5 lessons learned over 1 year as Product Marketer at Alan

I have recently celebrated my so-called Alanniversary: 1 year since I joined Alan Product Marketing team. It was certainly a year of exponential change for me as a professional, as I had to fully change my mindset to adjust from operating in a more traditional corporate environment to a high-growth fast-speed scale-up world, and at the same time - from a more strategic long-term marketing focus to a more experimental product marketing, much closer to daily life of product & sales.

Here are my TOP 5 lessons learned about marketing in a high growth environment: from launching a project & communicating about it to training sales, managing change & building a feedback loop.

One of the largest projects I led was a launch of a content management platform Showpad across our Sales & Marketing teams - building everything from A to Z, onboarding & driving adoption among 80+ AEs over 3 months with 60%+ using the tool weekly. To give some context on the complexity of the project:

In Russia we have a saying “The eyes are afraid but the hands are doing it anyway”, - that is how I certainly felt during the 1st weeks of launch. Thankfully, I quickly realised that the traditional approach to project management was not that useful considering high level of uncertainty combined with tight deadlines.

While I did always have a vision and North Star metric in mind, I relied on a more iterative & agile project management & “learning by doing”.

For example, considering the context, I made a big bet on an async training focusing on essentials only, trusting that our sales are smart enough & the product is intuitive enough so they could figure it out all on their own. While it was certainly against the guidance we received from the implementation team on the vendor side, it worked for us.

🗣 "Very well documented, super clear"

We even experimented with async training distribution method based on team preferences: some busiest teams just received daily 5 min reminders to watch a video training straight to their calendars, and they just loved it!

🗣 "Delightful and smooth onboarding - Easy to do, with only a few clicks"

Imagine, you did all this huge groundwork for a launch, and you are about to announce your great results to your audience. In an ideal world, people would stop anything else at that particular moment & focus on your announcement, actively interacting with it, but reality is very much different. Will your announcement even be read at all? Not sure, it could be extremely difficult to get your message noticed.

Slack notification overdose is one of the consequences of high growth & async culture: sometimes people are just focused on their work & simply miss your ping. For this reason, it is important to__ take written communication seriously__: making it as easy as possible for the reader to capture the main idea with extreme structure & clarity.

.. And we go the extra mile to make it delightful for end-users to catch & keep the attention of our stakeholders with a sparkle of creativity.

OK, you spent the last couple of weeks working on an in-depth go-to-market playbook for your sales & preparing for the launch. You shared a catchy & clear announcement to your stakeholders & let’s say, they even noticed it. Now, you are confident that it is going to change their lives: all AEs will add this playbook page to their bookmarks & keep going back there to leverage it on a regular basis. Yes, sure 🙂

High-pace environments can be overwhelming: playbooks & new initiatives are launched on a weekly basis, and it could be hard to follow & way too easy to forget about it, especially if you are a busy salesperson who has 20 important prospects to talk to today.

One solution is to enable Sales in a smarter way moving from Pull Anytime (sharing the playbook you created with sales & moving on hoping they would be actively using it when they need this info) to Just in Time push (proactively sharing ONLY relevant part of the playbook with a person who needs it exactly when s/he needs it).

It might sound like magic, anyone can set up the basics in half an hour with some creativity. Good marketing tech stack will help you accelerate if you want to go next level.

Unfortunately, proactively enabling sales at the right moments is not enough to drive adoption of new initiatives. Let’s be honest: no one likes change, especially when every deviation from an already efficient process is seen as creating friction.

To accelerate adoption, we build decentralized ownership at different levels & leverage the power of communities by creating strong links between these owners.

Let’s say you did it: a change is happening & you see it is working. You think your work is done & it is time to celebrate?

Maybe a little celebration will not hurt, but remember that it is just a quick break. The next big piece of work is just around the corner: building & maintaining a feedback loop to learn from experience & leverage these insights for an ongoing improvement of the product & process.

It does not matter if we are talking about creating a feedback loop for an individual initiative or about a holistic feedback loop on your Product to drive a roadmap, it is extremely important to find the right balance between zoom in detailed view & zoom out big picture view.

Let’s take an example of the product feedback loop.

Only by mastering both zoom in & zoom out & getting comfortable with jumping between both on, can we actually learn to uncover unique insights that would bring actual value for your project & company.