What makes product marketing execution different?

Who are these people and what do they want? 

I've met a lot of marketing pros in my life, and for many, the answer to the above question often seems prefaced with "Quick, think of something clever to say!" Value propositions that rhyme, slogans looking for a libretto, endless verbal flowering. When marketing types are drawn into wordplay, they let loose their gift of gab. First, say smart stuff about the product ...

What has frustrated me in hiring product marketing managers are those candidates who can talk about the product -- but don't know how it works or what problem those nice people with the money really want or need to solve with it. Or those candidates who emerged from engineering because they could speak in complete sentences and had social skills or personal grooming habits superior to the other software programmers. There's more to be said about the anti-patterns of product marketing in future posts. 

Product marketing needs to solve a problem -- define it, design its solution, make sure it works, and move the merchandise. No other marketing discipline spans the cycle so completely. Communications skills help, but they don't suffice. There's a lot of analysis, with structures and models of various shapes and sizes, that has to be done. That's not just a process: it's about executing for results. And each result in the chain has its successor; take the result and execute on it. 

Questions I'll answer going forward, among others: 

- What do customers want and need, and how do you know? 

- What choices should you make in decoding what you have learned into a direction you can take?

- How can you ever talk your development/engineering team into building what will sell, rather than what they would build for themselves to buy? 

- How do you know that they built what you agreed with them? 

- How and when do you get the sales channels in the game? 

- When have you done enough to expose yourselves to your customers? 

Welcome. More to come.