The Many Hats of a Technical Program Manager - The Marketer

Marketers create reach and scale. It’s that simple. Most people think this function consists of sales and advertising grunt work, but they would be wrong. Marketing is more about making sure your target customers are able to find, understand, acquire, and consume your product at a value point that makes sense for you both. Marketers are often called upon to create messaging, campaigns, tell stories, outsmart the competition, and ensure pricing strategies are in place and in-line with company goals. It’s a massive undertaking that, if not executed properly, can easily sink the best of products before they ever see the light of day. I often advise customers to double what they spend on product development and that should give them a good starting point for a marketing budget.

The Hat

I can’t say with any certainty how often you will be called on to wear the marketing hat in your career, but I can say when it happens it’s really important to get it right. I often work loosely with the customer’s marketing team on things like messaging and storytelling.

User Personas

This is a bit of overlap with some of the other hats we discussed earlier. It’s true that designers often think about user personas when engaged in design thinking. Personas are often charted out in storyboards and the product owner in you may capture them in the backlog user stories. They are, however, just as critical to understanding the messaging and the campaigns that the marketer has to pull together. User personas tell the marketer who to target and provide mechanisms for effective targeting. If you are building software to help remove bias from the recruiting process your primary customer persona may be the head of HR or a chief people officer. They may also be lead of diversity and inclusion practices. Personas describe these people, who they are, what they care about, where to find them, etc. This allows the marketer to tailor their message to speak to specific individuals. As a TPM its often valuable for you to understand these personas so you can ensure your team is building things they will truly care about. You may need to help your customers define these personas. While this may seem a bit out of the ordinary it will help ensure you get to the true pain with the true customer and will add tons of value and clarity to your requirements.

Go-to-Market

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is a comprehensive plan that outlines how a company will launch a product or service to the market. It includes identifying the target audience, defining the value proposition, and determining the best channels for reaching potential customers. The strategy also involves setting pricing, creating marketing and sales tactics, and establishing metrics for success. Essentially, a GTM strategy ensures that all aspects of the product launch are aligned and coordinated to maximize market impact and achieve business goals. It's important for a TPM to think about the GTM for the products they build. If you haven't thought about GTM then how can you be sure of successful user adoption? Why are you building anything? This doesn't have to be some fancy paid advertising campaign either. Maybe the product is internal, and your customers are employees. You still need a GTM strategy.

Channels

Channels are the pathways to customers. They are paths you will transverse to find, and connect with, the customer personas we discussed earlier. Both are an integral part of your GTM strategy. Another way to think of this is a GTM without channels and personas is like a shotgun blast. You point in a general direction and hope you hit something, but your reach is short, and you may not like what you hit. I often start thinking of these things in the very early days of a project. Who is my audience, what do they care about, and where can I find them. I mean, if we can't answer these questions, why are we doing this at all?

Campaigns

If channels are the pathways, then campaigns, are the bait. Once we reach our customers, whatever shall we say? Marketing campaigns pull together messaging, content, calls to action, value propositions, etc., executive across various channels, all designed to illicit a specific response from a target customer. I always ask my customers if they have thoughts of specific marketing campaigns but more often than not, they lean on me to help craft these. A simple campaign to launch an internal product may play out at an employee conference. It may involve things like table fliers, chat channels, and training sessions to build awareness and make new users feel comfortable.

Competition

A good marketer should have a good understanding of the competition. There are synergies and overlap with the researcher role here as well, but it shouldn't be a surprise that a TPM needs to understand the competitive market. Another difference is the researcher can tell me what the competition is doing and has done, the marketer can often tell me how they expect the competition to react to our innovation once it's released into the world. That’s because they can often anticipate the moves the competition may make to counter our product to retain market share.

Storytelling

Storytelling is important for an important skill for a TPM because it is the simplest way to inspire and motivate others. Simply put, everyone loves a good story and I have seen more customers opt for a product that is backed by a good story than one that is even more feature rich. Take investors for example, you can have all the metrics in the world backing your ask, but you better have a good story as well. My advice here is to follow a traditional story arc; it goes something like this: pain -> solution -> happy ending. Show the customer you understand their pain, show them how your product alleviates their pain, show them what their world would be like without that pain. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that. Here is an example I used for a recent group of manufacturing customers.

Contoso envisions a future where they are able work seamlessly, securely, and collaboratively with customers and partners, to bring new ideas to market. This vision allows them to respond faster and better to customer requests while simultaneously delivering complex systems-of-systems. To accomplish this vision, they require a platform that uses AI to infuse quality and value across their design, engineering, and manufacturing functions. Finally, they envision a future where all these capabilities are extended, throughout the product lifecycle, to their end customers, ensuring a consistent digital thread, from ideation to mission execution.

Conclusion

The Marketer is probably the least understood and frankly, the scariest of all hats. It's also one that really differentiates a mid-level TPM from a more senior one. This hat ensures you truly know your audience and, as such, are able to deliver value directly to them, wherever they might be. If you are a TPM looking for a way to stand out and level up, the marketer hat is a great place to invest in your capabilities.