Krithika Shankarraman: preference

Transcript context

…So there's a few questions I want to ask here. When is a time to bring in a Krithika? When is it like, "Okay, we need help here"? Or, "A bunch of smart people doing great work, people have the product, but I think we need a marketing person that knows what they're doing." I think the first criteria is having tremendous product market fit, which is really important because you're throwing fuel on the fire, and you might be throwing different types of fuel on your particular fire. So one pillar for marketing that you have to think about is product marketing. So, if you have a high velocity engineering organization and product organization that is putting out a lot of different features and your customers aren't able to keep track, maybe the engagement's not so high for some of the newer features versus some of the core features that you had in the past, a product marketer can really help bring a discipline of launch excellence and customer engagement, differentiation in the market. How are you positioning the product? The second pillar for me is demand generation. So if you have much more of a sales driven buyer journey in motion, how are you bringing the demand engines to bear so that your lead generation, your pipeline generation is staying really strong and solid? Or you might want to think about brand, right? You might want to think about community development as a big part of what you're doing as a company. So it really depends, but I think in all of these, you found a spark of product market fit before you're really going for it. The second for me is that you're distinguishing enough between capital and marketing and lowercase and marketing. And there's an important distinction I've learned over the years, which is capital and marketing, the marketing team, the marketing function at the company is responsible for those channels and artifacts and engines that are driving the funnel for the company, but they are not the end all be all of the discipline of marketing. And that's where the lowercase and marketing comes in, which is, what do you stand for as a company? What is the storyline that you're telling as a founder when you're talking to the press, to the larger business community? And then it really is a whole company motion where the product team is thinking about, "How are we going to market? What are we going to market with?" The sales team is figuring out, "What is the right ICP, the right customer profile that decision makers, that we need to be reaching?" And then it is this entire joining of the organizations to make that happen really effectively. Yeah. I think along these lines, there's a reason Brian at Airbnb merged marketing, or product marketing and product management. However much of that actually happened or not, but the intention-…

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