 Hello, everyone. I hope your product con is going well so far. I'm really excited to be able to speak with you today about one of my favorite topics. Being able to pass the product management, product marketing relationship to unlock growth and really ensure that both functions are delivering to their full potential. So first, I'd love to hear from you. What would you describe as the product management, product marketing relationship? Are we talking a sibling rivalry where we're always competing for attention, a boss trying to dictate to a wayward employee, or best friend forever, who are supporting each other through every twist and turn? Go ahead and put your responses in the chat. Well, I'm seeing a few different responses coming in. But of course, we all aspire to the best friends forever relationship. And hopefully by the end of this presentation, you will understand some of the tools that can ensure that that's really the outcome between how you and your cross-functional partners are really collaborating together. So first off, my name is Jamila Calhoun. I'm currently the Vice President of Product and Customer Marketing at Eventbrite, where I've been responsible for launching products, including our new subscription products, ad products, and AI tools. I've also been playing a key role in partnering with our marketing and product team to position Eventbrite more broadly as a service that's really a destination for consumers to find great things to do in their area and for creators to find new audiences. But before Eventbrite, I would consider myself something of a career shapeshifter. I have transitioned through multiple functions and industries throughout my career, including a stint in product management. And more recently, I've had the experience of building product marketing teams from scratch in organizations more than two times. So from my perspective, I have had the on the ground experience of defining the roles between product management and product marketing, and ultimately setting up the product marketing function and product management function to deliver and be set up for success. So what we'll cover today, number one, I'll demystify what product marketing is. It's so important to ground everyone in the same kind of perspective on what product marketing can be. Number two, I will build the case for collaboration by showing you some examples of when collaboration is not moving forward as smoothly what some of those outcomes could ultimately be. And lastly, I will share with you my model for setting up a winning collaboration between these two functions. So let's take a full step back. What does product market fit even mean? Ultimately, the goal of both product managers and product marketers is to commercialize product in a way that really is intuitive and resonates with our customers. Your director likes to say the aim is to know your customer so well that the product fits him or her and sells itself. There we can tell that, of course, products don't completely sell themselves. Marketers, sales folks, we know there's quite a bit of work. But when it's so intuitive to the customer, they are really able to get from a no to a yes much faster. But product market fit is not just about who your customer is and what you built. It's also about what business model you put against it and how you're going to find those customers and communicate the value to them through your different channels. So in terms of product marketing, how does product marketing engage in that process of coming to product market fit? It's all about how you ensure that you're bringing great products that are set up to succeed to market. Number one, you want to make sure that your understanding of the market is really strong. And so some product marketers are called inbound product marketers. They focus more on assessing the landscape and identifying those opportunities to deliver against certain portions of your customer base and their highest priority deans. On the other hand, certain product marketing teams also will engage in understanding more about the monetization model that should be placed against the product depending on what other competitors are in the market and the assessment of willingness to pay. That then, of course, combines with the powers of product management and engineering to actually develop what those solutions that are going to ultimately be able to solve a problem for the customer. And once you have the product, you now move into outbound motion. These types of product marketers really are delivering the unique messaging that's going to articulate the value of the solution that you delivered to get customers from no to yes. And then they'll also help coordinate for a cohesive communication strategy that includes multiple marketing touch points, as well as potentially some product led strategy to deliver messaging in product. If you are working with different teams, it's important to know that there may be multiple different aspects to what a product marketer can be doing. And if you are in certain organizations, these two roles and teams may be separate, but in others, they will be the same product marketer. And that's kind of called a full stack product marketing team. But ultimately, product management and product marketing are really just two sides of the same coin. We both really want to find the solution to customer problems and ensure that we're delivering those intuitive product market fit. But we often come at the situation from two different angles, which are complementary and ultimately critical to driving growth. Number one, product managers may ask how well that we solve the customer problem. Is our solution really set up to address the pain point in a way that is frictionless? And as product marketers, we're definitely interested in the customer problem. But we're also thinking about how well are we penetrating our market? How many people in that market have this problem? And for those who do, how connected are they to us and who we are and the value that we can deliver? If you don't have a true problem that you solved, and you don't actually understand how to deepen engagement in your market, you won't necessarily unlock the full potential of your product. And so growth really depends on both of these functions, collaborating together. And when collaboration is not going well, what can happen is ultimately your product stays on the shelf. Lots of new features could be built with incredible ability to solve people's challenges. And yet, you're starting to see slow revenue growth. Just to name some of the dimensions you may observe in this situation, you might find your product teams building non-scalable products for niche audiences, maybe a high value customer has really come in and advocated for a key solution. You may also find that you, while you've built an amazing solution, don't really find that you have enough pricing power to support it. This may be because of competitive incursion, the fact that it's not differentiated enough. Of course, your growth may be slower in terms of customer acquisition or attrition. And what ultimately ends up shaking out is you sunset quite a few features. And so we all want to avoid these outcomes. If we are really solving customer problems, you want to be able to couple it with a commercialization strategy that's ultimately going to deliver the business results. But to give you a quick example of a recent experience that I've had leading product marketing collaborating with products, Eventbrite has really continued to innovate in the ticketing space. And more recently, we are democratizing access to marketing tools that really are built specifically for events. We hear from our creators that marketing is often a difficult task that seems very opaque to them. And as a marketer, I understand that. But we wanted to be able to create a new offering on top of our ticketing offering that we're known most well for, that would be able to deliver a solution to our creators. When I joined, the product had been launched and it had been growing, but the subscriptions had really started to slow down. And so I took the opportunity to bring product management and engineering partners and design partners actually into the same room and go back to first principle. With that, we recognized that, yes, this was a key problem that customers had to be solved. But we were building many different features and more sophisticated marketing tools to support them in a way that we felt would really help demystify all of the complexity of marketing for them. But ultimately, many of our creators are small business owners who are just wanting to get started and get the word out. And so they were over-served by some of the features that we had on our roadmap. And so ultimately, I took the opportunity to reground us in what the market was, how many people had these needs, and ultimately, how many of them would be willing to pay for something that was more advanced. In the end, we repackaged our marketing tool subscription in order to make it more intuitive what level of the different tier would be right for the customer to choose based on how advanced they were. We started to really focus on email as the key entry point into the product in terms of email marketing being one of the first marketing channels that new creators engage in. Originally, we were focused on social media marketing, which we also know is very important, but it's a more complex landscape. And we brought in a lot more education to the creators in order to ensure that they felt equipped to succeed. And with that repositioning and changes to our customer journey in products, we've now been able to grow our subscriptions by 10x in just six months. And so this is such an important opportunity and lesson I took to all of our team to really showcase the power of collaboration between the product development function in design and UXR, market research and analytics, with the product marketing landscape and the way that we approach problem. Bringing the two together really unlocked this opportunity. So how can you make sure that your collaboration model is just as successful? Number one, I recommend defining your go-to-market hierarchy. Not all products are created equal and not all launches are created equal. So set expectations early and often. The second piece is to get on what I call your shared raft. I'll describe what that is more in a couple of slides, but it's all about setting you up to feel a sense of shared destiny between your different functions. Your third item is prepare for iteration. Get ahead of it by planning a dynamic learning agenda that allows for constant communication and insight sharing. And lastly be problem led. Low ego is critical to the success of this collaboration. So setting expectations with go-to-market hierarchy. What does that mean? In general, product marketing's involvement tends to differ depending on the level of complexity of a particular product launch, as well as the product's ability to drive a new narrative about your organization and its value to customers. So different types of product launches can go all the way from the most complex, which are truly business model changes where you're entering a whole new revenue stream or making a significant change to your pricing. In this case, you may want to go out in the industry and make more buzz about this change, as well as attracting a brand new segment to consider your offering. I give the example here, just using Netflix as I know we must all be familiar with some of their products and changes recently. But when Netflix went from DVDs to streaming, that was a business model change, or more recently in terms of their major changes to their pricing model and subscription. Other changes really change the way that customers understand the value exchange with your company. Netflix Originals brought in a new type of content into the catalog that they had. And here you're really looking at driving prospects to give you a second look or changing a customer's willingness to pay given that there's more value delivered into the product. Product experience changes are a little bit lighter. Netflix added their surprise me feature that allows them to pick your next piece of content for you. That really helps the customer find what they're looking for a bit more easily. And here you want to just drive customer adoption of that feature, usually within your existing customers. And lastly, customer experience changes. You're solely looking here to mostly educate the customer and ensure that they can connect with this feature in product in a way that's very contextual. So with this, generally you're going to see much higher product marketing support, the higher up you go on this scale. And so if you can get aligned on this, this will really help ensure that everyone's working from the same expectations of how product marketing will engage. Get on the same raft. So these are four elements, rituals, artifacts, the same fact base and targets. These are all kind of tools that you can use to make sure that your product teams and product marketing teams are staying in lock set rituals that could include things like quarterly product councils where you discuss product strategy with the cross functional group and review kind of your learnings from the past few months as well as the plan looking for heads, weekly things and retros. Artifacts are all about your requirements document. In many teams, I've seen the practice of actually creating a joint product and marketing requirements document. The product requirements of course describe as you guys know, all of the key elements of the solution that will be built. The marketing requirements are a lot more about the positioning and the landscape that you are entering into, whether that's a competitive assessment or an assessment of your key target audience. And of course, they can be incredibly valuable to ensure everyone's on the same page of what role they will play. Your fact base, starting from the same foundation is critical. So share as many insights as possible and you may want to set up some rituals that are dedicated to this practice. And lastly, targets. I usually like to use a balance scorecard that has different targets across these five dimensions. Adoption uses satisfaction retention and revenue. And I also like to use targets that include both absolutes like total number of subscribers and ratios that are more like market share or retention rates. This ensures that you're not only thinking about how the product is driving absolute results, but also how you're inflecting your growth curve over time. I love this insights wheel because oftentimes you will not only go around this wheel, but back and forth and around again multiple times. And so the best learning agenda incorporates all of these different levers, whether it's research-based, quantitative, analytics, or in-market AD testing. And so in general, you want to ensure that you're leveraging all of these potential channels to learn about your problem and keeping the information flowing actively throughout your product and management and product marketing team. Ideally, you would be coming up with a joint learning agenda that would ultimately ensure that you can all stay informed and that you're using all of these channels to the best of their capabilities. And lastly, I love this article from Harvard Business Review and talks about the power of leaders who focus on solving problems. This quote here says that one of the elements of these problem-led leaders is that they lead without expectations of attracting followers to themselves, but rather to garner support and get others excited about solving a key problem and the opportunity that that represents in terms of working on something that's a novel solution for your customers. And so the best product managers and product marketing managers who collaborate together really focus on the problem first versus on maybe their title or the particular role on this project. We are really connected in these two forums, in these two functions rather, by the fact that we love solving problems for our customers. And so this is where you can find that foundational common ground between your teams. So I hope you've learned here today how product marketing can really be a partner to you in driving success for your product. That strong collaboration happens because you have to be intentional around creating the right, shared rafts, your rituals, artifacts, fact-based and targets. And lastly, that the common ground we share is that we love solving customer problems. So I hope you continue to have a fantastic day at Product Con. And thank you so much for your question.