The document discusses the need for agile product marketing to keep up with frequent product releases, changing markets, and large amounts of customer data. Key aspects of agile product marketing include being customer-focused, transparent, iterative, and responsive to change. It also notes challenges like getting teams aligned, understanding customer needs quickly, and having the right resources.

1. The Agile Product Marketer
Session Notes 5/12/2018
Session Leader: Steve Robins s.robins@solutionmkt.com
Notes Captured By Erik Mansur (Thanks Erik!)

2. There’s a hole with regards to
“agile product marketing”
It may not exist right now, but it will
need to exist in the future.

3. Why Agile Product Marketing?
˜ With fortnightly releases, there’s a need to educate customers at the same speed
˜ The market changes quickly, so there’s a need to ebb and flow with the market
˜ We now have an unprecedented amount of data coming in - we need to be able to
use that data to be nimble and transformative in real time
˜ In many cases, there’s content and materials that can be turned around quickly,
while other elements require a longer term strategy that has connective tissue
˜ Customer feedback comes hard and fast, so being more active is important
˜ Transparency is an excellent knock-on effect of agile product marketing - you’re
delivering information to the customer as soon as you have it

4. What is Agile?
˜ Customer-focused (Steve says that this is the most important thing)
˜ Transparent (Steve says that this is another most important thing)
˜ Incorporates learnings - both by listening and by doing
˜ Responsive to change - often rapidly
˜ Accepting of change
˜ Iterative
˜ Cross-functional
˜ Collaborative - no one person is responsible
˜ Inertia-breaking

5. What are the characteristics of Agile Product Marketing?
˜ Standardization: being able to have a standard operating process for when
something new comes down the pipeline
˜ Multi-functional: PMKT + Engineering + Sales + Content + PM needs to be a
part of the process
˜ Buy-in: Everyone in that room needs to feel like an owner of their part of the
process
˜ Communicative: Everyone in the room needs to listen to one another and share
their own ideas, building consensus through communication
˜ Iterative: One thing should build to another, with changes that make sense; an
MVP approach, with the bare minimum delivery items ramping up the massive
product launch once the feature is “done”

6. What are the characteristics of Agile Product Marketing?, cont’d
˜ Aware: Understanding your audience and being aware that some audiences may
desire a new feature even before it’s “perfect"
˜ Integrated: Aligned with most/all aspects of the development stack to better
communicate to audiences, but to better deliver feedback back up to the key
stakeholders; plus there’s a ton of learning the can happen from this type of
structure
˜ Problem-solving: A deeper integrated PMKT team within the development stack
helps get the Product/Engineering org get closer to the customer - injecting direct
feedback into the development cycle to help address customer issues in real-time,
and to make rapid adjustments to features that are still MVP

7. What are some of the challenges to Agile Product Marketing?
˜ Getting started - if you’re not agile now, how do you get agile?
˜ Distance (physical, et al) - Engineering/Development in a different location than
PMKT
˜ Understanding the voice of the customer - using their words in your messaging
˜ Recognizing what the MVP is - knowing when is a feature “good enough” to
market
˜ Responsiveness from other stakeholders - Not having SLAs from other teams
that you need to work with
˜ Budget constraints - not having enough $$$ to market the way you want to
˜ Communication from customers - a lackluster feedback loop could make it
difficult to address customer concerns
˜ Resources - having the right people in place in order to be agile

8. What is the timing around Agile Product Marketing?
˜ One of the first pieces of collateral - sales enablement; they’ve gotta
be ready to roll it out as soon as it’s done
˜ 411 vs. 911: Can it wait (information), or does it need to get out right now
(urgency)
˜ Get customer to minimal level of satisfaction - can it be now or later?
˜ Core documents don’t change as fast as the new feature messaging
- bread-and-butter stuff can stay golden, but new features may need
rapid development of materials
˜ Messaging may very - MVP could get a blog post, Feature Complete
could get a full-court press