Looking for unicorns: Product Marketing Manager's in JetBrains
We are slowly preparing for the release of Kotlin , in connection with which there are new and interesting organizational issues. For example: “Do we need PMM (Product Marketing Manager)?” As is often the case, to answer this question, you first need to figure out who the PMM is. Since I have done this more or less in recent weeks, I want to share with you what I learned.
Disclaimer: I note right away that everything said below is more or less specific to JetBrains, and I don’t want to say in any part of this post that other companies are arranged in the same way or should be arranged.
So, here we have a product (for example, we made the coolest IDE or just a great programming language). To distribute it, it is reasonable to make some effort:
')
As for the implementation of these actions it is necessary to expend some resources (time, money, mental strength, etc.), it would be good to understand what investments pay off and how much. To do this, we need to somehow measure efficiency, that is, select some indicators and monitor their changes: here we did a series of workshops, and the number of product downloads for three months changed slightly, or here we published an article in a popular edition, and the number of questions about Our product on StackOverflow has grown much faster than in past months.
It would be good if a special person was involved in all of this (all sorts of advertising activity and measuring how effective it is) (or the project manager will crack at best in half), we are called Product Marketing Manager (PMM) .
As a rule, PMM deals with one product, although there are precedents, when there are several, somehow related to each other.
What does PMM do? First, as mentioned above, it plans, organizes and verifies the effectiveness of various kinds of actions for the dissemination of information about the product. This includes
That is, PMM is administrative (or managerial, if this word is not abhorrent to you): in general, you need to organize the work of a lot of people.
And then an interesting point arises: all these people do not obey PMM. He has no subordinates at all. That is, all around are more or less benevolent and conscientious people, they understand that doing this and that is their work, but they can only be asked , they can’t be ordered (in fact, we don’t really want anything to order; there are some ideas about subordination to the boss, but this does not apply to PMM. Let us note this moment about ourselves, and discuss in more detail below, in the section on skills and qualities.
And PMM, as a rule, writes blog posts and other similar texts (evangelists also write something, but as a rule they don’t give them all).
The next question: how to make promotional materials? What to write / show? To solve this, you need to somehow look at the product, at the market, now again at the product, now again at the market, and understand that this is what the market needs to say so that they can guess that they really need the product. In other words, it is necessary to analyze the needs of users (real and fictional) and present the product in accordance with them.
Ideally, what users want is already in the product, but very often it happens that, analyzing the market, PMM actually collects product requirements that need to be conveyed to developers in order to come up with and implement the appropriate features.
Conclusion: PMM needs to communicate with users , collect feedback, find out what is convenient, what is inconvenient, what I want, etc. This is done on a variety of channels: from Twitter to direct communication with participants in the lobby at the conference. And you just need to " keep your nose in the wind ": view technological news (hello to you, dear reader :)), look at competitors, related technologies, new items gaining popularity, potential new niches, etc. And, of course, you need to communicate with developers , so that they formulated some of the requirements formulated in their plans.
What should be PMM? Very, very sociable :) But this, of course, is not enough.
As we noted above, PMM should coordinate people who do not obey him, so he needs to be able to be friendly and understandable what is required , be able to explain why this is required, diplomatically, but persistently discuss deadlines and other details, monitor the progress of work carefully, but not really acting on everyone's nerves and so on. Best of all, of course, when PMM is a favorite of the public and a sweetheart, so everyone really wants to please him.
Also in the piggy bank of communication skills is what you need to communicate with users: really good English (writing is useful for blogs and correspondence, conversational - for conferences), the ability to listen and understand what a person wanted to say (users very often begin the story "not with of the end ”- they have been thinking about the problem long ago, and in their head it has already been greatly reworked compared to the unprepared listener), analytical and associative thinking (to match the requirements from slightly different areas and deducted to share the total).
And, of course, PMM will not understand anything if he doesn’t understand what the users are doing, so he needs a rather noticeable technical background , and in some cases even considerable experience in developing and managing the development may be required (this is, in a sense, , Kotlin's peculiarity: potential users are faced with a huge number of different integration scenarios, when a variety of technologies that they use, including Kotlin, must somehow interact, and in order to understand them, PMM must p well zbiratsya in such things, but this is nowhere but the "battle Production" do not teach).
Unicorn. So, we have such a portrait: excellent communication skills, fluent English, analytical thinking and development experience. At the same time the position is not leading. This is great: of course, all programmers who do not suffer from stereotypical communication problems and are fluent in the language, really, really want to not have any subordinates at all and do marketing :)
Experience shows that such "unicorns" are still there, although it is really difficult to look for them.
Why does anyone do this ? I personally, if I had a spare life, would definitely try to work with PMM. This is a fairly informed opinion, since, as long as there is no PMM in Kotlin, I perform most of the functions indicated above. I'll try to explain why it seems to me that this is cool.
First, your actions have consequences on a global scale . Seriously. PMM operates with concepts like “global market share”, and very many people use our products, so even the numbers that we see when analyzing the statistics of popular products are very inspiring.
Secondly, a lot depends on you personally . That is, of course, a lot of people are involved in the process, but this advertising campaign, which brought so many users (and, as a result, usually, so much profit), nevertheless - personally your brainchild. If any other participant had failed, you would have found a replacement for him, but if you yourself failed, everything would fall apart.
Thirdly, on the other hand, it is very nice when people help you . You bring together the efforts of many people, and not by force, but by a very kind attitude. Colleagues rejoice when you look at the result and say: this is great, thank you! And there is always the feeling that you are not the only warrior in the field. There are a lot of people interested in your success: the product team, the general marketing of the company, and the evangelists are all. They occasionally walk gloomy, so they are not up to you, but very rarely - all at the same time :) And in the end it turns out something really worthwhile. In this sense, an advertising campaign or a project site is also products, and I really like to make good products.
Conclusion PMM has a rather complex and diverse job, requiring a rather rare combination of skills and personal qualities. We are almost always looking for such people: IntelliJ IDEA , Kotlin , PhpStorm .
In general, JetBrains works well for those who have a lot of energy and ideas , and who want to do something much better than the average level . In particular, this is because no one will disturb you * purposely: * not everyone has time and / or a desire to help, but no one will interfere. Well, we also appreciate those who manage to do cool things, which is expressed both simply in relation to colleagues and in material terms.
Come.
Disclaimer: I note right away that everything said below is more or less specific to JetBrains, and I don’t want to say in any part of this post that other companies are arranged in the same way or should be arranged.
So, here we have a product (for example, we made the coolest IDE or just a great programming language). To distribute it, it is reasonable to make some effort:
')
- for example, you can post on blogs,
- and / or making learning materials
- place ads on different sites,
- organize workshops and reports at conferences,
- put propaganda cubes on the streets of Balashikha (or the city of Mountain View),
- handles with logos to distribute at the subway "Parnas" (or "Embarcadero"),
- order a solemn prayer service at the Kronstadt Naval Cathedral in the name of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker and so on.
As for the implementation of these actions it is necessary to expend some resources (time, money, mental strength, etc.), it would be good to understand what investments pay off and how much. To do this, we need to somehow measure efficiency, that is, select some indicators and monitor their changes: here we did a series of workshops, and the number of product downloads for three months changed slightly, or here we published an article in a popular edition, and the number of questions about Our product on StackOverflow has grown much faster than in past months.
It would be good if a special person was involved in all of this (all sorts of advertising activity and measuring how effective it is) (or the project manager will crack at best in half), we are called Product Marketing Manager (PMM) .
As a rule, PMM deals with one product, although there are precedents, when there are several, somehow related to each other.
What does PMM do? First, as mentioned above, it plans, organizes and verifies the effectiveness of various kinds of actions for the dissemination of information about the product. This includes
- coordination with web developers to work on the product site (or relevant pages on the corporate site),
- coordinating the efforts of evangelists (we have such special people who make presentations at conferences, tutorials, etc.),
- coordination with the marketing research department, which conducts any complex measurement of indicators,
- coordination with product developers (and with all other people involved) when it comes to release,
- coordination with other projects if you need to organize a common marketing company.
That is, PMM is administrative (or managerial, if this word is not abhorrent to you): in general, you need to organize the work of a lot of people.
And then an interesting point arises: all these people do not obey PMM. He has no subordinates at all. That is, all around are more or less benevolent and conscientious people, they understand that doing this and that is their work, but they can only be asked , they can’t be ordered (in fact, we don’t really want anything to order; there are some ideas about subordination to the boss, but this does not apply to PMM. Let us note this moment about ourselves, and discuss in more detail below, in the section on skills and qualities.
And PMM, as a rule, writes blog posts and other similar texts (evangelists also write something, but as a rule they don’t give them all).
The next question: how to make promotional materials? What to write / show? To solve this, you need to somehow look at the product, at the market, now again at the product, now again at the market, and understand that this is what the market needs to say so that they can guess that they really need the product. In other words, it is necessary to analyze the needs of users (real and fictional) and present the product in accordance with them.
Ideally, what users want is already in the product, but very often it happens that, analyzing the market, PMM actually collects product requirements that need to be conveyed to developers in order to come up with and implement the appropriate features.
Conclusion: PMM needs to communicate with users , collect feedback, find out what is convenient, what is inconvenient, what I want, etc. This is done on a variety of channels: from Twitter to direct communication with participants in the lobby at the conference. And you just need to " keep your nose in the wind ": view technological news (hello to you, dear reader :)), look at competitors, related technologies, new items gaining popularity, potential new niches, etc. And, of course, you need to communicate with developers , so that they formulated some of the requirements formulated in their plans.
What should be PMM? Very, very sociable :) But this, of course, is not enough.
As we noted above, PMM should coordinate people who do not obey him, so he needs to be able to be friendly and understandable what is required , be able to explain why this is required, diplomatically, but persistently discuss deadlines and other details, monitor the progress of work carefully, but not really acting on everyone's nerves and so on. Best of all, of course, when PMM is a favorite of the public and a sweetheart, so everyone really wants to please him.
Also in the piggy bank of communication skills is what you need to communicate with users: really good English (writing is useful for blogs and correspondence, conversational - for conferences), the ability to listen and understand what a person wanted to say (users very often begin the story "not with of the end ”- they have been thinking about the problem long ago, and in their head it has already been greatly reworked compared to the unprepared listener), analytical and associative thinking (to match the requirements from slightly different areas and deducted to share the total).
And, of course, PMM will not understand anything if he doesn’t understand what the users are doing, so he needs a rather noticeable technical background , and in some cases even considerable experience in developing and managing the development may be required (this is, in a sense, , Kotlin's peculiarity: potential users are faced with a huge number of different integration scenarios, when a variety of technologies that they use, including Kotlin, must somehow interact, and in order to understand them, PMM must p well zbiratsya in such things, but this is nowhere but the "battle Production" do not teach).
Unicorn. So, we have such a portrait: excellent communication skills, fluent English, analytical thinking and development experience. At the same time the position is not leading. This is great: of course, all programmers who do not suffer from stereotypical communication problems and are fluent in the language, really, really want to not have any subordinates at all and do marketing :)
Experience shows that such "unicorns" are still there, although it is really difficult to look for them.
Why does anyone do this ? I personally, if I had a spare life, would definitely try to work with PMM. This is a fairly informed opinion, since, as long as there is no PMM in Kotlin, I perform most of the functions indicated above. I'll try to explain why it seems to me that this is cool.
First, your actions have consequences on a global scale . Seriously. PMM operates with concepts like “global market share”, and very many people use our products, so even the numbers that we see when analyzing the statistics of popular products are very inspiring.
Secondly, a lot depends on you personally . That is, of course, a lot of people are involved in the process, but this advertising campaign, which brought so many users (and, as a result, usually, so much profit), nevertheless - personally your brainchild. If any other participant had failed, you would have found a replacement for him, but if you yourself failed, everything would fall apart.
Thirdly, on the other hand, it is very nice when people help you . You bring together the efforts of many people, and not by force, but by a very kind attitude. Colleagues rejoice when you look at the result and say: this is great, thank you! And there is always the feeling that you are not the only warrior in the field. There are a lot of people interested in your success: the product team, the general marketing of the company, and the evangelists are all. They occasionally walk gloomy, so they are not up to you, but very rarely - all at the same time :) And in the end it turns out something really worthwhile. In this sense, an advertising campaign or a project site is also products, and I really like to make good products.
Conclusion PMM has a rather complex and diverse job, requiring a rather rare combination of skills and personal qualities. We are almost always looking for such people: IntelliJ IDEA , Kotlin , PhpStorm .
In general, JetBrains works well for those who have a lot of energy and ideas , and who want to do something much better than the average level . In particular, this is because no one will disturb you * purposely: * not everyone has time and / or a desire to help, but no one will interfere. Well, we also appreciate those who manage to do cool things, which is expressed both simply in relation to colleagues and in material terms.
Come.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/290946/
All Articles