PMM Summer School: How to get a software marketing school and stay geek?

Recently, a summer school for the marketing of software products (PMM summer school) from JetBrains, which was already mentioned here and here, ended in St. Petersburg. The ink has not dried yet, the lectures have not yet been forgotten, and the organizers have not yet slept, but I hasten to share my impressions about marketing, products, the PMM school and JetBrains. Holivar about marketing is inexhaustible, so welcome to <cut />!

My friends were skeptical about the courses of Product Marketing Manager and Product Manager, asserting that these people will wash my brain and I will lose my technical sense 8). As it turned out, it is an obsessive stamp of perception, but rather a complete ignorance of marketing. Analytics, metrics, statistics, modeling, experiments, forecasting, big data and everything that can somehow help in the stochastic process - that's what marketing is. Finally, you can apply tons of knowledge about IT and math to a specific product. And that's great! It seems that this is the dream of this Geek ...

40 hours of lectures on Product Marketing Management

The organizers were on top and exactly adhered to the announced plan. For 7 days of school, experts from JetBrains managed to give 14 lectures about PMM. Video freak out here megamozg.ru/company/JetBrains/blog/19882 , and we have slides:
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1. How JetBrains builds the products users love | Eugene Toporov | slides
2. Intro: the whole picture | Mikhail Vink | slides
3. Developer advocacy: teaching, influencing | Hadi Hariri | slides
4. Working with community and business development | Mikhail Vink | slides
5. Hypothesis-driven decision-process | Andrey Cheptsov | slides
6. Organic channels | Vladimir Sitnikov | slides
7. Customer lifecycle: funnel optimization | Andrey Cheptsov | slides
8. Paid channels | Vladimir Sitnikov | slides
9. Website and CRO overview | Vladimir Sitnikov | slides
10. Product pricing: cost, customer, competitor. Demand, supply and price elasticity | Vasily Korf | slides
11. Analytics frameworks, tools and tips | Vladimir Sitnikov | slides
12. Email marketing | Vladislava Prasolova | slides
13. Product planning | Mikhail Vink | slides
14. Product analytics and research methods | Anastasia Chumak and Maria Antropova | slides slides

Product Marketing Management in Action

The most interesting thing was to apply the knowledge gained at lectures and do homework . All tasks were relatively JetBrains or the company's products, which made them not only interesting, but exciting:

• Community and Business Development. It is necessary to develop a strategy for the development of the company's relations with the community of users of any technology (for example, Pyramid (Python framework), Laravel (PHP framework), Scala, Swift, ...). Decision.
• Decision-making process. Choosing a business resource / tool (for example, JetBrains blog, pricing page, ...), it was required to offer all sorts of improvements and justify their decisions. Decision.
• Pricing. Several tasks related to prices, for example, analyze the prices of competitors, develop promo / discounts, calculate the parameters of purchases. Decision.
• Email Marketing and Marketing Automation. In this task, you had to write a marketing letter to subscribers, as well as develop a nurturing strategy. Decision.
• Product analytics and research methods Several tasks for analysis and analytics, for example, to estimate the number of developers in the US, the number of C # programmers, and to offer a scenario of effective sociological research. Decision.

Residents of Habr will be interested to think about the tasks themselves, comments and discussions are welcome! I publish my decisions with the proviso that JetBrains does not bear any responsibility and has no relation to my judgments, and I do not claim to be the ultimate truth.

In addition to homework, experts JetBrains offered students to solve short quizzes on the topic of lectures of the previous day. I think this is a good practice that helps restore context and flick through slides / recordings. If you also want to use quizzes in your course, then try to choose creative and not too complicated questions.

JetBrains atmosphere

The guys from JetBrains were able to create an excellent atmosphere for learning, creativity and discussion, and legends have been around for their office for a long time. If you organize such events, here’s my subjective checklist of what will leave good memories of a course, track or school - call it what you want:

1. Goodwill and openness. For example, when you come to a company, you are presented with a notebook, and not fingerprinted at the reception.
2. Good preparation. Original slides, rare information and personal experience are the key to an interesting lecture.
3. Communication in an informal setting. Mikhail Vink MikhailVink , Andrei Cheptsov andreycheptsov and Anastasia Kazakova anastasiak2512 answered, perhaps, 1,000,000 questions at the coffee machine, for which many thanks to them!
4. Bonus events. The guys from JetBrains did not regret their Sunday and made a great day with cakes, a round table and an exit to the lid. It was super!
5. Fidbek. The organizers shared their assessments, as well as an analysis of our feedback school.
6. Communication. Find the right way to communicate with your group. We used the slack channel, which was quite convenient and new to me.
7. Honesty. There are always uncomfortable and tricky questions that need to be answered only honestly and openly. It did not work, we zafapapili, it broke - tell the truth and try to fix it. Only he who does nothing is not mistaken.
8. Magic. If you approach the matter with the soul, everything will work out!

What was the hardest and simplest?

For me personally, the most difficult thing in PMM school was to write a marketing letter with a promotion. We all hate marketing news and 100,500 spam messages in the inbox. But when you want to make good to people (read to yourself) and write such letters yourself ... God, what a selective bulshit it turns out !!! This is just fantastic! I will not write about my sufferings for 4 nights, but I suggest you to try to advertise a great AppCode product so that it does not hurt and offended. The main conclusion I made from this assignment is that if there is no worthwhile informational occasion, for example, the release of a new version of the product, events in the community, conferences, anniversaries, or something else, your message is doomed to such awful words as FREE, WIN-WIN TRY and so on.

It turned out to be the easiest to communicate with experts. Firstly, in JetBrains, the simplicity of communication is protected at the corporate culture level - you can chat with the CEO, ask him how are you, and secondly, in JetBrains everything (absolutely everything), starting with HR, ending with the CEO, writes the code. Maybe that's why marketing with JetBrains editorial looks so familiar.

Instead of saying goodbye

Many thanks to the colleagues from JetBrains for the fact that they did not spare their personal time and spent the PMM school, especially the school organizers - Mikhail Vink and Andrei Cheptsov . Thank you and students for interesting ideas, networking and friendliness. In general, more than 55 people participated in the PMM school and it would be difficult to list everyone without forgetting anyone.

I hope that the community will support the initiative of summer schools from JetBrains (not necessarily according to PMM) and there will be more such events.

In addition, I got an interesting selection of books, articles and materials on the topic of PMM (thanks to Ilya Onskul ), which I hasten to share with you,% habrauser%: Spotify Engineering Culture , 54 articles for PdM , A day in life Handbook , Removing Barriers by Hadi Hariri , KLM makes 25 mln on the online media report and the best PHP IDE survey , RCS video with Will Reynold , Autosuggest tool , Branding in the Digital Age , Art of Evangelism , JTBD practices , JTBD practices , FPA , Conversion Rate Optimization , Customer Care , Online Translator's Guide , marketing automation , The definitive guide to lead generation , The definitive guide to engaging email marketing .

All the materials mentioned in the article are posted on GitHub github.com/paullarionov/jetbrains_pmm_school .