What does Product Marketing Manager in JetBrains do?

Hello!

My name is Andrey Cheptsov, I work at JetBrains and do marketing with IntelliJ IDEA and GoLand (our new IDE for Go). Officially, my position is called Product Marketing Manager. If in a nutshell, I tell users about what the product team does. At the moment, another such person is wanted in the GoLand team. To make it clear what he (or she) will do, in this post I will briefly tell you about my work.

Before, a couple of words about JetBrains. We create software development tools. Due to the “advanced” static code analysis, our tools allow you to read and write code more efficiently. JetBrains is an international company with headquarters in Prague, large development centers in St. Petersburg and Munich. Four million developers all over the world use our tools every month. Pleasant is the fact that many users choose our commercial products even in cases where open-source alternatives are available on the market. The latter allows me to believe that our users appreciate what we do.

Most of our tools are integrated development environments (IDE). We support Java, PHP, Python, JavaScript, C #, SQL and many other languages. Recently, thanks to the launch of GoLand, Go has been added to the list of supported languages. Go is actively developing and threatens to “press” some popular languages, such as Java, Ruby, Python and C / C ++. And although the GoLand team is three “full” people, and the product itself was launched quite recently, GoLand already has sixty thousand users and this number is growing rapidly. That is why the team now requires its own, “dedicated” Product Marketing Manager.
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What is Product Marketing Manager in JetBrains, my colleague Andrei Breslav (the chief language designer of Kotlin) and paullarionov (who took a summer PMM course in JetBrains) have already told you before. I will try to tell in my own words if possible avoiding the word “unicorn”.

What does my usual day look like:

• I get to the kitchen and make myself a latte (coffee with milk).
• As the coffee cools down, I open the mail, respond to emails and comments in YouTrack (YouTrack is our bugtracker for developers, and also a task management system) and Zendesk (a centralized system where all emails from users get).
• I check unread messages in a dozen of Slack channels.
• The coffee is cold, you can check out new comments on the blog, Twitter and Facebook and answer the most important ones. Questions that I can’t answer, I send to my colleagues: developers, testers, usability engineers, support specialists, team leaders, technical writers, evangelists, or any other people in the team who can help.
• Today comes EAP build IntelliJ IDEA. I need to write a post about the important corrected “bugs”, as well as about the new “features”. To do this, you first need to collect information about them, which means to check the Confluence page, where we collect information about releases, check release notes and corresponding tasks in YouTrack, and finally, talk to developers and testers from the product team, the SDK (this is our own JDK version) and platform. Information about the build is collected, which means you need to check the “features” in action and write the text, take screenshots and send to the developers and copywriters for subtraction (copywriters help to make sure that my English and sometimes Russian are imperfect). If one of the features does not work or does not like it, I go to YouTrack and report it in detail. Blog post is ready. It remains to prepare the text for the update for the IDE, the text for the site and the text for social networks.
• Published a blog post. I posted the changes on the site (Git). I am convinced that TeamCity (this is our system of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) checked that I did not break anything. Click “put on the site”. Later, you will need to check out comments on the post, tweet and post on Facebook.
• Now it's time to check out the new documentation texts written by technical writers. I check and report “imperfections” as constructively as possible.
• I recollect that it is necessary to check several “old” sections of documentation. I go to Google Analytics. I create a task for the analysis of "heat maps". I will analyze the data later.
• I see a few messages from my colleague from the evangelical team (Developer Advocates). Call up and discuss what content we need in the near future. Video or blog posts? Don't forget about Tips of the Day for Twitter. You will need to take screenshots, make texts and schedule tweets.
• Pause for coffee. I meet a colleague in the corridor and get stuck for half an hour, discussing the improvements that we made in the last release, as well as the ones that we planned for the next month. We discuss user feedback, statistics on the use of these features, as well as a couple of ideas on how to make them even better. I remind you of a couple of important bugs that have been hanging for several months.
• What do we have with conferences? It seems that you need to prepare a list of “things” that you need to have time to do for the conference. What is the sponsorship package this year? Where to go, where not? Agree on the design of the booth. Who will go? We also need to remember to order T-shirts with a new design, which we and the team came up with a couple of months ago.
• With conferences over. Just in time for the daily rally with the grocery team. The rally takes 5-10 minutes. The rally involved through Polycom (this is the solution we use for the video conference) employees from different offices, and some from home. At the rally, everyone tells what he did today. I accidentally found out a couple of interesting things. A colleague redesigns an IDE interface element to speed up its work and improve its appearance. You will need to question him more at Slack.
• After the rally, you can have lunch. At lunch, I run into colleagues from an “adjacent” product. We discuss what is “new” and who does what. The guys from PyCharm talk about a trip to China and visits to customer companies to communicate with IDE users. We discuss the tests that were carried out to optimize newsletters, as well as new landing pages, documentation sections and “webinars”. I make notes on what to do for IntelliJ IDEA. I remember that I had long planned to launch an automatic grocery newsletter for GoLand. You will need to phone with the email marketing department.
• Returning to the workplace. Checking Confluence. It turns out, on the nose a major update IntelliJ IDEA. This means you need to collect all the information, test new features and plan a number of content. It takes most of the day.
• In the late afternoon, I decided to switch to a blog post for Medium, which I had planned to write for a long time. In this post I plan to talk about the new plugin, which I do on my own in “free” time, distracting myself from routine tasks. The post is almost ready, it remains to “deduct”. Tomorrow it will be possible to publish.
• Before leaving, I remember about “phoned” with the developers of the technology that we support in the IDE. Discuss plans, write down wishes. Tomorrow we will discuss with the team what we plan to do in this release.
• Already evening. Time to go home!

It looks like my usual day.

If in general, I ...

• writing content for a blog, social networks and a site;
• I communicate with developers, testers, support specialists, usability engineers, technical writers, marketing specialists, evangelists, copywriters, guys from the sales department and many others;
• I respond to messages from users in social networks and YouTrack;
• I plan and attend events and conferences;
• helping the team rely on data when making decisions
• help users to use the product;
• Represent the interests of users within the team.

That the team expects me to understand the product at the user level, as well as the desire and ability ...

• write a lot of content about the product and technology
• communicate with users
• write and read program code on go
• learn new technologies
• send constructive feedback
• convince and argue their point of view
• learn and develop

If you are not afraid of the work about which I wrote above, you are interested in programming and marketing and you want to take an active part in creating and promoting world-famous products, we are waiting for your resume . In the comments I will be happy to answer any questions about the vacancy and, in general, about the work of the JetBrains product teams.