Even More Tenets for Effective Product [Marketing] Management
Better Product Marketing Beats a Better Product
Inferior products that have dedicated and engaged Product Marketing people on the team will ALWAYS get more traction than better products that don’t.
It took me two startups and a lot of sleepless nights to realize this, but it’s true. It isn’t enough to build a great product, promote it, and grow organically; it will usually fizzle and flounder.
You need the right Product Marketing people on your team. These aren't generic marketers. They're specialists who can churn out fresh, compelling content consistently to fuel your growth engine. What makes them "right"? Technical depth and domain expertise specific to your product. Without these qualities, they simply won't understand your target personas well enough to create content that resonates. I've seen brilliant products with mediocre marketing fail while average products with exceptional marketing thrive. The difference? Having Product Marketing talent who can translate technical capabilities into tangible value propositions that your specific audience actually cares about.
The silver lining here is that you don’t need to have the best product (or most mature, or most featured) in order to succeed but you do need to have something that provides tangible value and a kernel of promise to the primary persona in your beachhead segment. The value prop has to be significant enough that your positioning and messaging is effective.
Strategic use of product versioning terminology (alpha, beta, v1.0) in your marketing communications sets proper expectations, creating a psychological framework where users see "missing features" as "coming soon" rather than deficiencies. While less polished products typically experience higher churn rates than their more mature competitors, you can offset this early on by amplifying your marketing spend. This approach buys you crucial runway to iterate and enhance your product based on actual user feedback—often the most valuable input you'll ever receive.
The corollary is a hard truth I've witnessed repeatedly: brilliant products die in obscurity without effective Product Marketing to amplify their signal above the market noise.
The Primary Goal of the Product Marketing Website Is to Convert
By “convert,” I mean that you establish a two-way relationship between your product and a visitor to your website. By "two-way," I mean that a visitor isn’t just consuming your content but that they're consciously choosing to give you some of their information (e.g., name, email, etc.) because they see value in doing so. Typically, your definition of “conversion” on a Product Marketing website should be that the visitor initiates a free trial. But it can take other forms; an example would be registration for an upcoming webinar on a dedicated landing page as part of a specific account-based targeting campaign.
Why am I taking the time to elaborate on the obvious? Because it’s typically not done correctly. Product and Marketing don’t set a clear goal or definition of “conversion” and then go about designing a cool-looking website that leads the user through a winding trail of different conversion outcomes including: free trial, newsletter signup, contact sales, chat with an AI assistant, etc. The probability of someone making a decision is inversely proportional to the number of options that they’re given; in other words, multiple options reduce conversion rate.
The most effective sales websites are those that have a single exasperatingly long page with a content crescendo and multiple “Buy Now” CTAs at progressively better “deals.” They feature frequent large numbers (unrelated to price, e.g. 10,000 satisfied customers) that capitalize on our hard-wired relative-value bias. These websites typically only provide users with two options: convert or bounce. It works.
This leads me to my next point…
Don't Ask for Anything Before You Provide Value
Don’t ask your website visitors for ANY personal information or request any effort from them until you have:
- Provided them with real value, OR:
- Demonstrated that the value you will provide (e.g. in the form of a free trial) is commensurate with the amount of information that you’re requesting from them.
Don’t require a credit card for a free trial (unless your goal is to qualify users and exclude those that aren’t serious).
Don’t ask for tons of personal OR corporate information in order to establish contact with them (check out this article for more information on this topic).
What do I mean by "real value"? It depends on the context, product, and target market, but a simple example is a detailed blog post like "Building a Recommendation Engine: From Scratch to Production" that walks readers through implementing a recommendation algorithm using open-source Python libraries, complete with downloadable Jupyter notebooks and sample datasets.
Reciprocity is the underlying principle that I'm getting at here. Cialdini captured it in “The Psychology of Persuasion” and popularized an experiment performed by the Disabled American Veterans organization in which the response rate to fundraising mailers was approximately doubled by including a small gift (personalized address labels for the recipient).
In my experience, the reciprocity principle applies to a subset of interactions—namely those that occur between ourselves (or the product/company that we represent) and strangers. Thus, it applies to websites and visitors of websites. As an aside (once again, in my experience), it does NOT typically apply to interactions between ourselves and others with whom we have an existing relationship or an organizationally-motivated tie (e.g. coworkers); rather, commitment and consistency biases, which arise out of the same emotions that engender sunk-cost fallacies of thinking, primarily frame people’s behavior.
Buy Your Domain Right Now
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten pushback on acquiring a domain for a product: “We’ll have to get IT involved and loop in Legal. Also, we really should run this up the chain to Terry (CEO) and Angela (CMO) for buy-in before we do anything…” “Can you get started on writing up a business justification…” I’ve also heard the following over and over: “I think the first step here is to work with Legal on registering a trademark…” These responses reveal a prehistoric view of the digital world.
So, what do I do? If I have a corporate card, which all PMs should, I just buy the domain. The result is that the company owns it without going through any BS. It’s a $20 expense that nobody notices but has massive expected value. Think of it as a call option—you’re paying $20 for the exclusive right to choose whether or not you use that name for your product for years to come. Believe me, it’s worth it. No corporate card (because management doesn’t understand the PM role)? I buy it myself and I own it.
This section got too long so continue reading it here if you're interested.
Be Your Own Scrum Master... Until It's Impossible
For small teams (1-5 people), it's much less of a headache to perform all of the tedious project management tasks yourself than it is to have an inexperienced Scrum Master or someone who isn't a good cultural fit for the team. Having said that, if you can get someone good that you've worked with before, they'll make your job a lot easier and free up time for you to focus on product strategy, market research, and the technical aspects of product development.
If you're managing multiple product/execution teams, an excellent Scrum Master is usually a necessity. I included "excellent" here because that's the most important part of the sentence. No Scrum Master is better than a poor fit for the role, regardless of team size, number of teams, or product complexity. What makes for a challenging fit? Often it's someone who hasn't embraced agile principles fully—perhaps someone transitioning from traditional project management methodologies without sufficient training or coaching. It could also be someone wearing too many hats simultaneously, like an engineer asked to split time between technical work and Scrum Master duties, or a manager with competing priorities. The most effective Scrum Masters I've worked with are those who chose the role deliberately, invested in deeply understanding agile practices, and focused solely on helping the team achieve its potential rather than managing tasks or reporting upward.
Photo by Benjamin Wedemeyer on Unsplash