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Dive into the world of Product Marketing in fast-growth SaaS startups with our Host Kristina Terziyska. Each episode gets into the trenches alongside those who were *actually* there when it happened, with seasoned experts who bring a fresh perspective into this field. Brought to you by EarlyNode.com.
Hello, everyone. Welcome again to Inside the Product Marketing Mind, where we dive into the world of product marketing and fast growth SaaS startups, brought to you by earlynode.com. I'm Christina, and today I'm joined by Lena Shinkarenko, a leader in product marketing who has been a first time PMM in hypergrowth SaaS startups. She spent 6 years as one of the first and founding PMMs at Miro, leading the company through a massive shift in culture, product, positioning, and seeing the team grow from a 50 person startup to an established organization of over 1,000 employees. Lena has recently joined Mavenoid, a sales lead startup, as a senior product marketing manager, who's responsible for product positioning, competitive intel, as well as refining the go to market strategy and building out the sales enablement function.
Speaker 1:I've personally had the pleasure to work with Lena directly for many years and can say that she's a fountain of knowledge when it comes to product marketing, startups, and hypergrowth work cultures. I'm super excited to have her on the show to share her wisdom with everyone else. In this episode, Lena will help us cover what it takes to be a successful PMM as a founding PMM for an early stage startup, positioning mistakes for startups, and some career advice for product marketers. So welcome, Lena. I'm so happy to have you here and to share all your incredible knowledge with everyone listening.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me, Cristina. I'm super pumped to talk to you today. And thanks for your kind words. It was a pleasure working with you as well. I remember how many great and insightful discussions we had, how many exciting projects we worked on.
Speaker 2:So these are some of the fondest memories of my career. So thank you.
Speaker 1:And now we get to share them with everyone else. So happy. Yeah, that's exciting. So let's get right into it. So first, tell us a little bit about your background, your professional experience.
Speaker 1:How did you fall into product marketing? And any proud moments of your journey so far?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. That was, quite a journey, I must say. Because, honestly, as I was starting out my career in marketing back in 2013, I had no idea what product marketing, was at the time. And I never really planned to become a product marketer because I think at the time, digital marketing, performance marketing was all the rave. I think content marketing was an emerging discipline that was on the rise.
Speaker 2:And all I knew that, was that I really wanted to get into tech. I was really fascinated by SaaS startups because, I read all those incredible tales of hypergrowth. And that's why I started looking for my first role in tech. And I actually started working for a pretty heavy B2B focused consulting firm, that was focused on optimizing oil mining. And, this was pretty, interesting for me because I realised that, yes, IT world is something that I definitely want to, work in.
Speaker 2:But I was starting to look for a different challenge for myself. I was hoping to pivot into an earlier stage company, one that worked on an international market. And I happened to meet the founder of Realtime Board at the time, Andre. And, he was hiring his 1st growth team. So this was how it all started.
Speaker 2:And he was looking for a growth marketer. At the time, I also wasn't a 100% sure, what that was. And I was debating if I should join this up and coming startup for, I think about a year, actually. And then eventually when I started using the product, value of the product and I the value of the product and I got to meet the team, I really liked the team. I was very much fascinated with their mission, with the vision that they had for the product.
Speaker 2:And that's how I joined Realtime Board. And it was, in 2017, I think the company just found their product market fit and they were looking to scale acquisitions. So for the 1st few months, I was experimenting with some top of the funnel motions, figuring out how we can scale acquiring new users. And then as we started moving upmarket and building out our sales team, we realized that there was a gap with sales enablement. And I gravitated naturally towards sales enablement, started working on formulating our positioning, how to describe the value that our product delivers to our customers, started refining personas and use cases.
Speaker 2:And it actually was a lot of foundational product marketing work. But like I said, at the time, I still had no idea that product marketing existed. And when our first CMO joined, Barbara Gago, she had a ton of experience working for tech startups. And she was the one to, come and tell me that, in fact, the job that I was doing was called product marketing. And I think, for me, one of the biggest takeaways and something that I tell people who are interested in pivoting into product marketing from a different marketing discipline or potentially even changing jobs dramatically and, you know, becoming a product marketer after working as an analyst, for example.
Speaker 2:I think my takeaway here is that if you have the soft skills that are needed to be a PMM, if you're empathetic, if you're analytical, if you're comfortable switching gears between being very strategic, having the bird's eye view, and then being super deep in the weeds and being able to formulate the value of a single feature that your product team is working on, you'll probably make a really good product marketing manager. And I was lucky because, I joined an early stage startup that was very flexible, that was very open for us to learn to figure things out. And that is why I had a chance at starting to work as a product marketer. And I realised that I really enjoy it. I find it very fulfilling and my natural, strong, science and my skills are a really good match with what is required, for Product Marketing Manager.
Speaker 2:And here I am, 6 years later, working as a product marketer, enjoying my career a ton. Like I said, never planned it. But really happy that, things turned out the way they did.
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Speaker 1:Yeah. I love that every time you speak about product marketing, it's with so much energy and I feel like you've really fallen into a space that you love to do every day. I know the 1st few years at Real Time Board were just crazy. And you were kind of wearing a lot of different hats. But can you tell me from your own words and your own experience, what do you think it takes to be the 1st founding PMM for such an early stage hyper growth startup?
Speaker 2:I think it really depends on a bunch of factors. So I'm definitely talking from my experience. But the disclaimer is that, you know, depending on the vertical, depending on the business model, it may be very different. I think a few things that were crucial for building out the product marketing function at Real Time Board were first, because Real Time Board and Miro is such a product led company, it was essential to be very close to the product. It was very important to leave and breathe the product, use it in and out, and understand, all the workflows very thoroughly.
Speaker 2:And at the same time, and I think this is one of the things that is very difficult, You need not to fall in love with the product. And you need to try and be as objective as possible. And still maintain the ability to look at your product from your user's perspective and your user's lens. Because on the one hand, you need to be this ultimate product expert. And on the other hand, you need to maintain a very objective point of view, where you understand that, this product is just part of a vast toolset.
Speaker 2:And not all users are power users. Not all of them use your product every day. Not all of them have the full context and insight into the product development that you have. And that's why it's important to balance, on the one hand, being this product expert that the users can rely on. And on the other hand, make sure that you're empowering them, you're enabling them, you're giving them the sufficient context that they need.
Speaker 2:And you're also not overwhelming them because, different types of users need different breadth and depth and exposure to your product's functionality. So I think these two things were key. I also think that talking to users regularly was essential because desk research is great. Reading reviews, hearing tales from the field is amazing. But until you actually get into the habit of interviewing your users, weekly and talking to them, not about their feature requests or top features in their wish list, but talking to them about their day to day challenges, their aspirations, things that they hope to optimize in their workflows.
Speaker 2:This is essential because I think every time after talking to the users, I was able to communicate the value of our product and talk about the benefits on a completely different level. And this is my strong recommendation. I think as an early stage startup PMM, you cannot afford not to talk to your users and to your customers. You need to live and breathe the same air that they do to be able to be actually helpful for them. And I also think that one last key piece is learning how to be as cross functional as possible from day 1.
Speaker 2:Because I think what I see happens sometimes, and something that tends to happen to myself as well in some projects, is that because of physical proximity, maybe you're sitting next to the sales team or maybe you're in the same time zone as your support team or your CS team. Sometimes you naturally gravitate towards a certain part of the org. Maybe you're sitting in the product org and you're starting to take their point of view on things. And you're forgetting other parts of the equation. And I think it's extremely important for a successful product marketing manager to be very, very cross functional and to make sure that, as you're communicating what the product team is working on as you're working on launches, you don't forget to check-in with different people But your goal is to make sure that you're not losing But your goal is to make sure that you're not losing this 360 perspective on the things that different parts of the world are optimizing to.
Speaker 2:And it's really important to also learn about the feedback that they're hearing. Because the feedback that the support team is getting from users is very different from the feedback that, the sales team is hearing from buyers, for example. And it's super important not to be gravitating towards one part of the organisation overlooking other parts of the business. Because unless you have a very solid, holistic mental model of how the entire business works, you probably will have a really hard time going to market with your new products and features.
Speaker 1:Totally. And I think that's one of the probably my biggest mistakes, when I was starting out in product marketing, was the fact that I was so close to the product, and I was really thinking about the product through this product management lens. But forgetting to take a look at the customer lens and think about, okay, how is the sales team planning to actually talk about this to the field? How is the sales team planning to position this? And I think really combining the two pieces really makes for a very strong product positioning story.
Speaker 1:I'm curious to know, so you've seen all the stages of a hyper growth startup to scale up to now a more established company. I'm curious to know what are the differences that you've seen working in product marketing for a startup versus a scale up?
Speaker 2:That's a great question. And, it was one of my favourite parts, about working at Miro because, it's really interesting when you're working at the same company, but it feels like every 6 months, you're actually joining a completely new company with a new side of challenges and, a totally different scope. I think, as we were establishing our product market fit and working on scaling it, I think our goal as product marketing organization was to make sure that our early adopters, who were always super pumped about everything that we shipped, got a heads up about the new releases in time and they could start using, the product. They could evangelize it for us. So I think this was pure product marketing where we were reinforcing our positioning on the market.
Speaker 2:And we were making sure that every feature that we ship is a big launch, is a big splash on the market. We're making the noise. We're driving activation engagement in the product. And then as we started, growing bigger, as our user base became a lot more diverse, a new set of challenges appeared. First off, we needed, to figure out how to nail our go to market with our horizontal offering and some more verticalized use cases.
Speaker 2:So this is where things got a little bit more complex for us because we needed to make sure that there is alignment between the way different product teams work and the way we communicate, our newest features to the market. Because unless we did that, we could run into a situation where we were sending conflicting or confusing messages to the market and, making our users doubt what they should use the product for. And when we started moving upmarket, something that also became a major part of our work was that as we started working with bigger enterprise customers, they obviously appreciated the velocity that we were moving at. And at the same time, things like predictability, reliability, transparency became extremely important for them. So I think from this, launch, launch, launch, get people excited, let's go to product hunt mode, we switched into a much more deliberate approach to proactively managing expectations, looping our customers in on our product roadmap, making sure that they feel heard, making sure that, they feel that we're taking their feedback into consideration as we're shaping our roadmap.
Speaker 2:And I think as our organisation grew bigger and became more complex, maybe in the early days, 80% of my time was focused on communicating with users. And only 20% of my time were focused on internal communication. As we grew bigger, I'd say internal orchestration acting as an interface between the product org and the GDM work, and other parts of the business became a lot more prominent. So I'd say it was dividing my time almost equally between internal communication, making sure that we're driving alignment. I'm very clear and transparent about the things that the product team is working on, why they're working on this, how to communicate this to customers.
Speaker 2:And then the remaining 50% of the time was actually directly delivering these messages to our users. So I think that was a big change as well. And I also think that product strategy and product narrative became a lot more important and prominent as the product, grew more complex. I think the product org moved from planning, their work in sprints and quarters to thinking about longer term vision and strategy. And this strategic piece also became a lot more prominent in my work as well.
Speaker 2:Because instead of just thinking about the task at hand, right? Like there's a feature launching in 2 weeks. So we need to come up with, a way to launch it so that it gets as many eyeballs as possible. I moved into a much more strategic and forward looking mould where I was thinking about, product strategy for the product areas that I was responsible for for the next 1 or 2 years and figuring out what are some of the recurring themes that we want to reinforce? How, do we want to start telling the story today so that when the product evolves in a quarter or 2, we're able to double down on the story?
Speaker 2:And I think the last piece that kind of grew on me was competitive, intel because it's a very big difference when you're working, in the blue ocean, you're disrupting the market, you're creating a category. There are not too many direct or indirect competitors per se. I think like you're probably competing with the status quo. So initially, the majority of my focus was on just telling our story, right, and telling our users what the product is, what the frame of reference should be, explaining the value, and convincing them to give it a try. But because we unlocked a very promising category that is now a multi billion category on the market.
Speaker 2:The ocean started to boil. It became a lot redder than I remember it when I joined. And that's why staying on top of competition and being very articulate about the products that we should be compared with, the products we shouldn't be compared with. Giving our users actionable guidance, telling them where we are a better fit for the workflow and where potentially other solutions are a better fit than us. Enabling the sales team, enabling the success team to confidently navigate competitive conversations, helping them have a very strong mental model of the market, this became a lot more prominent.
Speaker 2:And this was something that I also really enjoyed because working in a competitive market is a lot of fun. Because A, you get a lot of validation that what you're working on is really important. Because the market is so crowded and everyone wants to win in this space. So it's definitely a lot of fun. And on top of that, I think it's also one of the most beautiful parts of product marketing, when you can navigate competitive conversations and when you can enable your team to navigate competitive conversations in a way that is not trying to downplay your competitors.
Speaker 2:Because all of the competitors in our space are amazing products. And there's a lot of innovation happening there. And I think this is where, as a product marketer, you can do a really good job and, identify where you have the best product market fit. Make sure that you're talking to the right audience. Make sure that sometimes you're able to tell your prospects that you're probably not the best fit for their goals.
Speaker 2:And also being able to highlight your strengths and talk to them instead of you don't have to necessarily say, that's competitor a is worse than you at, something. And I think, like that's the part that, I really enjoyed as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. One other topic that I really wanted to get your thoughts on was in terms of positioning, especially like an early stage product, what are the top mistakes that you've seen when it comes to position your approach to positioning at that really early stage?
Speaker 2:I think there are quite a few that you can make, to begin with. And we are seeing this happen a lot with all of the AI hype right now. I think, many early stage startups are a lot of the time very focused on their technology. And all they can talk about is what's under the hood. And we're hearing a lot of AI powered, AI enabled solutions.
Speaker 2:And I think, the mistake here is trying to position your product or create a category based on the technology alone. From my experience, there are very few users who have a very strong opinion which technology they want the solution that they're gonna use to run on. A lot of the time, yes, they want to know that it's secure, that it's best in class, but they don't necessarily care all that much about what's under the hood. And I think, one of the biggest mistakes is getting too focused on the how and not thinking enough about the what. What are you doing for your customers?
Speaker 2:What are you doing for your market? What part of their workflow are you disrupting? What business value are you ultimately driving? If you're not articulating that, you're definitely missing the mark there. Another mistake that I see quite often is, you know, I think the majority of startup founders, are there to make our life better.
Speaker 2:So they have a great vision. They believe that something is broken and they want to fix it. However, what I see happen is, sometimes when they start talking about their product, they're trying to basically ship their product strategy to the market. And they're talking about their vision, their platform approach, or a new shiny category that they envision and they want to create. And I see this, fail pretty often on the market because A) potentially the market is not ready for it just yet.
Speaker 2:Or B, the markets and the users, the buyers, they haven't recognized the SME necessarily. And I think it's really important while, having a long term vision and strategy, just still make sure that the way you're communicating into the market is resonating with how people think about their workflows, how people think about their objectives, their goals. And I think this is key because, there are certain things that will always be an internal document. Most likely, your positioning dog and your product strategy, will never materialize 1 to 1, in a customer facing artifact. And I think this is super important not to miss the step.
Speaker 2:And yes, absolutely drive internal alignment, understand what you're optimizing for, but not to forget to translate it into the language of your user and make it relevant to them. Because I think, again, in the majority of cases, we see many startups that are talking about very ambitious, innovation and disruption, But they're failing to explain how what they do and all this amazing technology that they have under the hood is going to make my life as a user, better.
Speaker 1:Totally. I love the examples that you shared, especially around AI. It's such a relevant topic in today's world right now. And I'm so grateful for all of your knowledge that you've shared today, around positioning, around mistakes as a first time PMM in a startup, your amazing experience working in these companies that have skyrocketed into hyper growth. And I think my biggest learning from today, Laina, has been the fact that you mentioned to not, as a PMM, you should not fall in love with your product.
Speaker 1:So always try to keep an open mind, always be open to change, always listen to the customers. Because I think we really tend to fall in love with products that we market and that we talk about. And then we sort of develop this bias. So I'm going to take that away. And I want to ask you for one single piece of advice that you want to leave our users with.
Speaker 2:I think my advice for product marketing managers is to think outside of your role. Because the greatest product marketing managers that I worked with are people who are very curious and who always do their best to understand the ins and outs of the business that they're working for. And they have a very clear mental model of the competitive landscape and the market. And I think, if you want to be successful as a product marketing manager, if you want to learn really fast, if you want to drive crazy impact, if you want to have a lot of fun, you need to, maintain this broad perspective on the business and on the market. And always look for areas of improvement and optimization where you can drive the biggest impact for your users.
Speaker 2:They are who we are, or here, and for the business.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Thank you so much, Leana. It was so good to chat with you and to catch up. And I'm looking forward to hearing more about your future endeavors and product marketing and continue following you on LinkedIn as you share more wisdom. Thank you for being here.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Christina. It was great chatting with you.
Speaker 1:If you like this episode, then you'll love the SaaS Operator, a weekly newsletter brought to you by Early Node with actionable insights from SaaS experts in the industry delivered right to your inbox every Tuesday for free. Visit early node.com to subscribe.