Product Marketing for New Products

You might have the greatest product on earth, but if your potential customers don’t know they need it, they won’t know they have to buy it — let alone buy it from you. This may seem obvious, but it’s actually an important concept to pause and focus on, because it affects everything from understanding who your buyer really is and who the competition are to how you set the buying criteria and frame the problem your product solves for customers. In this deck, first presented at one of our company building events in early 2017, a16z partner Sharon Chang -- who managed product marketing at Opsware; directed product marketing at HP Software as well as other companies; and headed marketing at Rockmelt -- covers the fundamentals of product marketing for new products. And the fundamentals behind the fundamentals are all about your story, capturing it and scaling it so it’s just as compelling when your first sales rep conveys it as when you first heard it from the founder.