Raaz Herzberg: preference

Transcript context

…I want to circle back to marketing/product advice, going back full circle a little bit. So folks that are in product, now that you're in the marketing world, thinking about marketing, what do you think you wish you knew as a product leader, that you think a product leader should be thinking more of, or maybe you miss, that you now see as a marketing leader? Having done products for many years, I really did not understand the criticality of marketing, and even of product marketing. I really did not understand deeply enough that sometimes even gap, between when you're in the product, and you really live inside the product. In the technical domain, you can sometimes not understand how far you are from a common person in your market, or a seller in your market. And marketing, in a lot of ways, bridges that gap. It's like a multiplier, but the further you get away from the core engineer, than product, then in order for the messages to move correctly, they have to be crystal clear. That is something I understood only when looking at it from the other side. If you're on the product side, you can often work with things that are fluffy or blurry or gray, okay? Somebody will ask you, "Can the product do this?" You'll be like, "Yeah, not exactly, but it can do, blah, blah, blah," kind of work around something, right? It doesn't have to be crystal clear, because you can kind of go around things, in a way, that when you try to scale your message, you can't. It gets lost in translation. You have to be crystal clear, black and white. You have to communicate very clearly, especially as an organization scales, you have to communicate very clearly. Suddenly, you're looking at the product org from the outside, in the company that scales fast. And you said, "Whoa, product marketing, in marketing, plays a really important role, in being able to take that message and amplify it." And if you are giving signals that are even a bit gray, fuzzy, then it's not going to work, and you can't expect them to do a good job with it, in some ways. I really, by understanding the go to market perspective, and the user perspective, and the seller perspective, I suddenly understood how things that can look simple on the inside of that side, are very complex, when you cross over to the go to market side. And I think learning the difference is so, so important for product people to understand, that they have to deliver those crystal clear messages about the product. Is there an example of that, where you're like, "Oh, wow, I thought this was good, but no, nobody understands what we're talking about?"…

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