What I Learned in My Three Glorious Months as a Product Marketer

Late last summer, I landed a marketing role at Reforge. I was over the moon because I’d followed Reforge for a long time. I'd heard great things about the product itself, but I had been reading founder and CEO Brian Balfour's blog going back to probably 2014. I felt that he and Reforge had made a deep commitment to content, and I really respected that. I was thrilled to be part of it.

I spent my first few months there working on thought leadership content, but Reforge was making a serious pivot towards SaaS, and product marketing emerged as an immediate need. After a conversation with Brian, we agreed that I would work on product marketing in the near-term. This lasted a few wonderful months and then Reforge was acquired by Miro, and I'm now back to working on content marketing. Frankly, I feel more at home working on content but my brief stint as a product marketer was a fantastic learning experience.

In that role, my primary goal was to run product and feature launches, which typically went out once per week. I’d work with the PMs and engineers to make sure I understood the feature and value prop, create all the marketing materials (blog posts, email blasts, tutorial videos and social posts) and then coordinate all the marketing on launch day. 

I learned a ton, which I’ll distill into a few key lessons. 

Product marketers are closer to the action

At a SaaS company, the product managers (PMs) and engineers are really the core of the business. They understand customer needs, decide what to build, and then execute on it. I've spent several years of my career working in content marketing at software companies. While I thoroughly enjoyed it, I don't think I realized how far away from the action I really was.

I immersed myself into the PM and engineering Slack channels, got set up on Linear, and joined the team's weekly EPD (engineering, product and design) meeting. I was so used to seeing features at the time of release that I didn't fully appreciate how much happens before it gets to that point. There are tons of customer interviews, prototypes, wireframes, mock-ups, user testing, etc. 

This experience reminded me of an experience earlier in my career at Animalz. After a decade working only as a content marketer, I had the chance to run sales for the agency. I ran more than 200 sales calls and learned very quickly that most marketing wasn’t doing much to help sales, which is the heartbeat of most SaaS companies. I had been much further from the action than I realized. 

The same goes for product and engineering. Content marketers typically don’t get much insight into how features are decided on and built, but this is among the most important things happening at a SaaS company. Even if you aren't directly working on product marketing, it's very valuable to understand what the product engineering folks are doing and thinking about. At the very least, you'll have a heads up on what features are being worked on. And very likely you'll be able to reshape some of the work that you're doing to support their work, with content to support PLG or sales. 

There’s more coordination and more camaraderie

Most content marketing efforts can run on a schedule that is largely independent of product. In my experience as a content marketer, I occasionally supported a big launch, but I spent the huge majority of my time thinking about growing organic reach and building out thought leadership programs that didn’t need to align to anyone else’s schedule.

A product launch is different. It requires a lot of coordination. You have to prep all of your marketing materials for every channel and have all of it ready to go on the same day and usually at the same time. Email segments need to be built. Everything needs to be QA'd and properly tested and signed off on.

Oh, and the product has to be ready as well. In order to put together the marketing materials, I would typically get access to a new feature behind a feature flag. It was easy to forget that the software I was using was actually not publicly available. More than once, I had to make last minute changes to the marketing materials based on changes to the product. We got better at this over time, but I typically found myself a bit stressed as each launch approached because I wanted everything to run smoothly. 

I found that product marketing is more of a team sport than content. Our launches involved at least four or five people and sometimes more. There was more coordination and also more camaraderie. It felt amazing to see features get shipped, then the marketing to hit people’s inboxes and feeds, then see the signups and increased usage, and then get to celebrate it together.

Product marketing gets out of the way

Can you take a complex idea and package it up so it’s simple, accessible and hopefully even enjoyable to read? If so, you’ve already nailed one of the core skills that powers both content and product marketing. 

I found that it was relatively easy to create marketing material, but more difficult to absorb what it is we were marketing. The features sometimes came with a learning curve or a sophisticated use case. I also learned quickly why messaging and positioning are so important. (This is a great primer on the topic.) Thankfully, Reforge had very strong messaging and positioning in place already and I made sure that all the marketing materials reflected that guidance. You need a deep understanding of what you’re marketing to do it well. 

This is an area where I found myself slowing down to make sure I got it right. As a content marketer, you mostly want to make sure the content itself is good. The content hopefully makes the reader feel a certain way, or informs them of something they can later act on. Product marketing is more immediate. People don’t really see the marketing, they see the product. And so as a product marketer, you need to give people a window into the product that makes the marketing feel invisible. This was an adjustment but I found that I liked it, especially since the team was building and shipping features that were genuinely cool. The marketing didn’t have to work overtime to make up for a boring feature, it just had to get out of the way.

Claude helped a lot

This is probably obvious but I’ll explain a few ways I used Claude to shorten my own learning curve and build the foundation of a good product marketing:

• Projects: The first and easiest thing I did was create a project in Claude, which I loaded up with all kinds of context. This included all of our internal documents on messaging and positioning, memos from leadership, screenshots of Slack conversations, Linear docs, existing marketing materials, sales docs, etc.
• Style: Our CEO Brian had already created a Claude style guide for himself, which I modified to use for things published under company handles. I found this was the step that got us from generic content to writing that actually reflected our voice and tone. This is incredibly easy to do. Just give Claude some examples of writing that already reflect your voice and tone, and then ask it to create a style guide, then set it as a style. (Example here.)
• Notion connector. We used Notion for just about everything at Reforge, and I got really sick of copying and pasting stuff from Notion to Claude and Claude to Notion. One day I just asked Claude if it had a solution, and it helped me set up the connector, which would then output the results of my prompts directly in a Notion doc. This was wonderful because then the text output was in a place where I could easily edit it, and Claude could see those edits as well. I didn't have to get output, edit, send it back, etc.
• Skills. Once I got the basics of the launch process in place, I had Claude create a skill that would replicate a Notion template that we used for each launch. This was hugely useful because it would go out and gather a bunch of context related to that feature, leave placeholders for all the different types of marketing material we needed, and run me through a quick messaging and positioning exercise. Once I completed that, it was filling out the content for the different channels. Because of the Notion connector, I could chat directly with Claude but see all of the output in Notion. As I made changes to Notion, Claude would know to account for those changes as it continued working through the template.

In those few months, we built out a fantastic process, and I think we were just scratching the surface of how to use Claude to support product launches.

And a few other smaller learnings

• Video is a whole thing. I got set up on Descript and was making screen share tutorial videos for each launch. Our designer helped me with some simple motion graphics, and I think we started creating pretty good videos, but there was so much more work to be done here. This was the most obvious place for more investment. Also, I found that I loved doing it.
• Product marketers tend to earn more money than content marketers. This has come up many times over the years in Superpath, and I feel like I now understand why. It's much easier to correlate the product marketers' work to business outcomes and therefore easier for product marketers to ask for more.
• Our team of product managers and engineers is insanely smart. I learned so much working with them and observing how they go about their jobs. 

Shifting into product marketing after so many years of content marketing put me into a sweet spot. I had basically all the skills I needed, but was still forced to learn more. I felt like I was always being pushed, but in a healthy way. I did a bit of research on this idea and found that it’s called the Zone of Proximal Development. And it’s a lot of fun to be in that zone. 

Now that I’m back in content, there are three specific things I’m doing differently based on this experience:

• Studying the product! I want all the content we do to support the product in one way or another. Sometimes, that will be alerting people to a new feature, but far more often, it’ll be talking about core features, linking to templates and customer stories, and making sure that we adhere to messaging and positioning guidelines. 
• Getting out of the way. I think the best marketing doesn’t really feel like marketing. In product marketing, you showcase the product. In content marketing, you can educate, enterain or make art. In either case, it’s marketing in name only. 
• Seeking out the Zone of Proximal Development. I’m an experienced content marketer so it’s easy to lean on old habits to do a new job. But the reality is that I have so much to learn. I’m trying to push myself out of my comfort zone and stay in the zone where I’m always learning something new. 

This phase will likely be a blip in my career, but one that inspired me as a marketer. If you get the chance to collaborate with another part of your marketing org or chip in on a project that is a little outside your expertise, do it! And if you don’t know your PMs or engineers, say hello and see what they are working on.

Perhaps my biggest takeaway from this experience is how much I didn’t and still don’t know. I found that feeling to be refreshing and you might too.