#194 - Building Loved Products: The Tech Product Marketing Fundamentals - Martina Lauchengco

[00:01:02] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Today, I have with me Martina Lauchengco. So she’s the author of the book titled Loved. So if you remember, I had in the previous episodes Marty Cagan, Chris Jones, those people are from SVPG.

Martina is also the same. She’s a partner at SVPG, Silicon Valley Product Group. And Loved is actually one of the titles left that I haven’t covered from SVPG books. And I’m really looking forward for today’s conversation. I know it’s about marketing, but I think we all need to learn about marketing in some sense, right? So that when we build our products, we know how to market it successfully. So Martina, thank you so much for this opportunity. Welcome to the show.

Martina Lauchengco: Thank you, Henry. And I’m so happy to have an opportunity to talk to engineering leaders and product people about why marketing matters to them.

[00:01:52] Career Journey

Henry Suryawirawan: So Martina, let’s start with maybe telling us a little bit more about yourself, right? So if you can mention any highlights or turning points that you think we can learn from that, I think that will be awesome.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Well, I started my career at Microsoft in product management. And this was in the era where Microsoft Office, as we know it today, was just beginning. It was a product and pricing bundle before that. And as I got there is when it became an integrated suite. So that’s been a 30 plus year juggernaut. I learned so much from Microsoft. And then I went from Microsoft to Netscape, which is when the internet 1.0, as everybody talks about it, era began.

And there I bounced back and forth between product management, product marketing, actually leading teams at NetCenter, which was consumer portal, and I led consumer products. And I’d say the biggest thing I learned there was how important it was not just to follow a linear path in your career, but really to jump into things that kept things interesting from a learning perspective. I learned how to do contracts. I learned how to negotiate business deals. Nothing that I would have foreseen as being super important.

And basically followed Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen as they started LoudCloud, which was the original internet services provider as a service and learned a lot there about what it’s like to have a category and establish it before the world has an understanding of the cloud concept. So it was cloud before there was cloud. That was really challenging. Learned a ton and spent about a decade focused on teaching and advising before I joined Costanoa Ventures, where I’ve been the last nine years as a partner on the builder ops side. So I help early stage startups with their company building.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow! So thanks for sharing your story, first of all. So I think you’ve been in those parts where the key moments or milestones in the tech world actually happened, right? So Office, I know, now, it’s like Office 365, more like subscription, but it used to be a bundled software, right? So you buy a license once and you use it perpetually. Also you talk about Netscape, right? That’s probably the first internet browser that is available out there. And

Martina Lauchengco: That’s right. The OG.

[00:04:02] Market in the Product Market Fit Dimensions

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I think that would be great to learn from you, all this experience, right? And the title of your book is actually asking us to rethink how marketing is done for tech products.

I know these days that everyone wants to build tech startups, right? Build tech products, cool apps, and things like that. Most importantly, they always focus about the product. But marketing seems to be lacking, right? And I think in your book, in the first few chapters, you covered this key thing, which I find really insightful, right? We always talk about product market fit, but people tend to focus a lot on the product itself, you know, building the idea for the products, what features and all that. But we forget the second word, which is market. Tell us a little bit more about this, right? What is this dimension of product market fit?

Martina Lauchengco: Well, it’s funny. I just co-wrote with one of my colleagues, Jim Wilson, a blog post on, I think we need to rethink this and actually make it market product fit. Because certainly for those of you that are interested in starting up in a startup, it’s the intersection of the market and its capacity to absorb whatever technology awesome you are building that actually determines its value.

So just this morning, we got pitched by these founders, one of whom is a fantastic CTO and engineering leader. And what we all discussed after they left the room was do they really understand the trade-offs that have to be made on the product side, depending on which market they choose to build their product for? Because they’ll build very different products based on who they’re targeting and what the go-to-market motion is. And it was remarkable how much it would influence the roadmap. And it was also really important for us assessing their abilities as potential entrepreneurs. Can they actually hear market signal? Do they understand the true challenge that is in front of them?

So the reason to introduce the notion of “it’s actually market product fit” is if you don’t have the capacity to process this market signal as it’s coming at you, you just keep thinking, no, this is a really great idea. This is what technology makes possible. And you do the equivalent of, I’m just going to turn the volume up to 11 so people understand what it is that I’m building and why they should need it, as opposed to saying, this is where there is market need, where there can be fast adoption. And I can have an evangelistic base from which to grow. Or in this case, it was, we need to refine our expert and agentic models. And so we need access to data sets that make them superior. And until we have that, we can’t actually build a great product. And so we have to start with a market that gives us access to that data. What is that market like?

So it’s this really, it’s very different thinking than I think what most people are used to. I’ll leave this saying that building is now the easier part. It’s much more how do you, whatever your idea happens to be, if you haven’t figured out how you’re going to bring it to market and penetrate your market. Because there are thousands of other companies that are already trying to do something similar. You’re missing actually the most important part.

[00:07:02] Importance of Go-To-Market

Henry Suryawirawan: I think in almost all product advice, product management advice, they will always encourage us to actually first, you know, build minimally and try to find people to market, right? You know, people with the pain points, the problems that the product is going to solve. So what you’re saying is also like the same thing, right? Kind of like find the market from the signals, probably from people feeling the pain, the problems, and things like that before you actually kind of like build the whole kind of feature set of the product, right? So I think the go-to-market is this something that we have to really think about in the very first place, right? When you have the spark of an idea, let’s say I want to be a cool app.

Martina Lauchengco: It is. Because I’d say that vision, having a big vision of what’s possible is not the harder thing anymore. It’s like, I, we get pitched on the venture side, we get pitched great visions every single day. There’s no lack of vision. Oh, and they could do this. Yep. I know that’s possible. But the really hard part is how do you actually commercialize this? How do you actually bring that to market?

And the example that I gave in the book about Pocket, this was someone who had actually built a product. It was in market. It had 3.5 times the number of users as something that did exactly the same thing. And they were both just continuing to build product surface area. And then one of them, Pocket, decided, well, I need to shape how the market thinks about my product and why it’s more valuable than this other thing that does exactly the same thing. And as soon as they started taking the time to shape the market, and not just build the product, it completely changed the trajectory of the company and its adoption.

So I do think it tends to be under-thought through, because people tend to think of go-to-market as I have an idea and then it’s about bringing it to market, as opposed to the go-to-market informs what should be built, even the idea and the vision and what’s reasonable or credible as a vision.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, so I think people say idea, the vision are cheap, right? So you can always come up with them. But the execution part, including the marketing side, I think is quite difficult. And you actually mentioned that probably the biggest differentiator between successful tech companies and the others is actually not just the product itself, right? But also the go-to-market strategy part.

[00:09:16] Marketing Tech Product

Henry Suryawirawan: So maybe let’s start with like when we talk about product, tech products, right, there are so many features that everyone can build. Can marketing actually help to sell any kind of product, be it really great products, advanced technology kind of product, or maybe even a simple app can also use some kind of marketing to actually help promote the success of the product?

Martina Lauchengco: First, and this is actually why you brought up the title of the book, How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products. I think there is a misconception of what marketing is. It tends to be a word that’s bandied about that, that just means promotion. And real marketing is actually thinking through a lot of the stuff that we’re talking about. It’s that all the difference between an idea that’s a hobby and something that’s actually a commercial business is. Marketing with the big M, all the different business levers you have, product being one of them, but pricing and promotion, which is what most people consider marketing. And place, so where is this available? So 4Ps being the easiest way to understand that.

But the reason why I think a lot of people need to rethink that aspect I think it’s beyond the product needing to be good. The world must understand the context for why they should believe your product is better. And I think my favorite modern example of that right at this moment is what Microsoft did for AI versus Google. So 18 months ago, if you had, or let’s say two years ago, if you’d asked who’s the leader in AI, everyone in Silicon Valley would have said, absolutely Google. Microsoft knew this. They were making a huge product investment. And one of the things they did is, how do we change the conversation about AI being something that Microsoft owns? Because we’re not known for that. And so, beyond the investment in OpenAI, they actually took a beta product and they made it broadly available to all these influencers and potential evangelists. And they let it be out in the wild.

That was a really high risk move. But what it did was it associated Microsoft with this movement and what was new and most advanced in AI. And every conversation I always have, even at casual parties with my female friends, they’re like, “Oh, did you read that article about what was happening? The AI being hallucinating and what it was saying? Wasn’t that so weird?” That was a masterstroke of marketing. This is the kind of marketing people don’t think of, which was by giving people early access, unfettered access to this really interesting technology that could have gone, it did went many different directions. It changed the conversation people were having about Microsoft and AI.

And then they owned it. They said, we want Google to know that it was us that made them dance. They just threw down the gauntlet and they made it a very open, market-based competition. This is classic product marketing and you do it with, it’s not just one group or someone that holds the title. It’s a way of thinking. It’s a foundational way of thinking. So I want to encourage more people to adopt that way of thinking.

[00:12:17] Product Marketing vs Marketing Campaign

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. So probably we can also learn from all these kind of like masterclass move in the industry, right? You’ve mentioned about AI, maybe search engine was Google’s era back then, right? How they market the search engine. So maybe let’s go to this topic, right? So in big companies, how typically this kind of marketing strategy, the big marketing strategy is done? Because you have been in some of these companies. Maybe you know some kind of ideas, workflows, or maybe, I don’t know, brainstorming things that could actually spark this idea of this marketing campaign.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Well, so in here’s where I’ll draw a distinction between product marketing and what you described as marketing, which is like clever campaigns and getting creative ideas flowing. And one is strategic shaping how the market thinks about a product. So product marketing is driving product adoption by shaping market perception through strategic marketing activities that align to business goals. So that’s why what Microsoft did was product marketing as opposed to just promotional marketing, which is what a lot of people tend to like clever campaign, like really great ad.

Like Apple does fantastic ad campaigns. The product marketing aspect of it is, well, how do we price it? What channels do we make available? Do we go exclusively with this provider versus that one? They’re shot on iPhone leaning heavily into the phone as being, oh sorry, the camera as being the primary feature set into which they lean and assert difference. Those are the strategic decisions, but then they build really great, pure promotional campaigns around that. And so if you’re just trying to activate more interesting creative thinking around the promotional campaigns, I think generally, what you want to do is make sure it’s aligned to the strategic space that you want your product or company to occupy 12 to 18 months from now.

So we’ll take Apple as an example. They want to make sure that their phones are associated with how we live our modern lives. So it’s not just look at the features that are on this camera. How does this impact the lives that we live? So it’s not from, in some cases when they first launch it, they’ll promote, oh, it’s got three lenses. It has this. But if you look at the campaigns, it’s photographs of kids and families and these things that are meaningful to our lives. So they pull on the emotions. They want to make sure that it strikes an emotional chord. They’re absolutely brilliant at that. Early, when they’re trying to influence early adopters. That’s where they make it more feature function centric, because they’re basically say, why should you drop your 13 or 14? Right now, it’s up to the 16. Why should you drop your old version and adopt the 16 when it’s just a little bit different? They have to find that one compelling thing that might drive people along. It’s typically not just one thing, but sometimes it can be. But it has to be very specific. It can’t be like, oh, cause it’s just got these 25 things that are massively better. It has to be either phenomenally better or this one specific thing that’s really different. So that’s thing one.

But thing two is around strategy. So all of the adoption of this phone is important, not because they just want to sell more phones. That has slowed as a business. But it’s because of all the other businesses they built on the back of that. Their media businesses, their understanding of consumer behavior and patterns that let them build out all the rest of their product lines. They need to have that. So it’s part of a larger business strategy and that’s the strategic aspect. That’s more of the product marketing thinking. So that always needs to be incorporated as opposed to just cute and clever campaign.

[00:15:52] Sales-Marketing-Product Roles

Henry Suryawirawan: When I heard you just explain this, you seem to make a distinction between product marketing and maybe there’s a marketing department as well, and maybe sales team and a product management team. Tell us in your kind of like ideal team setup, right? What are the roles that must exist in any tech product?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. So great question. And typically, product marketing is one of the functions that falls underneath the arm of marketing. But it is one of those disciplines that depending on what a company is trying to do and the leader that’s best in position to take advantage of it, that might determine its reporting structure. But you’ll always have some kind of sales capacity. If you’re direct to consumer, it’s through channels. If you’re B2B, it’s typically there’s some direct sales aspect or it might be product led growth in either of those situations. That’s the sales aspect, the getting people to transact that sales.

The marketing is the pricing, packaging, promotion, and where that actually takes place. So how do I enable somebody to be curious enough, like for them to discover it as they are encountering a problem or be curious enough to want to learn more. So it’s kind of like the Air Force to the Marines, is a bit of an analogy. And then, of course, you have to arm them with a great product. That’s where the Product team lives. And by Product, I mean, big P, the engineering, the design, the people who are the engine of building. So those are the three legs of the stool, very, very broadly speaking.

[00:17:20] How Product Marketing Collaborate

Henry Suryawirawan: And how do you envision this collaboration between what you call the product, right? Which covers like product, engineering, and design, which typically is the team setup, right? How they club together product, engineering, and design, right? Building the tech products. How do you actually envision the collaboration? Do they actually talk a lot frequently? I don’t know, like a weekly thing or every sprint? And how do they come up with this brilliant strategy? Again, like what you mentioned, right? It’s not just about creating creative promotional campaign, but it’s actually about strategy, thinking about multiple products, if let’s say the company have multiple products. Or maybe thinking about feature set that could change, you know, people’s perception about certain behavior. So how do they actually synchronize and collaborate?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Well, this is, so there’s, what does leadership do? And this is where product strategy and marketing strategy need to intersect, which is if this is where we see the product going, or this is a dialogue, we’re falling behind. We see the market going here. So what can we build that will actually help us penetrate this market or continue to grow? So that’s a dialogue at the leadership level. And they might make a declaration saying, okay, it’s really critical for us to go in direction A.

Once direction A has been decided by leadership in terms of the operationalizing of it at the individual team level, this is where I always encourage embedding product marketing in with the product teams. It’s not one to one. You might have one product marketer that’s assigned to multiple teams or at the director level where multiple of the squads roll up. But it should be in. Is it weekly sprint meetings? Is it whatever it is that that team uses as a mechanism by which to make decisions and decide what are we prioritizing and why are we prioritizing this? And always on the go-to-market side, it’s when. When actually winds up being the most important thing. When, then why, then what, then how. Because when shapes whether or not you have wind, market wind at your back.

So an example of that is if you are releasing accounting software, you would never release it, at least in the United States, anywhere in the March, and from January to April is a dead zone. Because all accountants are busy actually doing the tax preparation work. They have no capacity to think about or evaluate new software. But immediately after that, so after they’ve done their filing, it’s like, okay, now’s the big opportunity for when you might increase the amount of promotion that you’re doing for your product. Because they have a little bit more capacity. Same thing with e-commerce. It’s like, hey, Q4 is when all they’re doing is trying to transact. They’re not going to put new systems in place. They have no capacity for that. But early in the year is when they’re reassessing, okay, based on what we did last year, if we want to go to this next year, we need to upgrade our systems.

So that’s why when it comes to go-to-market, when, actually, is critically important. And tends to be, most product teams think, okay, this will be done now. And so now bring it to to market as opposed to hey, when is the best time to bring that to market? And then let’s make this a dialogue. Well, this will be ready, that won’t. Maybe we should prioritize this. Or we have this huge, many companies have two huge conferences that they’re going to that are just massive events or that they want to make it these big marketing moments. And so you say, hey, there’s, these are two marketing trains that we will have as a company leaving the station. So what can I load up on train A and what can I load up on train B? And that is the dialogue that is market forward and needs to be market driven, where you need that team member to help the product team think that through and the implications.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, you brought up a very good insights, right? Because typically in many product teams is actually they estimate, okay, how long this feature is going to be built, right? And by the time they’ve kind of like finished it. So yeah, we think about the strategy, how to market it. But I think like what you mentioned, right? Maybe the go-to-market strategy should determine kind of like the when. Of course, if it has to be kind of like maybe a big kind of a feature changes, right? So I think that’s a very good insights for me, at least.

[00:21:16] Product Marketing Metrics & Attribution

Henry Suryawirawan: So speaking about marketing, right? So I’m not a marketing person, but what I heard from many, many people talking about marketing, right? Measuring the success of their role is actually quite difficult because of the abstract notion of translating what they do to, I don’t know, like business impact or revenue. So in your probably expertise, right? How do you recommend people to actually measure the success of the marketing campaign or marketing strategy or product marketing role in general?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah, such a good question. And here I’ll draw a distinction between what most people refer to as marketing, like running campaigns. Those are actually fairly easy to measure. There are a lot of industry standards about effectiveness and click through rates and what you’re spending for customer acquisition. There are bands that are reasonable versus somewhat better versus worse. So that’s a little bit easier. It’s a lot harder to measure some of the product marketing stuff, which is we want to occupy this position in the next 12 to 18 months. Are we actually doing it? Cause these are much bigger investments. Have analysts actually designated us a leader? If we are trying to be associated with this movement, do we see evidence of that?

So the types of things you would look at are things like inbound organic or trending searches. And whether or not a term that you’re trying to introduce in market is actually being seen or searched on in the market. That would be an example of that. Share a voice would be another example of that. But typically, the product marketing and… Another way to measure that also is basically brass tacks on the website and the funnel. Which is if your messaging is connecting really well with your intended audiences, the quality of who is coming in, who is inbound or who is kind of being caught in your net is going to be higher.

So you’ll just have more people who are visitors qualifying into your catcher’s mitt. And then with each stage of the funnel, if it’s effective in terms of either what you are doing to, to pull people down through mid funnel versus top of funnel versus bottom of funnel. Each of those things, each of those conversion rates, there’s an industry standard and then there’s better. And you just want to make those as good as possible. So a conversion in each one of those thresholds inside of the marketing funnel, that’s another way to measure effectiveness.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. I feel that all these metrics that you mentioned, it kind of like also the metrics that other departments or other roles also incentivize to kind of like promote and make sure it’s successful, right? So how do you actually take the subset of that to actually claim it for yourself? I think, I find it still very difficult.

Martina Lauchengco: And I don’t know if it’s necessary or important. It’s not like we can’t say that this was solely us. We had an influence on it. And then it’s done in partnership with these other organizations. In B2B organizations, that marketing and sales are stuck together, like with glue. And so it’s going to be a mix of both organizations contributing to that. But there is typically, it might be, hey, up to this part of the funnel, it’s mostly marketing influenced. And below this part, it’s largely the sales process and sales. Some people draw that threshold at as soon as it’s a sales accepted lead or sales opportunity, then it’s sales’ ball and they’ve got it. And up to that point, it’s marketing’s ball and then it’s sales ball.

But this is where I think having shared metrics is actually a really positive thing. Cause you don’t say like, hey, hot potato. I’m done. I handed it off to those guys. It’s their fault. If they’re not being effective, it’s everybody’s fault. So if sales can’t sell well, because they’re not saying the right stuff, the right customers haven’t come in, and or they don’t know how to position what they have as being valuable. Are you targeting the right customers? Are we saying the right things? Are we contextualizing this? Or do we have the right tools that enabled them to be successful? So sales enablement is a great thing that product marketing often is massively involved in, from sales decks to, you know, development of the sales playbooks. These are all things that product marketing is typically very, very involved in. That is not typically, I’ll say classic marketing campaigns and promotions. It’s like, hey, sales being, knowing what to say, who to say it to, how to compete against competitors. That’s all product marketing.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right, thanks for the clarification. So I hope people learn from these kind of distinctions, right?

[00:25:33] 4 Fundamentals of Product Marketing

Henry Suryawirawan: So in your book, one of the main core things that you covered are the four fundamentals of product marketing. So maybe outline to us, like, what are these four fundamentals and maybe we can dive them deep, uh, one by one in the next conversation.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah, well, I’ll say the reason why I created four foundational principles of product marketing was it is really important for everyone to be able to understand these things as opposed to just like, well, here are the checkboxes of things that the 37 things that you must do to do product marketing. Engineers, founders, product teams oftentimes have to do some of this foundational product marketing work. So what is that?

Number one is ambassador. This is connecting the customer and market insights back and forth through the organization. This was what we were talking about earlier in our conversation where I have this market insight. This is going to influence what we might build, may or may not. Or we’re just going to position it differently. But having that conversation, driving that dialogue, that’s the ambassador portion where you are influencing it. You may not necessarily own it, and that’s why it’s ambassador as opposed to owner. So that’s ambassador between customer and market.

Then there’s the strategist, which is okay, where do we need to be 12 to 18 months from now? Product marketing is this longer term view of if we want to mean X to the market, it must mean that we do Y. So it’s thinking about that to this longer term lens and the when and why, the what, the how.

And there is this storyteller who is shaping how, what the market thinks about you or product. So it’s not a lot of people think, oh, I just need to have the right messaging, or I just need the right positioning. It’s about shaping market perception. And so that’s many things. It’s not just one thing. And it’s the combination of all the activities you do collectively that actually shape the story of your product and market.

And then last, the fourth one is evangelist. Not that you are an evangelist, but that you are enabling others to be an evangelist on your behalf. The big thing that has really changed in modern marketing is what you have to say about you is probably least important for your product. What matters much more is about what Henry is saying about Loved than what I say about Loved. He has to say, oh my God, it just opened my eyes and I never thought of things this way before as opposed to me saying that. It’s way more credible coming from Henry. So I need to arm Henry with things that make it easy for him to talk about my product, my book. And the same is true for anyone. What are the atomic particles that others can pass along about your product, your company, that tell your story on your behalf? Because in modern marketing, it matters what everyone else is saying, not what you’re saying.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, so I think those four things are really interesting for me. So when I read about it, right, so you mentioned about ambassador, right, strategies, and then storytelling. And the last one is about evangelism. So I think those things are definitely cool when you see it in action, right, when they all kind of like work perfectly, seamlessly together, right? So I think clever product marketing definitely makes a lot of a difference, right? And I think we can learn from these four fundamentals.

[00:28:40] Ambassadorship

Henry Suryawirawan: So the ambassador thing that you mentioned, right? Of course, understanding the market, the insights from the market, right? Understanding the customer profile. So maybe in your kind of like experience, you know, you have worked with multiple different products. What are some of the creative ambassadorial thing that those products did that actually makes a lot of difference. So for us to actually learn from that experience.

Martina Lauchengco: Well, one story I like to tell is from Workiva. They actually had a product called WebFilings that was for SEC financial professionals. And it basically lets them file their official paperwork with this government institution in the United States that is really important. And they invested a lot in their customer success team. And this customer success team kept hearing from customers. So these are financial professionals that literally get hundreds of reports from all across the company and they need to rationalize all these reports. They have all this information up on multiple screens. And the customer success team kept hearing from customers. We really would love your product to have multi screen support.

And when they brought that to the product team, the product team said, yeah, that’s a nice to have. We have all these things that are broken, these foundational flows that we need to fix. We need to do these data integrations. And while all that was correct, luckily the customer success team would not be deterred. And they just advocated for their customers saying, no, all that stuff might be important, but this is the only thing that we are hearing that is really important to customers. So can we prioritize this? So the product team relented and then prioritized it, came out in the next major release.

And then customer success team was sure enough, the only thing people were talking about, like, Oh my God, we’re so glad that you have multi screen support. This is so helpful. And it’s because the impact on that SEC filing professional’s daily life was really noticeable immediately. So while it might’ve seemed like a small feature, its perceived impact for the target customer was massive. And so it had disproportional market impact.

So that was a great example of, you need to be that ambassador of, it might not seem as important, but from the market and from our user’s perspective, it’s actually critically important. And we get this disproportional market when they love us, we listen to them. So it’s a perfect example of ambassadorship, not coming from product or from marketing, but from an organization that recognized its importance and advocated for it. So that’s why, again, I keep these as general principles, because they might need to be practiced anywhere.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, it seems that you have to really understand your customers really, really well, right? Maybe doing a lot of survey interviews with them, getting good signals, what you mentioned signals, right? And kind of like, don’t deter against, you know, all the other features that maybe product is thinking, right?

[00:31:25] How to Get Customer Insights

Henry Suryawirawan: So maybe some of the practice, how, besides the typical one, you know, like survey, maybe online survey and maybe customer interview. Are there any other tips that you can suggest to us in order to get these signals much, much better? Because I find it sometimes it’s also intuition thing, right? Uh, where you think, okay, this is going to make a big difference, right? Is there some tips that you can suggest us?

Martina Lauchengco: Yes, I’m a massive, massive fan of the anthropological form of this, which is just observing and watching users work. There’s the user testing version of that, which is I put a task in front of them and I watch them complete this task. But there’s the “let me just watch you do your job for the next hour”. Or let me just watch you on your screen where it’s not just embedded in your product. You’re actually seeing how many different screens they navigate through. Like I’m sure this has occurred, this has happened to you where you see someone like, how many tabs do you have up? Like and you see how frequently their context is changing and how small you are in their world.

So observing this and realizing, gosh, you know what? People are going into our interface. If you’re lucky once a day or if you’re super lucky, they’re in there all the time. But for many products it’s intermittent. And so each time they go back in, they have to re remember or re-learn. Oh wait, what am I supposed to do here? And we get so familiar with our products, we assume that they’re really easy. Again, a user test is different than I’m observing in context of someone doing their job, where this falls in with how they do their job. You see how much it competes with email or you see how much they are still using email or Slack to accomplish things you thought they’d actually do in your product.

The reason why this becomes so important is, I feel you can, you realize when you’re starting to over design and over solve. Oh, we need to give them options to do X, Y, and Z. It’s like, no! They don’t need more options. They’re overwhelmed with options. We actually need to simplify. But we actually need a number of these steps or put in a wizard that might seem so rudimentary to us, but is actually genuinely helpful because they don’t want to have to use their brain to use our product. Can we just make this drop dead easy? And you won’t really understand what that means until you observe how overwhelmed they are with interface and other products, until you observe them in the wild.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, great tips there! So observe how people use, not just the product itself, right, but in the context of the day to day job, the daily lives, right, or maybe there’s the kind of like the screens that you mentioned, right? So I think that will give a much better insights in order to understand better your customer, the pain points that they have. And maybe also a little bit of a spark of a new idea sometimes, because if the software has some limitation, maybe they work around that through some other mechanism, maybe other products or other features. So I think that’s a pretty good insight. So the next fundamental you mentioned…

Martina Lauchengco: I was going to say, I’ll just give you an example like that actually happened. I did this research project for a company, well, research, I’ll call it product strategy research, where we had an MVP built, and this was a product for wineries. And so I went and I interviewed 20 winery CEOs in Napa Valley and just spent the whole first half of the interview just asking them about their day. And then after that, I would show them this potential MVP product and say, you know, do you find this valuable? Like what are your, like first of all, how would you use this? Where would you go? Do you find that information valuable? And all of them were like, yeah, this is interesting. And this is, this would be valuable information. Then I would ask, well, how often would you use it? And the answer would be like maybe once a quarter, maybe every couple of months.

And that combined with, in the interviews, there were 12 other things that they were worried about before the stuff that this product, this MVP was covering, was even making it on the list. I was like, this isn’t going to break that threshold of getting utilized to provide enough value that it’s actually worth the development effort. So I went back to the company and I said you shouldn’t actually take the time to develop this product, because it’s not providing enough value to make it useful that it’s worth the effort.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, another great example, right? So sometimes we are kind of like blinded with all these insights if we don’t actually understand the kind of like the customer journey, right? Not just when they actually start using your products, but what leads them to actually use your products. So…

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Great distinction.

[00:35:47] Human Aspect of Product Marketing

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, speaking about this, right, it comes back again to the strategy part, right, which is your second fundamental, right? How do you actually come up with the go-to-market? And I find that product marketing, it seems like they really need to have a good expertise in terms of what the capability of product can do. And especially now, if you have multiple products, right, you need to be able to think creatively how these products can collaborate with each other, if let’s say they can collaborate, right? So in your view, how much important for product marketing to actually understand the product inside out, including maybe the technological advancements that it supports?

Martina Lauchengco: Here I will say I have a bias, which is, well, first, they have to have really strong product knowledge. There’s just no substitute for that. That being said, at least in Silicon Valley, there’s an enormous bias toward, well, you have to have a technical degree to be able to be technical enough to be able to understand the product or understand the tech. And I totally don’t buy that. I actually think it often blinds us to the customer perspective. Or even if you’re selling or trying to bring a product to a technologist, you have to understand they’re a human being first. They’re a human being who is skeptical of what you’re, of anything that you are promising them. They’re a human being who is very, very busy and has other things that they’d rather think about or work on. Until you’ve convinced them that whatever it is that you want to talk about is actually worth taking some of their extremely valuable time. That’s hard. And it does not require technical knowledge, it requires human understanding.

And a lot of people who don’t have, who think about it as a, well, I just need to understand the future. No, no, let me explain to you how well these features work. They’re not understanding that the reason why you’re not breaking through is you haven’t connected with the pain that is most important now.

So I was at this forum with a couple hundred CIOs. And they were for most of the, you know, hundreds of millions to many billions in revenue for the size of businesses. And to a person, all of them said, people first, process second, and tools third. And in the world of product, we are a tool. We are not the people and we are not the process. We are a tool that enables those other two things.

So you have to have the capacity of understanding that that is the mindset of whoever you’re trying to influence. Which is all a long way of saying you must have product knowledge, but you’re actually building this bridge to where’s this human being come from? What are their priorities? And how do I intersect that with what’s unique and compelling about this product? And I have to find a way to build a bridge. And that is a little bit of three dimensional chess. But if you are too much one side or the other, you don’t build that effective bridge.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, sometimes I find that the lack of technical expertise here can also help the marketing side, right? Because you can connect to other people who may not be technologists themselves, right? So especially, for example, think about AI, right? So most people these days don’t actually understand what is going on at the LLM side probably, right? But they know how to actually market it so that people can use it, adopt it in their day to day lives, right? So I think that’s a very important call out that you mentioned.

[00:39:03] Directing the Product Go-To-Market

Henry Suryawirawan: You also mentioned something about go-to-market strategy. Try to create a perception about yourself. Like how do you actually distinct your product? Because we have so many competitions these days. Everyone can build an app. Everyone can build a new software. So how do you actually come up with a go-to-market strategy that actually distinguish you from all the other competitors?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Well, here is where occupying position, even in advance of a product makes a huge difference. So there are companies, so this actually happened in the data observability space. There were about, depending on how you count it, four, six, seven companies that all started around the same time, and they all had essentially the same value proposition. And one of them focused on defining what data observability should be, how it should be viewed. They made sure that their CEO was this pundit and that people were understanding why this would be important. And if you googled the term, their content would come up. They did not have a product in market. All the other competitors were earlier to market than the one that was occupying the market position.

By the time the one that was occupying market position came into market, they just kicked butt over all of the others because of how that technology was viewed, because how they had solved the problem, because they defined what success should look like. And they, and I don’t actually know whether or not people would consider the product superior. I think they could, you could argue it many different ways. But they did such a great job of defining the position which they wanted their product to eventually occupy that they kicked butt over everyone else in the space. So now advanced, that wasn’t coming out first to market. It was defining the market better. So that’s great example of that was a strategic mindset saying, let’s make sure people know why this matters before we actually bring the product to market.

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think when you mentioned about position, definitely we are touching on the third fundamental, which is kind of like the storytelling aspect, right? So the difference of, you know, positioning and also promotion. And if I’m not mistaken, the example that you mentioned just now is also covered in your book. It’s a Looker, probably. But yeah, tell us a little bit more about story. Is it Looker?

Martina Lauchengco: No, actually it wasn’t Looker at all. It was Monte Carlo. So total different space.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right.

Martina Lauchengco: But, but a great example of this happens everywhere in all different categories. And so what do you need to do? You need to figure out what’s important for you and your category. Is it owning the position? Is it coming to market first? And there’s no single answer. There’s no one formula, which is why you have to have enough market knowledge to know for what we’re trying to do and for who we’re trying to reach, what’s most important. And that’s the crafting the strategy component. But a key part, as you were saying, is how do we shape the perception of this product? And that’s the storytelling aspect.

[00:41:53] Storytelling

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, the storytelling aspect I find is always very interesting, especially for me who is not so creative, right? So sometimes you need to come up with, you know, some kind of ideas, how do you actually sell your product through stories, right? And I find that this is probably sometimes very difficult for engineers who probably are more, I don’t know, like we are more logical thinking, right? So tell us how do you actually come up with this kind of like storyline and kind of like bring the product through that particular story? Maybe a little bit of insights for us.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Well, Henry, you just use the magical word, which is tell stories. And I’d say, especially for technical products, the best thing you could ever do is tell customers’ stories. We went into this customer. They were struggling with X, Y, and Z. And you’re grounded in the today version of the world. This is what was hard. This is what’s struggling. This is where they were struggling. You might bring in, you might, you may or may not bring in some of what is possible saying like, you know, but this new technology is making this other thing possible. So when we started talking about blank, blank, and blank, they’re like, oh my God, that would immediately let us do thing A, B, and C, which we couldn’t do before. And the moment we showed them the product, they said, can I start using this tomorrow? That’s a story that tells me the value of what we were trying to do was so high that they immediately wanted to do something with it. So you don’t even need to know what the technology is where you’re like, it clearly solved a problem. So there’s credibility built in to that story structure.

The other reason why story structure is great is if I say, let me say about these great features in this great product, you’re like, okay, you’re immediately skeptical. But if I say, Henry, let me tell you a story, you’re immediately going to lean in and listen, I want to hear a story.

So great example of that was a company. I can’t remember whether or not I talked about this in the book, early stages of data loss prevention. They could not talk publicly about any of their initial customers because they were big banks. And they’re like, no, you’re a tiny little startup. You cannot talk about us. They would take their first customer, who they had a POC and they said, we’ve turned on the POC and within 15 minutes we discovered an offense that was so huge, someone had to excuse themselves from the room and said, uh, this is a fireball offense. And I need to go deal with this right now. That one story sold the next five customers. You don’t need to know what technology is doing or the fact that they had a different algorithmic way of solving X, Y, and Z. That was… that you get to that. The story sold the value. So that’s why stories can be so powerful. And I’d say, start with a story. Don’t lead with the technology and what’s possible with technology.

The other reason to do that is there are 10 other interesting technological ways to solve problems now. It’s not like this is the one way that’s best. It’s like, that is a good way, but there probably is another. And someone can make it as equally compelling argument that that other technical way is pretty good. The stories are what are more memorable. The stories are easier to pass along.

[00:44:50] Curating Stories

Henry Suryawirawan: When you mentioned that, it seems like I’m just imagining myself as an engineer trying to sell a product, right? This is typically how engineers try to sell the product, right? You know, like we talk about all cool features, you know, all these advancements that we did, but we actually forgot one important element, like what you mentioned is the story itself, right? So I think it’s a very good thing that we learn, right? So always come up with the story. And for these kinds of stories, does it have to be curated by the product marketing teams so that, you know, we have a very kind of like uniform messaging. So is there a way for us to come up with these cool stories to tell?

Martina Lauchengco: Wherever the stories are occurring, you want to capture them so that everybody can say the cool stories, because sometimes a salesperson will discover a great story. Sometimes it’s in a customer discovery interview that you discover a really cool story. So I don’t think there’s any one way. As a company, you want to have a place where those can be captured so that everyone that wants to use them can. Many times someone in the marketing department will curate these stories, but I’m actually not a fan of these highly polished case studies. Yes, they absolutely have a role. But the ones that feel raw and authentic and real and conversational feel immediately more credible.

I was just so, here, Henry is a case study of a company that looks just like you. Here are the problems. Here’s what they’re trying to do here. This, here’s how our products solve the problem. It’s, it’s overly curated. Everybody knows that. Whereas if I just said, Henry, I just this morning talked to someone that had the exact same challenges that you do. Here’s what they did to solve the problem, and here’s how they used my product to help them do that more efficiently. It’s just a different conversation.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah. Even when you mentioned that sentence to me, it sparks interest definitely straight away, right? Without actually understanding, like, what is the solution, right? So I think that’s a very good distinction, you know, a good story actually brought people in, right? They want to listen, they want to understand, and they want to relate to where they are at the moment, right? So I think that’s the critical aspect, how you actually create a perception.

[00:46:52] Evangelism

Henry Suryawirawan: So the last part that you mentioned in your fundamentals is actually evangelism, right? So now you have these cool stories you tell to the customer, but evangelism is something different, right? It’s the customers themselves, the users themselves that actually kind of like evangelize or promote your product. So I think this is a different level of marketing. So tell us, how can we create this kind of like virality where people are championing your product?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Well, this is where having a genuinely, totally awesome product makes all the difference in the world. Cause people naturally want to talk about that. So did Tesla owners not talk about their Teslas when they first got their Teslas? No. And we’re like, oh, you had a Tesla? So what do you think? They all had a point of view and they were all talking about it. Cause it was, it wasn’t like, oh, well, it’s really cool to use the screen to do X, Y, and Z. It’s like, you wouldn’t believe what happens when I push on the gas pedal. And they, they just had their own, there were many technical reasons why it was great, but every customer had their own story. So that’s what you ideally want to engender. It’s a really strong product that just naturally lends itself to these stories.

There’s another one out there right now that I wouldn’t even call this a story, but this is an example of sometimes we get overly burdened and like what is the definition of story? Does it have characters? Blah, blah. Is there a narrative spine? Don’t overthink it. Here’s a perfect example. I was talking to a security professional and I asked her, what is the last product you advocated for and brought in that you absolutely love? And she said, it was Wiz. And I said, well, how did you sell it to everyone? She’s like, it was easy. It said, these six products, we can turn them off by buying this one. And it was the fastest yes I ever got. So that’s the story.

And immediately you’re like, well, what did they do? And, oh, and the value is, is super clear. And they didn’t package that up for her to say. They built a really great product that lets her do that. But that’s the easy pass along, which is, and maybe they’ve encouraged that. Maybe there was an ROI case, saying like, hey, or maybe that’s part of their go-to-market motion which is, hey, when you adopt us, you can turn every other X, Y, and Z monitoring, you can turn these, any of these monitoring style products off. That can be part of how you sell or how you market your product.

So evangelism takes a lot of forms. Social is probably the biggest channel for evangelism these days, which is other people on their social channels talking about your product. And thinking through what would make someone do this on their own? How do I spark the conversation that lets them talk about this more themselves? So those are all great examples of enabling evangelism in many different styles.

[00:49:26] Authentic vs Authoritative

Henry Suryawirawan: So you also mentioned earlier about authenticity, right? So I find that evangelism that you’re promoting is something that comes authentically from people who want to really evangelize your product, right? So these days, also people, I don’t know, like they probably have influencers, you know, tech influencers, right? Or maybe they even pay for those influencers to actually promote their product. So tell us why the difference between authentic evangelism and these kinds of influencers who are kind of like paid to actually talk about your products.

Martina Lauchengco: It’s so funny, I just got this question two days ago in another interview where someone said, how do you define authentic? And just the premise here is being authentic is more compelling than being authoritative, which is how a tendency, especially if you’re a technologist. You’re a trained engineer, you’re like, I know I’m correct. And I’m coming from this place of authority, because it’s technically correct. It’s way more important to be authentic. And the distinction I would draw is you might be technically correct, but someone who is being authentic has something that they genuinely want to convey to someone else and connect first with that person and give them something of value. I want to connect with you, Henry, and give you something of value. That’s me being authentic. I want to be valuable to you, because I care about you as a human being, and if I’m taking your time, I want to give you something that’s valuable for it.

Whereas I’ll call it the more authoritative older style, technology style of marketing is having a broad, a platform that you broadcast from. And that you’re just broadcasting at people and you’re just trying to broadcast at them in the right places for a reasonable cost. And that’s just blasting out at people. And in the modern era, people are savvy and they recognize the difference, because we have now millennials and Gen Z that have been digital natives for much of their life. And so they’re very, very savvy and they recognize or prefer, hey, if this is coming from, even if it’s paid, I don’t care. If that person’s saying something that feels credible to me and what they’re saying feels valuable to me, I’m going to choose to believe it.

I just saw there was a stat that folks reported that said. It gets something along the lines of more than 70 percent of people believe influencers over people that they know in their personal networks. And it’s because those influencers have proven themselves. I look at 10 hundred beauty and cosmetic products a year. So I do have the right, even though I am not a cosmetologist, I have the right to have a point of view that’s informed and thoughtful. And I’m going to give you my point of view and you decide what you want to do with it. But that is more compelling than me, Martina, who does not use a whole lot of makeup saying, I really like this concealer. I’m not credible, but that influencer, even if it was paid, is, as long as they’re talking about it in the authentic way. Let me tell you what you might need to know to make this thought, this decision. And it’s up to you. But it’s authentic.

[00:52:16] Product Review Channels

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think you kind of like brought the kind of like different, different ways how you can market product. These days we can see, you know, like people unboxing a certain product, right? Or maybe comparison, product comparison, you know, like this phone against that phone. Or maybe also like customer review website, you know, these like G2, or maybe like analyst website, TechCrunch, and all that.

Martina Lauchengco: There’s so much stuff. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.

Henry Suryawirawan: So how, how do you actually use all these? Like do you promote people to actively use these all channels? Like how do you actually come up with this influencing market perception part of your product?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. You do. You actually have to. So if you want your products to be reviewed on G2 and have people say positive things, you can’t just presume that they will do it on their own. So this is where a customer marketing group might say like, hey customers, we really value you and we would… If our products providing value to you, we would really appreciate if you would click this link and make it easy for them to tell the world what you like about us. This actually happened where I give another example here. They had a user conference and they just had a computer up for people to give feedback to. I believe it was Gartner about what they thought of the product. And it was just like, hey, we’re not, they didn’t give any reward for it. They just said, hey, we would love for them to know what you think of our product.

It crashed Gartner’s server and Gartner was like, who the hell is this product and this company that crashed our server? Because there were so many users that were trying to give feedback that was positive. And it made this huge analyst group lean in and want to know more about this company that they weren’t doing a lot of reporting on saying like, clearly users love you and customers love you. So what’s going on over here? So there are many ways that you can try and you do have to solicit it. You can’t just presume it’s going to happen on your own, even though it feels icky sometimes, but that’s what your marketing department just has to work on.

[00:54:07] Product Support

Henry Suryawirawan: So for me, also another part of the good experience about product is not just the inbound part, right, where you create interest and all that. But after customer use your product, the support or the aspects of the user experience actually also matter. So do you actually see product marketing also need to come up with like a support side of the product. So be it, for example, if the customer has issues, you know, you have different, different forums where people can find the answers. Or you have some kind of like experts, right? They are in the community, but actually also helping people to solve problems using the product. So tell us also this part or where the product marketing actually should also come up with a good kind of like strategy to overcome this.

Martina Lauchengco: So this is where I would say the realm of the execution falls more towards customer success, customer support. Different companies define it in different ways. It might be user engagement or community management. All of these are within the purview of where this might be operationalized. The connection to product marketing is the product marketer will say, strategically, we have to make this investment. It’s one of our primary swim lanes or it’s a secondary swim lane. So developer evangelism is really critically important. So we’re going to really nurture our communities, and we’re going to have dedicated resources to make sure that someone’s always on Discord responding.

So I work at Costanoa. We’re all early stage startups, many in the developer infrastructure world or developer tool world. And all of them are on Discord. And I can’t think of one where they don’t ask their developers to engage directly with people. It’s not like, hey, come and observe. It’s like, engage directly, be valuable, engage, be a part of the conversation and the dialogue. So these are, it doesn’t just live in one place. It depends on stage and where you are will determine kind of who does this. But that’s the distinction between, you know, that it’s important from a strategic perspective, but you’ll probably operationalize it different ways in different groups, in different teams.

[00:56:01] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: Thanks for explaining that. So Martina, I feel like I have a crash course on product marketing. But unfortunately, we have reached the end of our conversation. Typically, before I let you go, right, I have one last question that I would like to ask you. I call this three technical leadership wisdom. Maybe you can change it a little bit to be towards product marketing, right? So think of it like advice that you want to impart to us. So maybe if you can share your version, I think that would be great.

Martina Lauchengco: Yes, I have three, I’ll just call it leadership wisdom pieces. And they intersect all of these things. And they come from three different people. One comes from Steve Blank, which is get out of the building. And it’s really where we started our conversation. You can’t develop something of market worth unless you’re getting out of the building and seeing how the world actually is as it is. So get out of the building. Steve Blank.

Number two comes from Malcolm Gladwell. And this relates to how do you tell stories and what is storytelling, which is think about it. Think about your product or how you talk about your product, the way you would explain something to an intelligent eighth grader. This removes jargon. This removes reliance on industry language, where you really have to boil it down to like what’s actually happening. How do you really unpack this in a simple, compelling way? And it just removes us from always relying on the jargon that we tend to, like it’s a platform that does blah, blah, blah, that improves efficiency and blah, blah, you know. Like we just use jargon, jargon, jargon, and everybody says the same thing. So none of those words would mean anything to an eighth grader. If you were trying to explain what your product actually did so that they could say, oh, I can see why the world would need this. You would use very different language. So that’s a great hack for how can you keep unpacking what you say so that it could make sense to most people.

And the third comes from Steve Jobs, which is stay curious. It came from a graduation address at Stanford, but I would morph it into practice curiosity. And what that means is every single day don’t sit in the seat of I’m an expert. But sit in the seat of the beginners, the beginner. What do I need to learn today? Or what can I learn that’s new? And it will just enrich you and your learning and your energy more than you can ever know.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, I like the twist for the last one, right? Practice curiosity. It’s not just stay curious, right? Because stay means like it’s a bit of passive. But actually, if you practice it, you become more active.

So thanks, Martina, for all these. If people want to ask you questions, follow you online. Is there a place where they can find you?

Martina Lauchengco: LinkedIn is the best place to find me and follow me and give me your feedback about things that you would like to continue learning on, because then I can give you something of value.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. Thanks again, Martina, for this marketing crash course, right? So I hope people learn a lot of things how to market their tech products much better, right? Thinking about the story, evangelism part, and all that. I find this is something really important for us to make a successful product. So thanks again for that.

Martina Lauchengco: Thank you for having me, Henry.

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