Rapid Fire: What is Product Marketing?

What's your name?

Brandon Rodriguez

What's your title or function?

Go To Market and Brand Advisor

What industry do you work in?

Technology

What led you to this career path?

I walked into a startup wanting to find a way to contribute without much experience or any special skill as a college student. I was asked to "dial for dollars" which sucks. In the process, I realized I don't have the makeup to be a salesperson, but I did try to discover a hustle to get demos set for our sales executive. I started with emails, turned into content next, that led to events and I essentially became a marketer via trial and error. Following the acquisition of that startup, I decided to go to business school and formalize my training in marketing.

When you started in this job function where did you need to get up to speed?

As a non-technical marketer, marketing very technical products, the challenge is going to be learning the product at a depth that allows you to effectively communicate to your consumers the features and benefits that lead to adoption.

When you started in this job function where did you hit the ground running?

Problem solving was where it started. I knew the desired outcome and just had to figure out a way to make it happen. Since then, I have come to appreciate marketing as a match for my ability to marry the quantitative and artistic aspects of the discipline.

What does your day-to-day work look like?

Full adoption funnel coordination- in other words, driving strategy to ensure that efforts to build awareness (content, social, community engagement) directly impact the adoption of development tools.

What are some of the challenges that you run into in your role?

Within technology, there is a pervasive misconception that "the best" product will win. Its what I call "The Field of Dreams" fallacy- 'if we build it, they come". History has proven this is not enough to build something slightly faster, better, or novel than an incumbent solution. Virality is not a strategy, its a lottery ticket. It's hard to tell inventors/entrepreneurs/product managers that their consumers probably do not care as much about the technical accomplishment as we hope they do.

What types of questions are you asking regularly in your role?

How will this product/feature make the user's life better? How is it better AND different than what they currently do? If this is a B2B offering-- how will the company save or make money by adopting this product? Why should we care?

What's your favorite piece of career advice you've received?

You're only entitled to what you have earned- the trick is being honest about what you've earned vs been given.