This article is based on Karen’s talk at the Product Marketing Summit in Tel Aviv earlier this year. Check out the exclusive OnDemand recording of this amazing session here!

If I were to ask you about your top three objectives in life, you might struggle to come up with more than one. We’re so busy with our day-to-day routines that we often forget to take the time to pause and gain clarity about where we want to be. But this clarity is so hard to find, right? When there are so many distractions, emotions, and people vying for attention, our brains become muddled and it's hard to know what we truly want.

But this truth and this clarity can be found in our dreams. Our dreams reflect our deepest desires, our real challenges, and our weaknesses – without the external distractions that can cloud our waking thoughts.

But if dreams are so powerful, how come we often forget them and continue racing through our lives without direction? Imagine how much more effective we could be in life if we would only listen to what our souls were telling us overnight. Up until the 1900s, dreams were considered irrational fantasies, dark thoughts lurking in the corner of our minds. And then Freud came in. He found patterns in our dreams, and he created a framework that allows us to categorize, interpret, and understand our dreams.


So, how does this all connect to product marketing?

We’ll get to that shortly, but first, let me introduce myself. My name is Karen Cohen, and I have a wealth of experience in the product marketing realm. I've been a product marketing manager myself, and I've been driving, mentoring, and creating go-to-market strategies at different companies for over a decade.

When I look back over the years, I realize that we've been obsessed with questions like ‘What is product marketing?’, ‘What does the product marketing manager do?’, ‘What is the product marketing skill set?’, ‘Where does product marketing sit within the organization?’, and ‘How do you measure its success?’. I'm going to be an annoying Karen this morning because my answer to all these questions is that it depends. And to illustrate that matter, I want to tell you the story of my past five years.

Over the past five years, I’ve taken the product marketing team at AppsFlyer from a party of one (that's me!) to a team of more than 22 product marketing managers worldwide.

When I joined AppsFlyer, we were transitioning from an early-stage startup to a growth-stage company. Today, we have extensive marketing solutions for different verticals from gaming to eCommerce, media and entertainment, finance, and more.

However, it didn’t start like that, so let me go back to the beginning.


Early-stage companies

Every company at its early stage has the same needs. The company needs to build its brand because, in most cases, it's not known. Plus, as a marketing team, you also need to generate pipeline in order to help the sales team to sell.

Usually, marketing teams and sales teams divide and conquer. While the sales team is focused on driving revenue, the marketing team will be busy running events and creating content and ads to promote their brands and create pipeline.

If you as a product marketing manager are hired at an early-stage company, you're probably going to be an extension of the marketing team. They’ll be looking for a content writer, a deck creator, a jack of all trades, and a marketer that will give a little product flavor to the marketing team. Essentially, the marketing team will be measuring themselves in terms of the leads that they bring to the table.

However, you (and this is something I want you to remember) as a product marketer, need to connect to the business needs – and what really matters to the business at that stage is annual recurring revenue (ARR). If you keep the importance of revenue in mind and focus on helping the sales team to win more, you will be successful.

Psst… we’ll be noting a few more business-related acronyms. Here’s a list that you might find helpful.

Growth-stage companies

In the second stage, it becomes much more complex and more interesting. This is the stage we were at when I joined AppsFlyer. You still need to solidify the brand, generate pipeline, and sell, of course, but things are a little bit more complicated.

You have a bunch of customers that you need to delight, and you also have to deal with a lot of different regions. Plus, you don't have just one product anymore, but multiple product lines. And, because you now have so many product lines, you're not just going to sell your first product, but you also need to upsell and cross-sell to your customers.

In most cases, this is where you'll start reorganizing your product marketing team around the different products, making each product marketer an expert in their particular product line. Their input comes from their product team and their output is for the sales team. So, not only will your product marketers be product experts, but they’ll also have a deep understanding of sales enablement, pre-sales, and the entire sales lifecycle.

At this stage, the Northstar of the company is net revenue retention (NRR). The formula to calculate NRR is based on your monthly recurring revenue (including all that lovely upsell and cross-sell) minus churn. This is the needle that you need to move in the growth stage.