Speaker Series: Martina Launchengco

Scott Dorsey: Okay. Hi everyone. I think we'll get started. I'm Scott Dorsey with High Alpha, and welcome to our July speaker series. Delighted that all of you could join us today. Want to give a quick shout out to our sponsors, Ice Miller and SVB now a division of First Citizens Bank. This is our 69th speaker series, and we aim to bring you inspiring, and interesting, and knowledgeable speakers. And we have all that and more today in our guest, Martina Lauchengco. Martina, thank you for joining us.

Martina Lauchengco: I am so happy to be here, Scott. Thank you for having me.

Scott Dorsey: A little bit of Martina's background, she has just an incredible background starting with Microsoft, Netscape, LoudCloud. Is currently a partner at Costanoa Ventures, also a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group. She teaches at UC Berkeley and is a true expert in an area that every early stage company should really care about, and that's product marketing. Martina wrote an incredible book called Loved, that I loved. It was outstanding. I've been listening to it over the last few days. And I think either way, if you go with the book... And I know our first 75 registrants all have a book on its way. Or if you'll listen to the audible version, which is actually Martina's voice, it's just chockfull of absolute gems and wisdom. And I know all of you'll benefit from her knowledge and her experience. So yeah. Martina, once again, thank you for joining us.

Martina Lauchengco: Thank you. And thanks for talking about Loved. It was written precisely for people like the audience, people that aren't product marketers, but need to know, and practice it, and understand how to use it for their businesses.

Scott Dorsey: Why don't we jump in? Why don't we jump in? And perhaps we'll start with a little bit more of your background. You honed your early product marketing skills at Microsoft. And perhaps you could share a few stories or a little bit of that experience, and how that shaped your career.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah, well I was really lucky. I landed at Microsoft right at the moment where Microsoft Office, as we all know it today, was about to hit the market. So it was the first time that it wasn't just packaged products, but they had actually done the integration work, and they were trying to have the entire market rethink what productivity software belonged on people's desks. So it wasn't a natural thing at that time, for everyone to have a spreadsheet. Only analysts had that. It was not a normal thing for everyone to use side presentation software, only people doing big presentations and special designers would touch that stuff. And so they realized by taking the interface of a word processor and making it the same one in all those other tools, that more people might use the products. And of course, then they could sell a lot more software and put it on everybody's desks. And so I watched that evolution of how the category became the office category instead of the desktop application category. Also, how long that category shift took despite a machine like Microsoft. It was a two year journey for it to start to actually penetrate, and then it only went up from there. But it's never an easy journey. But watching and observing that from something that all of us today still know and understand was super instructive, and it's completely shaped who I became.

Scott Dorsey: Good for you. That's incredible. And Martina, maybe share a little bit about what you're doing today, both your work at Costanoa, and your teaching, and ultimately what led to you writing a book.

Martina Lauchengco: I work at Costanoa as a partner, primarily on their builder ops team. So that's the team where once we made an investment, we work with them to get better at whatever they're doing faster. A lot of what High Alpha tries to do with you, with everybody here, and we do all early stage companies as well. So my day- to- day work is literally just the last two calls that I had before this. " Okay. What were the conversations that you were having with the VP of engineering from draft cans? What were the words that he was using? How is he saying that? How is that your ICP?" And we try to sift out through all the early customer discovery work, how should we be talking about what we do? Is it important to establish problem and context first before we explain what we do? That's a big part of product marketing. And then also, the early stages that merges of course into product strategy. If this is what the market can talk about and can hear, how should we be prioritizing what we build? And what will give them an aha that we can actually market, as opposed to just talking about the same things that everyone else does? So at the early stages, that product and go- to- market work is massively blended. And so my job is to work with our companies to help them figure that stuff out, because you of them haven't used those muscles before.

Scott Dorsey: Good for you. And what led to you ultimately writing the book?

Martina Lauchengco: I was very much realizing in all of this work... So I taught product marketing workshops for Silicon Valley product for I guess, it's almost as old as my kids, so almost 15, 16 years at this point. But everyone didn't understand what product marketing done well actually looked like. And for many people it became, " Oh, it's product collateral or it's a version of product management." And so I wanted the world to understand when done well, how powerful product marketing is. And that even if you don't have either great product marketers or product marketing resources in your company, it's work that must fundamentally be done. It's foundational for every technology product. And how do people who don't have that skillset or that title actually begin to practice the product marketing fundamentals, so that as they bring their product to market, it can penetrate? It can actually elevate. Every single product category has thousands, in some cases, tens of thousands of players in them. And so to be distinct... You can't rely on your words anymore. Everyone's going to say words that sound very much the same, if not directly the same. So how do you stand out in a world in which you can't say something that is totally unique? So that's the art of product marketing.

Scott Dorsey: That's awesome, Martina. What's been most surprising to you about writing the book? Was it easier, harder than you thought? And then life after the book hits the market and makes it out into the wild.

Martina Lauchengco: I knew writing a book was going to be hard, but it was way harder than I thought it was-

Scott Dorsey: Was it really? How long did it take you?

Martina Lauchengco: It took me soup to nuts. So when I started to when it actually released two years and four months, and the first draft took me about a year to write. And I think what I didn't anticipate was how hard the rewrite process was going to be because I was like, " Yeah, I got the first draft done. I must be 80% of the way there." The first draft is only 50% of the way there. It's like a product. It's like anything else. Then you put it out, you get your reviewers, you get their feedback, you think you were really clear, they're like, " This part was confusing." And you have to rethink a lot of what you assumed was on point or was really clear. So the rewrite process I think was a shock to me about how much I needed to toss out, the very final rewrite. So I did two major rewrites after my first draft, and then I did one super deep final cut. And I eliminated eight chapters, 9, 000 words. I cut really, really deep. Because you want it to be refined, a book product. A book is different than a podcast, it's different than a blog post. It has to be a book experience, and so you have to design it that way. And so that's all the stuff that I had no concept of when I endeavored to write the book. And that was the hard stuff.

Scott Dorsey: Well, you did an excellent job. Really, the end product is absolutely beautiful and so insightful. I look forward to everybody reading the book. It's chock- full of just great stories and great frameworks. I think that early or late stage companies can take and run with. I see we're already starting to get questions in which is amazing. Please send in questions and I'll either kind of weave them into our conversation, or I'll save them for the very end. But Martina, early in the book in how to use this book section, I really like this. You say, " Through all of this I learned there's a stark contrast between how most companies do product marketing and how the best companies do it. It's largely because product marketing is misunderstood, and its the most foundational work required to market any tech product." And I think that's really quite profound. So I thought we'd start our conversation with just, what is product marketing? Let's just start with maybe even a definition of product marketing or how you think about categorization of product marketing functions.

Martina Lauchengco: Well, I'm going to start with an example, because there's one that's playing out right now that the whole world can see very visibly, and this is how the AI search war, I'm putting that in quotes, is manifesting between Microsoft and Google. And Google, great product company. Not as good on product marketing. Microsoft, pretty good product company, great at product marketing. And so if you look at what has happened, Microsoft, they were not as far along on AI as... Google has been investing in this for so long. So you could argue that the product surface area they have around AI is much larger than what Microsoft has. Microsoft knew that they needed to invest in this massively, had a lot of catch up to do. But what they did that was brilliant was they controlled the conversation and they said, " We are going to make Google dance to us." And they literally said that. They had Satya go and say, " I want Google to dance and I want them to know it was us who made them dance." And of course with their investments in OpenAI, and releasing Bing, and not talking about Bing as search anymore. It's get answers, get answers to your questions. So they're now trying to reframe the conversation about what quote unquote search is. So they're leaving search in the past like that's taillights. We don't need to be the search behemoth. We don't care about that battle anymore. We care about how people are going to interact with information in the future, and they are completely controlling that conversation and Google is on its heels, despite potentially having way more AI product surface area than Microsoft. But Microsoft's controlling the market conversation. So that's a brilliant example of enough product, great product marketing, controlling the conversation. And someone else who might have tons of product that didn't really know that they needed to be playing that game now being caught in their heels and playing catch up, and now everything they do looks like it's in response to Microsoft. So that's brilliant product marketing on the stage that we are all watching right now. So product marketing defined is basically helping to shape our products go to market by having a strategy and having coordinated actions that move toward that strategy, that map to business goals. And that's the part, so it's the positioning, it's the messaging, it's all of those things. But it's the connection point all the way to the business goals that most people miss. Microsoft wanted to make sure that they had a future in whatever the information access business is, so they don't call it search anymore. Ask questions, get answers. That's controlling the narrative towards something that moves towards their business end. So that's an example.

Scott Dorsey: That's so good. That's so good Martina. Let's pull a little bit on positioning and messaging. What advice do you give to early stage companies in thinking about their positioning and their messaging? What's everything that should go into it, and how's a young early stage company even think about or build that capability?

Martina Lauchengco: The number one thing that a young early stage company needs to do is great discovery, customer discovery work. The same work that you're doing to figure out what's the right product I need to be building, at the same time, you simultaneously want to be asking questions that help pressure test, " What does the market think of this? Is this an urgent problem? How does this compare to other ways you might solve the problem?" The key question I tell every single one of our startups to ask is, how would you describe this to a colleague? And you listen to the words that they use. Early stage companies, we tend to invest in very technical founders with very technical products. They have a tendency to presume a lot of understanding on the part of the person who's receiving the message, and they use a lot of jargon. And that often gets very much in the way as opposed to being clarifying, which is counterintuitive to a lot of people. A lot of people just need to contextualize before they can process what it is that you do and why they should care. So for early stage companies, one of the biggest things I talk about often is, how do we create a context in which someone caress? And sometimes, that is more important than spending the time... Well, you'll figure out how to talk about what you do. But the more important thing is to set a context into which they care about what you do. So just today, my 9: 00 AM was with a super technical company, and we were looking at the webpage that they're going to release in a month. And I said, " In order of hierarchy, the number one part that the header needs to be about establishing a context, the problem context so they understand why they should care to read more." Maybe you have a sentence in the four top sentences that describes what you do, but the rest has to be establishing a context that makes them lean in and want to learn more. And then the rest of the page is about what you do. They had that inverted. So it can be very counterintuitive. There's not a single formula, because it really depends on your category. You might have a category that's better understood, in which case then you can go directly to, " And here's what we do., or why we do it differently, or how we do it differently." So it really depends on your category and the market context.

Scott Dorsey: That's so good. That's so good, Martina. If a company's really early and they haven't hired a product marketer yet, where should this work live? Where should it be occupied, and how early should a company hire a product marketer?

Martina Lauchengco: If you don't yet have a product marketer, most of this work happens in the early stages with the founders or with anybody that is go- to- market facing. So if you have someone that if you're not founder- led sales, if you bring in a salesperson, that person's a massive input. I'm working with a lot of companies that are all engineers, and it's literally all hands on deck. " Hey, talk to your engineering friends, get their feedback." And we just collate the feedback that comes in from those conversations, and we process it together as a team. So it can be anyone that is interested in engaging with the market and getting direct feedback to try and filter out, " How do we talk about this in a way that is meaningful?" So this just happened on Monday of this week. Company that does packaging management. This is for developers, it's going to sound super technical. And they kept talking about, " Here's what we do." And as they were describing the conversations they'd had in the last two weeks, they mentioned, " Yeah, people keep talking about dependency hell and how they keep running into dependency hell." And I said, " There, that's it. That's what we want to talk about. Dependency hell, and avoiding dependency hell, or getting out of dependency hell," because that's what they kept describing to you as the problem they felt, that would lead them to care about a better way of solving it. So it can be anybody. Those were again, all engineers. Anybody can do this work. You just have to have really big listening ears and the desire to desire to not presume what the market wants to hear, but really listen with that beginner mind.

Scott Dorsey: That's what I was just going to ask Martina, what are the most common mistakes you see with discovery? Or tips or advice on how teams and founders should be thinking about these discovery sessions, and then how to document their learnings and findings.

Martina Lauchengco: I'd say the biggest mistake I see is people will make a statement and say, " What do you think about this? How would you prioritize these things?" So they presume something and get people to react to something, as opposed to broadening the aperture to ask more open- ended questions. " How would you describe this to a colleague? What are the most important things that you recently ascribed budget to?" So there's what people will say are urgent or important things, and then there's what they actually spent their money on. So the mistake is a lot of the presumption and how the questions are asked, as opposed to really understanding the broader market context into which you might be falling. So that's the number one mistake I see.

Scott Dorsey: Okay. No, that's really good Martina. And when you think about messaging, what advice do you give to early stage companies on how edgy to be? Sometimes they see language that just sounds so vanilla, sounds so industry jargon.

Martina Lauchengco: Yes.

Scott Dorsey: I'd like to see a little more edge, a little more boldness, something to try to capture the reader. And how do you advise companies to think through that or try to strike that right balance?

Martina Lauchengco: I say, " Yes, totally do it. Totally try. Go for it." Because there's way too much vanilla. Just this morning, one of the things we were playing was ETL or reverse ETL, what the hell? And he's like, " I can't really put hell on there." I'm like, " Yes you can. You should, put hell, it's not a bad word." He's like, " It's not a bad word?" He put in the asterisk. I'm like, "No, no, no, just put hell." Because that is what people are wondering. And by putting it there the language that people are actually wondering, it helps. I talk about in Loved an example of for the last decade, teaching my Silicon Valley product group workshop the statement that everyone liked the most was Expensify, which was expense report sucks. And it was saying sucks that specifically felt so visceral to everyone, and everyone reacts to that. So that finding edge, playing with edge, that is absolutely a way to stand out.

Scott Dorsey: So good. So good. We are getting so many questions. This is fantastic. I'm loving, and I'm going to have to figure out how to weave them into our conversation versus the end here.

Martina Lauchengco: And thanks for piping in the questions. We love that.

Scott Dorsey: So good. So good. How often should you reevaluate positioning and messaging, and what are the signs or signals that you kind of need to pivot and take a fresh approach?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Early stage, you're going to be doing it often. Unless you stumble onto something, that's just totally awesome and really working. So the indicator that it really working is it's creating pipeline interest and engagement, and you can measure that in all sorts of ways. So the indicator that you might need to pivot is that you are not getting engagement. If you send out an email and nobody's writing you back or nobody asks a question. Also, there's so many tools that let you measure, like the heat maps on websites. This happened to another company. Basically, people start at the top, they completely skipped the whole middle and they went to the bottom. So they're like, " Well that did nothing." There was no spike at all on their website after they tried to do this little mini launch and we're like, " Okay, what we've done isn't working at all." So it was literally toilet flush. Let's start from scratch, and let's not be precious in any way. The early stage, don't be precious. Have no ego about anything, and then just keep it moving until you find something that clearly is working, and you find it because you see that engagement.

Scott Dorsey: Yeah, that's excellent. That's excellent. Let's see. So we've started to kind of cover, what is product marketing thinking through? Fundamentals of positioning and messaging. One area-

Martina Lauchengco: You know what? I guess I didn't get to the four fundamentals-

Scott Dorsey: Come back to the four fundamentals.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah, the four fundamentals. Okay, so this is for everybody. The four fundamentals of product marketing that anyone can put into place, so number one is being an ambassador between the customer and market realities. And so this is the two- way, here's what's happening in the market, here's what customers are saying. That ambassadorship is critical. It can come from anyone and anywhere. Number two is strategist. So you have to think about, what is it that we're trying to achieve. Marketing is never, especially at the early stage, " We have the webpage, check. We have our discord server, check." What is this all moving toward? What is the shape that we're trying to occupy in the market? And you want to think longer term. At the end of this year, how will we know that we... What do we want to look like in the market? That's the strategist aspect, and everything that you do should build toward that. Then there's a storyteller. That's all the messaging, positioning, that's the stuff that we've talked about already. But, messaging is distinct from positioning. Positioning is the position that your product occupies at a particular point in time. It takes a long time to build to that. Messaging is a lot of stuff that you say that moves toward that. But positioning is more than your messaging. It's how your Salesforce acts. It's what your customer success team does or looks like. It's the brand, it's all those things embedded help bring shape and support the position that you want to occupy. And then evangelist. And it's not that you guys are evangelists, it's that you're enabling evangelism by others. In today's modern world, most of how you get talked about is not through what you see on your website, it's how others talk about you. It's what a comparison site says about you, it's what Reddit is saying about you, or this forum on GitHub. The questions people ask, " Oh yeah, try this tool. It's totally awesome." So wherever the watering holes are that matter a lot to your market, you want to make sure that people have the atomic particles, what they should be saying about you. And that they're present in all of the digital faces where you show up. So that's enabling evangelism. Be it social, be it influencers, be it analysts, be it Salesforce. Figuring out who is most important for your business, and making sure you're enabling that evangelism.

Scott Dorsey: That's so good, Martina. I know you talked about digital footprint being the concept of all the different areas of the internet and those watering holes where people are talking about your company and your product. And it's so important to keep a pulse on all those different avenues in which a prospect or a customer might ultimately find your brand and your product, and make sure you're nurturing them, and doing the very best you can to make sure your story's being told.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah, and I'll also say a lot of people don't realize that their digital footprint starts to be inconsistent. Early stage, don't worry about it as much. But when you start getting to, " Okay, we're past our first few million, there are more people in category." And you realize that how you show up at G2, how you show up in Google when someone is searching, how you show up in Crunchbase, some of them are old and don't reflect who you are today. And so you do want to do periodic, regular and systematic checks on, what does your digital footprint look like? Is it consistent? Especially if you have evolved over time. Early stage, you always will. So make sure that it reflects the up- to- date version of how you want to be perceived.

Scott Dorsey: Awesome. So good. So good. So when a company's ready to hire a product marketer, what advice do you have for what they should look for in an individual or a person's background? And then the age- old question, where should product marketing live? Should it live within the product org? Should it live within marketing? I'd love your thoughts there.

Martina Lauchengco: For early stage companies, I recommend a director level product marketer. Anyone with less experience is not going to be able to recognize very quickly, a lot of the patterns that we just talked about, and be able to work as easily with all those different, a founder, with an engineer, and be able to take all those inputs as seamlessly. So you want a certain level of minimum experience for that person to be able to be as flexible, to be able to move and be as nimble as you want. So that's for your first product marketing hire. And In terms of when is the right time, it's as soon as you feel like you want a Salesforce that needs to sell, you need a product marketer. You cannot have sales in place without product marketing. I have seen this. It always goes badly. Yes, they're able to get some traction, and they might even be able to get some sales, but it's all cowboy stuff happening. It's nothing that's actually positioning you, or helping people understand what you do, or getting that information back into the organization so the organization can grow. So if you think you're going to hire in sales, then you should be hiring product marketing. And where to report? Marketing or product? I would say at the early stage is there too. It's most typically a marketing function, but you want to set it up to succeed. So you want to put it underneath the person, the leader that has the highest likelihood to make that position succeed. Some people are unicorny and can kind of bend in both directions, so it's less common that a product person has that marketing background. But it happens, and they might be the better person to have that report to it because the product might be technical or early enough that it's changing very quickly and so it makes sense for it to report there. But typically, it is a marketing function that reports into marketing. What you want to avoid or watch out for, or say, " Maybe this isn't working," is if product marketing is just becoming the producers of product collateral and producing materials for sales. If they're not able to act strategically and if they're not able to shape the market in advance of product, then they're not close enough to product. So those are the warning signs to look out for.

Scott Dorsey: That's so good. And this position or function is so collaborative. The product marketers need to work extraordinarily well with product management, with engineering, the rest of the marketing org, and then sales, right? So I totally agree, regardless of where the function lives within the organization, collaboration is of the utmost importance. And you had some great examples in the book, and a couple that really stood out to me that I'm hoping we can expand on. One is, product releases versus product launches. And so commonly, product and engineering are busy building features and enhancements, and product marketing may not be ahead of the game thinking about how to position those new capabilities. So why don't we start there? And then I'd love to dive deeper into just pricing and packaging as well.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. So the best of model, best in class is when product marketing is embedded with that product team, so that they are part of the conversation of how product is making the decisions about when to do what. So they don't determine what's being done, that's the product team. But when is what makes something very market sensitive. Are we doing it in July where nobody's around to hear it or are we doing it in September where we can actually put a lot of wood behind this arrow, and we're attending this event, and there's this follow on speaking opportunity that our CEO's doing the following week? We can build on that momentum. That's a much better time. That doesn't mean that you're not continuously releasing or improving the product, it just means that's the moment in which you're putting a lot of market energy. And that has to be a dialogue where the product marketer is saying, " Hey guys, if we do this this way, we can do a lot more with it on the marketing side." It might help the product team decide, " We might prioritize things a little differently," or, " We might add in these features that are a little sexier to talk about in that timeframe, and we can finish them if we have a little bit of extra time." So that's why it's a dialogue as opposed to, " We've made this decision, can you go market this?" And you want it to be dynamic, so that's best of practice. You talked about releases versus launches. What we just described, have this marketing moment September, that might be a launch. But I talk about in the book release cycles. The modern product organizations should be releasing very, very frequently. So you're not going to talk about everything all the time. And so what you want to have is a release scale that lets everybody calibrate on, " Hey, is this something that we're talking about in market or is it not?" And it doesn't really matter how many levels. Is that one through five? I had one company that named everything a different kind of bird, was a little confusing. It's the evil, good, and the robin, but whatever works for your company. And what you want to have is reference releases that people can look to, " Oh yeah, I remember that release. That was a level two release," which means that we talk about it on social, we don't do anything. A level three release might be we actually do something, where we try and get some press. Level five is all hands on deck. We do one of these a year, and the field gets trained. But that also provides a common language between the product and engineering teams and the go- to- market teams where the product engineering teams might do something that is a Herculean technical effort. " We did this major architectural change, we did this thing that massively improves performance, because it was slow before." You can't market that, even though it was an enormous amount of technical work. They're like, " You know what, that's not even a one, that's a release notes. That is a one, it's a release notes. That's it. We're not doing anything." And the engineering team's like, " Wow, we've done that for so long." But that's why you have to have this dialogue. Effort does not equal what is going to have impact in the market. And so that's what the release scale is very helpful for.

Scott Dorsey: Yeah, that's really helpful Martina. And I'm a big advocate for naming and branding, and creating an identity around programs or releases is a great example. And it's a way to create momentum both with your external audiences, but I also find your internal audience. There's nothing better for a product and engineering team to be able to see the fruits of their labor, what they've worked so hard on be market, and promoted in a way that makes them really proud, and makes them want to give even more to the company and more to the product that they're building. And that's important. And I think if everything being built is done very quietly and in the shadows, you don't have that feedback loop, that can be really a huge boost of morale.

Martina Lauchengco: That's such a good point Scott. And I think the advantage to having these launch moments is you can mark a line in the sand, " This was before and this is after." And then you can tell the entire organization, " Here's how to measure whether or not this was having the impact that we expected. Our pipelines are much more full, our website traffic increased massively. We have a lot of inbound with exactly the right customers." So we can look at all of these things and say, " Yes, all of this collective effort yielded what we were hoping for the business." It's always about, at the end of the day, we're creating a product to create a business, and we need to make sure that it's having the right intended business impact.

Scott Dorsey: Excellent, excellent. Okay, we're covering a lot of excellent ground here. Let's chat pricing and packaging, and then I'll start to work through our backlog of questions, which are amazing.

Martina Lauchengco: Great.

Scott Dorsey: Let's dive into pricing and packaging first.

Martina Lauchengco: So just the real quick basics on pricing and packaging, there's no single formula. There's so many ways to attach this, but separate three key things. Monetization strategy, which is how are we going to make money? Are we freemium, are we going to be open source and then we're going to do things on top of that? That's all separate from pricing and packaging. Pricing is what it actually costs. It's not what it costs you, but it's what someone will pay. There's a lot of engineering that goes into pricing, and there's no one place that it's necessarily owned. It's oftentimes a collective effort. If you have things like dynamic compute behind it, where you have to take that into account and how you price, that's the stuff that has made pricing very much a discipline, a focus discipline unto itself. And then packaging is specifically how you package your products for specific market segments or customer segments. " Hey, we're doing this package for the entertainment industry, or for pharmaceuticals, or for financials." You're taking the thinking out of it for them. " Here are all the things that you need, and we've prepackaged it for you." Obviously, you've priced it that way as well. But the packaging is what makes them feel seen and recognized, not the pricing. Pricing is what the pricing is. Packaging is, " We've done the pre- thinking. We know exactly what integrations you need so that you don't need to figure it out. And we've put it all together into a solution that is for you, it's designed for you." Packaging can also be different pricing structures that are trying to move people toward a particular package. So those are all the dimensions of it. And I'll just say that a lot of people say, " Well, who should own this? Where should it live?" This is one where I'd say, again, at the early stages, it depends on where you have the skillsets. Some early stage companies have a business operations specialist and someone in finance pretty early. And depending on the factors that go into the cost and the pricing structure of your particular good, it might be the finance team that does this determination. I've seen it live in product. I've seen it live in product marketing. So there's not any one place, but it's a lot of the dimensions that factor into that pricing that determine where it lives.

Scott Dorsey: That's really helpful Martina. And early on, do you think it's more fruitful to have one price point with maybe some different levers, or do you like going good, better, best early? And then what advice do you have for companies in trying to find their pricing sweet spot? Do they start out out of the gate as more of a premium brand and really try to test the upper limits? Do they start low just to try to get customer traction? What are some of the considerations to keep in mind there?

Martina Lauchengco: Well, all of the things you said. But I would say it begins with the product, and it depends on the market. So if your market might sustain a premium product and that you've designed, but maybe you haven't built a premium product, so you can't say, " Well, it's just premium price," when you haven't built a premium product. So you have to have the right product for the strategy that you'd like to pursue, and you have to have a market that will take that. So we'll take developer tools that might be something where it's like, " Hey, we do a freemium model, or we do open source," because that's the way that we get people to kick the tires on it. And based on the open source project, then we offer these packages where it's like, " If you're whirling it into an enterprise, there's a different product." You're familiar with the open source thing, and this is what it costs. So it's not better best, it's more you've had an experience. And now that you want to roll it into a different environment, there's a different product that you might use that you want to pay for. So it very much is category and market dependent and very much depends on the product that you are building. So it's all of those things in consideration with one another.

Scott Dorsey: That's good. How about thoughts on, when do you try to create your own category, versus dovetail into an existing category?

Martina Lauchengco: I am generally a fan of, even if at some point you are going to create your own category, you always want to do it in reference to existing categories, because everyone gets what exists now. And if you just lead with, " We're this blankety blank new category."

Scott Dorsey: Right.

Martina Lauchengco: Really, really, people will always, without exception, still try to map you that the categories they know. " So wait, how does that compare to this, and how does that compare to that?" It's just natural, it's human nature. So even if you're trying to create a new category, you'll still have to do category mapping against existing categories. So oftentimes, it's way easier to expand an existing category or reframe an existing category, than it is to create a totally new one.

Scott Dorsey: So good. So good. Okay, let's go. You ready for some questions?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah.

Scott Dorsey: Other than from me. So let's give it a shot here. This is a pretty incredible list here. I'll first thank Chase for dropping some really great questions in here. This is a good one. Transition from a single product company to a multi- product company.

Martina Lauchengco: Good one.

Scott Dorsey: And early on in this company's journey, the product and the company had the same name. How should marketers think about transitioning from single product to multi- product, and what naming conventions might follow?

Martina Lauchengco: Such a great question. So when I worked at Netscape, Netscape Communications was the name of the company, and Netscape Navigator was the name of the browser. And Netscape the company never invested in there being brand, meaning in the company, for all the other products that it did. So the perception of the company was as the browser was getting less share and was under attack for Microsoft, the whole company's reputation was wrapped up in that one product, because they've never invested in separation of Netscape, a primary brand, and then having other key brands and lines of businesses around that. So when you are at that point, you have a decision to make, which is how and where do we want to invest? Where does the equity exist, and is this expansive enough for us to pull in and create other lines of business or product lines around that? So we'll take Atlassian as a great example. They're much better known for their products than they are for their company name. So everyone uses Confluence. And so what they're they're doing is they're taking their product brands that have much more equity than the company brand, and they're using those to create the product lines, because that's where the equity resides. When they have a new customer segment, then they're adding that customer segment together with the existing product brand, that is close enough, it's adjacent enough, that that strategy made sense. It didn't make sense for them to, " Well let's just call everything Atlassian blankety blank," because there wasn't sufficient equity in Atlassian. Intuit's another big example of that. They're how many years old now, Scott? 30 years old? Something like that.

Scott Dorsey: Probably more, yeah.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. It's taken them until very recently to start to move Intuit the company brand into the product brand's name space, because the product brands are so huge and such big businesses unto themselves. So those are more mature businesses. But you're at this very delicate point where you have to ask yourself the question, " Where does the equity reside?" If the company name and the product name are the same, can the company can name, that's also the product name, be a big enough umbrella for everything we want to add to it? And then what you will relegate to the product name, you want to create some separation, but you want to shift that, so that it's not synonymous. So let's say the company name was Sticker. Then the company name's going to remain sticker, and you're going to use it as the brand asset it needs to be. And what used to be the product known as Sticker and now becomes Sticker Maker, or something that separates. So you have to create consciously, that separation. And then, you also want to think through naming taxonomy and what that signals. So if you call it Sticker Maker and the rest of your product lines are also going to be different forms of Maker, there's Sticker Maker, there's Paper Maker, there's Drawer Maker. wherever you're going, how are you using the naming taxonomy to signal the organization and structure of what's coming out of the company? So that's how you make that evolution.

Scott Dorsey: Awesome. Okay, beautiful. Here's another really good one from Vanessa. " There are opposing views within our management team in terms of when to market new features. Some prefer to market it very close to the release date, others two to three months out in advance to build momentum and expectations." So it's that question around marketing the roadmap.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. And I think the answer here lies always in, what's happening in your market? So if's it's hyper- competitive, and there's all this interest in AI, and your product isn't ready, absolutely talk about it now because you want to signal to the market, " Yeah, we're not behind. We're right there. Yeah, it's coming." But you want to signal that you're there. So the market is shaping. Now is the time to talk about it. Let's make sure we take advantage of that. There are going to be some features that you don't need to do that with. So it's not always. It's very dependent on the market situation.

Scott Dorsey: Very good, very good. All right, so many good ones here. Let's go with this one from Jonathan. How do you balance listening to user feedback versus getting the market to believe in your vision? So that casting a big vision versus maybe more incremental enhancements and messaging around what users are asking for.

Martina Lauchengco: And you've found the word directly in your question, which is, it is a balance. It's not one thing or the other. And this is where you have to have just really big listening ears, and understand, what can the market tolerate? There are absolutely times where you should always attempt to bring shape to the market without exception. Try it, try and bring that shape to the market. And you'll start to see whether or not you're getting traction, whether you're not you're being listened to, whether or not more and more people are intrigued or being pulled in. Always try it. But if you try it and people are just deflecting off of it, it's not taking it all, people are confused, then you know you need to spend a little bit more time in the landscape of what is known, of what exists today, of what they understand. And spend some time understanding that being there. It might be a year, it might be 18 months, it might be two years. But from that, then you can also still in the future create shape. But you'll have a much better understanding of the customer. Some time will have elapsed, you'll have a better sense of what you do, and then it's easier for you to do that market shaping. But always attempt and then you can retreat back into, " Well now we got to spend more time on the customer's reality." There are some exceptions to that where if you are a highly technical product that has a million other things that do exactly this thing right now, or people think that they do it exactly right now, do not lead with your vision. You want to lead with the context in which people should listen and say, " There's a new, better way of doing this? I didn't know that." But you have to lead with what it is that they are grappling with for them to decide whether or not they want to listen to what you say. So those are the two different market scenarios.

Scott Dorsey: Okay, very good. Very good. How you holding up here, Martina? Going strong?

Martina Lauchengco: Good, yeah.

Scott Dorsey: All right, the questions are pouring in. So we're hitting a really relevant cord here. This is Pankaj, CEO of one of our companies. Pankaj is based in San Francisco. Thank you for your question.

Martina Lauchengco: A neighbor. Hello, I'm in San Francisco.

Scott Dorsey: Yes, yes, exactly.

Martina Lauchengco: I'm in Noe Valley.

Scott Dorsey: So Pankaj says, " It sounds like good product marketing is articulating a visceral customer issue that might be solved by a single feature or two." How do you balance solving a problem that's feature oriented with positioning yourself more as a platform? And I'm really particularly curious, Martina, in your thoughts around the word platform, and when a company has standing to position themselves as a platform.

Martina Lauchengco: I hate the word platform.

Scott Dorsey: You do?

Martina Lauchengco: I do. I absolutely hate the word platform, because it's become everyone's favorite shorthand for, " I built this new thing. It's a platform." You get to platform. But if you can't articulate your value without using the word platform, you absolutely are not a platform. So I think what you want to find is your wedge of value. And if it happens to be a feature that's insanely valuable, that's great. You can always build from that. But you're trying to discover something that makes everyone love what it is that you do, that they elect to speak about what you do and the value you provide. And it might be just a couple of features that are insanely valuable. That has way more value than building an end- to- end product that has some value, somewhere along the way. Because think about that. Someone has to eat the whole sandwich to understand whether or not they like some of the pieces and parts inside versus, " Are you a big fan of Havarti cheese? Well let me give you some Havarti cheese. Let me build on that. If you like Havarti cheese, you can add this to it." So I think there's way too much reflective desire be like, " We're building a platform," and nobody needs another platform. If you are lucky enough to be super relevant over five, 10 years, you can build your platform, and then you will actually legitimately be one.

Scott Dorsey: Okay. All right. Very good, very good. Here's a question from Alex. " Are there any indicators or signs that an organization is not effectively leveraging their product marketing team?"

Martina Lauchengco: If the company has pipeline but not market position is one of the key indicators. " Yeah, we're getting inbound. They're reacting to campaigns." But another competitor is pulling ahead and has clear market position, and your company does not. That is a failure in product marketing. That's probably the most visible market version of that.

Scott Dorsey: Yeah. I would say also if product marketing doesn't have a seat at the table. Decisions are being made, new products flowing out the door, and product marketing doesn't have a strategic role in thinking well ahead on the release launches, pricing, and packaging. Then they're probably in too tactical of a role to really be effective.

Martina Lauchengco: That's a super great point, Scott. And I would add to that if the product team... So the indicator that it's working really well is the product team doesn't believe they should make a decision about it to release something, without consulting product marketing. If it isn't at that level, there's room to improve.

Scott Dorsey: Yeah. Okay. Very, very good. Very good. Okay. Maria also in Noe Valley. Very nice Maria-

Martina Lauchengco: Oh my gosh-

Scott Dorsey: Question. We're reaching every corner of the country today, which is amazing. How product marketing team connects to other marketing functions, specifically marketing ops? What are the main expectations and interactions between these two functions?

Martina Lauchengco: Marketing ops is probably one of the ones that product marketing would interact the least with outside of, as product marketers set, the products go to market strategy, marketing ops kind of needs to know, " Where does all this stuff fit in? And are we instrumenting well enough to capture reports, and analyze whether or not everything is having the intended effect?" So that's how you would interface with them is, " Hey, let's just make sure we're instrumenting everything. We can report on these things." That would be the primary way in which product marketing and marketing ops would interact. All the other functions. So digital, PR, marcoms, brand, there's a lot of interaction. You want to give them the foundational tool set. So a messaging framework, here's what everyone should be building upon from a messaging perspective. " All campaigns are based on this. Make sure you include these key messages. These are the key target personas that we're trying to target. Here's what we're trying to have all of this activity add up to, ladder up to." That's the strategy that everyone's clear on that. Everyone builds out their own strategies on top of that. Social, again, the PR, marcom team, the brand team. So the messaging framework and the go- to- market framework, those are the two ones that are really foundational for the rest of the marketing team in being able to understand how everything they do is laddering up to where you are trying to move the market and the product.

Scott Dorsey: Okay, excellent. Excellent. Total sidebar here. What do you think of Twitter rebranding to X?

Martina Lauchengco: I can't explain.

Scott Dorsey: Please decode that for us.

Martina Lauchengco: The unkind way of describing, this is some egotistical, hallucinatory, crazy act. The kinder way of describing it is how I'm sure Elon Musk would like us to feel, which is United States should have a WeChat, and that should be X. And Twitter is too associated with a singular messaging thing, so the brand umbrella isn't big enough for his vision. So that's the generous version. My personal interpretation of what a mess that has become is everyone's leaving the platform. So it really doesn't matter what... He will probably bring his vision to fruition, but it won't be as impactful a platform because of the turmoil, and how it's been done. Meta did a great job. " Facebook is a brand that is in crisis. We have to evolve our company name. Let's do it meaningfully, purposefully, understand, describe why." And even though it was initial little resistance, everyone's just absorbed, and it's moved on. And Meta has rebounded. And Facebook as a brand lives in a space that does not control the company's destiny. That was a great company rebrand. Not what happened over at X land.

Scott Dorsey: Well said. Okay. I really appreciate all the amazing questions, and everyone's excitement and passion for this topic. Why don't we finish up with two more questions? How about that Martina?

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah.

Scott Dorsey: Two more? Okay, great. Benjamin asked, " How and where should early stage companies find good product marketing talent? What should they be looking for in backgrounds or maybe skill sets?"

Martina Lauchengco: Great question. The number one thing if you're hiring someone who has worked in product marketing is evidence that they have seen excellence. So have they worked at a company where you've seen evidence of exceptional product marketing? Because they might have worked at a name brand company, but they might not have been exposed to it or seen it, or they might have just been a passenger, and not really known how that happened. So that's also why I'm recommending at the early stage, you want director level, they need to have seen it in a few places, or seen some action to really be able to differentiate what was the thing that created this. Versus, this was just a train that left the station. I happen to be lucky and riding on it. If you are not hiring someone that has a direct product marketing background and you're just looking for... If I'm trying to find a generalist that can move into this role with that beginner's mindset and do a really great job. Consulting backgrounds and brand management out of consumer packaged goods are great places to look. Because consumer packaged goods are all commodities. This cookie's different from last cookie. They have to be highly strategic in how they're choosing to make their moves. And so they're used to thinking about things, always with that business perspective in mind, and always assuming they have to lead with their differentiation. They have to hit hard at something that will pop. So they just have that muscle. And the consultants obviously are those generalists that look at it from all those angles, which is what you want.

Scott Dorsey: Excellent. I was kind of curious, Martina. When you are working with a new portfolio company or perhaps at Costanoa, the team's considering an investment, and you're skimming a website to get up to speed on the company, and you're forming your impression of how good they are at product marketing. What do you look for? What are the things that stand out, or what are the signals on the website itself, that tell you they're ahead of the curve? From a product marketing perspective.

Martina Lauchengco: I'd say evidence that I see that there's good marketing muscle there is where I see something that is reflective of the market, and not just the product. The early stage of tendency is always to be super product oriented. But if I see signal in how they're presenting themselves, that they're aware of the market context, they're aware of the problem, or if they're emotional evocative, I'm like, " Hell yeah." I don't know if I've seen that yet. But I would. I'd literally have that reaction. " Oh my God, these people actually know what they're doing." But when I deal with entrepreneurs, and I work with them in the early stages, part of what I assess and I look at is their ability to comprehend and work with the staff very, very quickly. And you see that's really where manifests, where there's this one engineer. He never thought he was going to be an entrepreneur. He is so amazing at quote unquote marketing because he knows how to be his authentic self and he can translate that. He doesn't move to jargon. He doesn't try to be anything that he's not, and his authenticity has just struck this beautiful cord. He has a huge following. He has so many people using this open source project, and each one's better than the next release. And it's all because authentic, and real, and keeps it real, and people love that. And for whatever reason, it can be very, very difficult for people to do that. And so he's having great success, and other people that are struggling a little bit with that are just having, I'd say the more typical and traditional struggle. So when I see that, when I see the ability for authenticity and be able to get a concept really quickly on why this marketing thing might be important, that to me gives me an indicator of the plasticity of the brain, and that they're going to constantly process market signal for what it is. Which is not what we desire, but it just is what it is. And the better you are at processing market signal quickly, the more you can adapt your business to it, and the faster you can succeed. So I look for that.

Scott Dorsey: Okay. Beautiful. Okay, final question. Here we go. I would say, any parting words of advice of how organizations can really think about product marketing at a level of excellence? And then I'm also curious if there are any kind of portions of the book or any frameworks in the book that you think our company should start with, or maybe is the most impactful framework that one might get started with.

Martina Lauchengco: As it relates to the frameworks in the book, the product go to market one sheet is where I direct everyone to start. Because it's like the picture to the puzzle, it just gives you a mental map. Why are we doing everything that we're doing, and what are we hoping to achieve for this? And when? It really drives that when aspect. So it's combining the when, and the why, and the what, and the how, and the product is embedded in that. So it just gives you a map. So if there's only one thing that you do, do that, because you'll have a map for where you're going. And as it relates to... The first part of your question, Scott, remind me was.

Scott Dorsey: I know I kind of tacked in advice and then where to get started in the book, and maybe those two blended together. So maybe just any partying advice-

Martina Lauchengco: Parting advice, parting advice. Have fun. This is early stage is so fun, it's so dynamic. I genuinely find it to be massively energizing. And if it's not, look inside and say... If you're on the mission to make the world better, serving customers and discovering this stuff should be fun. So have fun with this stage, and be dynamic with it, and good things will happen.

Scott Dorsey: Fantastic. Martina, just on behalf of the High Alpha team and the High Alpha community, thank you. This was a lot of fun for me, and I know it's extraordinarily valuable for our audience. So if there's anything I can do for you, just say the word. And thanks for joining us. This was amazing.

Martina Lauchengco: Thank you guys for so many... I couldn't read the questions, but-

Scott Dorsey: They were coming in. It was so many. Thanks everybody for joining us. Take care.

Martina Lauchengco: Thank you all so much.

Scott Dorsey: Bye- bye.