained 247

Acknowledgments 255

About the Author 258

Index 261

MARTINA LAUCHENGCO is the product marketing partner at Silicon Valley Product Group and a partner at Costanoa Ventures, a boutique early-stage venture capital firm. Martina worked at Microsoft and Netscape, two of the most formative tech companies of all time, before advising startups and Fortune 500 companies. A lecturer in the engineering graduate program at UC Berkeley, her work has been featured in TechCrunch and VentureBeat.

Martina received her BA and MA from Stanford University. An avid cyclist, runner and snowboarder, she lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children.

Twitter: @mavinmartina
LinkedIn: martinalauchengco
Martinalauchengco.com

Good product marketing is the difference between products that lead their markets and those that go nowhere, yet it remains widely misunderstood.

In LOVED: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products, Silicon Valley veteran Martina Lauchengco delivers a clear and intuitive guide to craft strategies to bring your product to market, apply customer insights, shape how the world sees your product, and inspire customers to be evangelists. You’ll learn these four fundamentals of best-in-class product marketing plus how to implement them, hire for them, and lead and organize the role for maximum impact.

Using stories grounded in her own experiences as well as examples from the front lines of leading companies like Apple, Dropbox, Microsoft, Netflix, and Salesforce, this book provides one-sheet frameworks and agile marketing practices to simplify and elevate your product marketing.

Written for product teams, marketers, founders and company leaders, LOVED describes the key skills, competencies, and actions you must take to do product marketing well and succeed in this crucial function. It invites a customer- and market-centric approach that helps turn customers into raving fans and ensure your products realize their business potential.

LOVED is an insightful and exciting opportunity for you to rethink your company’s marketing by focusing on better product marketing.

PRAISE FOR LOVED

“There really hasn’t been a definitive book on the art and science of product marketing, and companies have struggled to bring a strategic approach to the discipline. But now there is! LOVED is a hands-on guide to help marketers excel at the fundamentals of product marketing. Martina brings a wealth of real-world experience to this book, as a marketing executive herself. Put simply, I loved LOVED. You will too.”
—JON MILLER, CMO, Demandbase; former Co-founder, Marketo

“A must-read for business leaders who want their products to not just be launched, but to be loved by customers. Martina demystifies why some great products ascend to great heights and why some fizzle. Focused on technology but relevant to all, this book unravels the mysteries of product- market fit at every phase of growth with accessible examples and relevant tips.”
—TATYANA MAMUT, PhD, SVP Product, Pendo; former GM, AWS, Amazon

“I didn’t realize how powerful product marketing could be until I saw it done really well. It completely changed what I thought was possible and made me rethink how to structure a marketing team. Martina’s book shows the rest of the world how to succeed in product marketing. She is a force of nature.”
—DOUG CAMPLEJOHN, CEO, Airspee; former GM, Sales Cloud, Salesforce

“Great products deserve great product marketing. LOVED debunks the common myths of product marketing and serves as a practical guide to help you cut through the noise. Martina is a CMO’s best friend.”
—ROBERT CHATWANI, CMO, Atlassian

“Our industry has needed the definitive book on product marketing for so long, and with LOVED, Martina has finally written it. This book is essential reading for tech startups but applies just as much for mature companies wanting to do product marketing better.”
—SARAH LEARY, Co-founder, NextDoor