Speaker: Thomas Dong, Advisor, LogiSense
Please introduce yourself and tell us why you chose the Product Marketing Community?
Thomas Dong: My name is Thomas Dong and I've been involved with the product marketing community since 2016 when I was a VP of product marketing at OpenText. Whether you're a seasoned product marketing leader or new to the role is the great network to meet or find talented product marketers. And it is the most authentic community for sharing product marketing stories and best practices. I really believe every product market or should be a member of the product market community. I've sent members of my team to pass conferences in San Francisco, Toronto, Boston, and myself. I've attended several events in San Francisco as well as most recent virtual event in June as a panel moderator.
New products are typically passed from Engineering to PMMs to be marketed and sold. How might you go about evaluating product-market fit?
Thomas Dong: whether you're evaluating a new opportunity for trying to understand growth potential. Assessing product market fit is a crucial first step, and there happens to be a very simple and elegant approach called a Shawn Ellis test. Much like calculating NPS where you ask your customers, how likely are you to recommend a product in the scale from 0 to 10? Instead, ask, How would you feel if you could no longer use our product? Given the choice is a very disappointed, somewhat disappointed and not disappointed. If more than 40% say they would be very disappointed you have a good product market fit anything less, it's time to revisit your product roadmap in vision or redefine your ideal customer profile.
As PMM we're primarily on the market side of product-market fit equation. How can a PMM effectively drive GTM strategy?
Thomas Dong: as product marketers. Our job is understand the customer, so go to market strategy should begin with a strong foundation of persona based marketing. But the key is not to create personas in a vacuum, but rather to drive consensus at all levels of the organization on who the personas are. What is the ideal customer profile and, most importantly, agreement on the customer journey map that every functions and services. That journey map is the ultimate deliverable and needs to be built the view into the influencers champions and economic buyers and relationship between all of them as they move to your funnel as a buying community, they should align with who product management and engineering are designed for. It should help barking, understand who would and where to target, and it conveniently defines for sales the buyers and champions they are identifying in the popular Medic sales methodology.
How can you turn a strategic view of the customer journey into an execution plan?
Thomas Dong: the customer journey map is one of your most crucial strategic assets, and the construct could be easily leverage for tactical planning is well, for instance, overly or content strategy on top of the customer journey map. By creating an inventory of the contents attitude, have to support the needs of every persona wherever they are in the customer journey, the gaps will be obvious, as will be the key conversion links that aren't working today that may require new or updated assets. This simple exercise will help you effectively rationalized and prioritize your content execution plan.
