Confidence Creators | A nicer view of product marketing

I’m thinking of buying a sign. It’s one of those cool neon ones. Dramatic, glowy, future-forward.

Or maybe it’s something hand painted. Artistic, personal, classy.

Either way, the sign’s going to be hanging behind my office chair, telling people what I’m all about.

The team at OpenAI had a sign like that on their wall, way back in the 2016 early days. Theirs was hand-painted script.

“Man has a large capacity for effort,” it began, “but it is so much greater than we think it is, that few ever reach this capacity. We should value the faculty of knowing what we ought to do and having the will to do it. But understanding is easy. It is the doing that is difficult. The critical issue is not what we know but what we do with what we know. The great end of life is not knowledge but action.”

Now that’s a lot of sign.

But it does say something. Purpose. Qualification for investor dollars. A quote by Admiral Hyman Rickover – which I hope they mean well by, over at OpenAI.

My sign would be quite a bit punchier, though. Create Confidence. That’s it.

The main O to the KRs

The job of a Product Marketing Manager (PMM) is a bit of a confidence creation game. We don’t much talk about it in those terms but for me, that’s the heart of the work. It's the "action" in Adm. Rickover language.

We want sales, marketing, shareholders and buyers to be confident in the product and/or service. Make the value so obvious that buying it (and selling it) is also obvious. Achieve that, and the functional value of a PMM is undeniable.

But I worry the common job description of PMMs is, at once, overly reaching and also shortsighted for the Create Confidence game. That PMM definition basically proposes to do the job of a product manager plus a slew of sales and marketing functions while never mentioning the design work and visual storycrafting that brings it all together. It’s a big miss.

In my experience, the aesthetic qualities and overall composition of most go-to-market assets is inseparable from the messaging, word-choice and whatever else the PMMs are doing. Design is how real-world people actually experience the perfected positioning that many PMMs focus on.

Show, don’t tell. Surprise, create memorable moments, signal real quality and distill. Create confidence.

To make the case, let’s consider a company famous for design and quality signaling; Apple.

Apple’s second CEO, Mike Markkula, once penned Apple’s Marketing Philosophy. This was a set of rules that represented the original vision of Steve Jobs.

Here’s the important bit:

“The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” [Jobs] wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”

At Apple “impute” means first impressions. One area, where this is famously emphasized at Apple, is in the packaging of their phones, pods, laptops, software, etc. It's hard to throw that box away.

In fact, right now here in Austin, Apple has an open role for a “Product Packaging Design Engineer” which must coordinate across design, manufacturing, marketing and more to do their work.

Here’s the opening of the JD:

“When was the last time you enjoyed a box as much as the product inside? At Apple, every customer interaction is an opportunity for surprise and delight! This philosophy extends beyond the product to its packaging, where every detail is thoughtfully considered.”

I think it’s the same for good PMMs. No sales deck, no brochure or case study, no product demo video or sales training document or even GTM plan is sufficient with “slipshod” packaging.

I hear you already, "PMMs aren't designers!"

Now, please don’t get me wrong.

PMMs shouldn’t be lead designers or take from the work of design teams. They should elevate the work of those specialists–working with them, knowledgeable that designers typically must work within the constraints of the copy and vision that they (the PMM) provide.

To achieve this elevation, design must be within the Product Marketing Manager skillset. Throughout my career in the space, this has been true.

A good PMM should be comfortable with tools like Figma, Canva, Illustrator, and Photoshop (shout out Photopea), and even video editing tools like Descript.

They should consider design as they lead the creation of those assets that will Create Confidence around the company's products. In the best case, they work with designers to polish the ideas and concepts that they, themselves, largely first conceived.

In practical terms, those ideas which PMMs can not fully outsource to design may apply to:

Iconography
Graphic design
Chart formats
Font weighting and sizing
Layout and asset composition
Photo selection and treatments
Use of white space
Use of color
And so much more

Done right, it's a balanced role that makes high-quality asset production more straightforward and effective. That means higher output of good material with more room to iterate on stakeholder feedback. Ideal.

It’s notable that there are many successful firms out there focused on presentation design and similar deliverables. For example, GhostRanch is an actual partner of the Product Marketing Alliance (PMA) positioned largely as presentation specialists. There are many more. Slides.Agency, for example, I found while prepping for this and I love their big bold tone and client portfolio.

Perhaps these firms would happily do all of the work of PMMs but there’s a distinction, to me, between the two.

PMMs are grounded in the company, deeply connected to customers and stakeholder needs and knowledgeable about the products and services they represent – including their changes over time.
The agencies are wonderful storytellers and design leaders. Their work on the highest-visibility presentations results in some of the highest-quality decks the company might have.

The good PMM should, in some way, think like the agencies as they do the day-to-day assets and configurations for real on-the-ground sales and marketing channel needs.

Do the work

As I close out, I want to talk about the practical market-facing outputs (‘deliverables’) of a PMM; after all, when you combine the design and the copy, the result should be the asset.

In the PMA’s definition of Product Marketing and their associated “Product Marketing Framework”, the only two obvious market-facing outputs of their 35+ listed job functions are “sales assets” and “case studies.”

The role is just so full of implied research, planning, coordination and documentation – much of which is, in actuality, often the charge of other teams – that it gets a bit disconnected from practical deliverables. This might be part of why the design bit is missed. It's a frustrating amount of administrative toil that doesn't clearly land in execution.

This impacts the job description and expectations of PMMs, the skills improvement that many PMMs pursue and how they're perceived within the company as well.

If the PMM community can focus more on the full-scope of shipping useful things, their jobs will be more practical and understood by wider teams. They’re confidence creators; driving core market-ready material that just, simply, works.

When I sat down to write this essay, my first working title was “The Product Packaging Lead.” Yep, I was tempted to name yet another new skill/role but decided that wasn’t how I want this ongoing blog to be. But this is kind of a new spin on PMMs and I hope it’s one you’ll consider.

In my experience, this ‘full package’ is what made some of the most inspiring PMMs and executives that I’ve worked with so amazing. They artfully showcase a value proposition and do not shirk design as part of that storytelling – they often actually led with it.

I’ll leave you with this; Google once found that we decide our opinions on a website in just the first half second of a visit.

Was it the messaging framework, the headlines or the body copy that made that happen?