Product Marketing at PlayStation

Alex Kracov: So I'd love to start today's conversation talking about your time working at PlayStation. What were you focused on when you worked there?

Derek Osgood: Yeah, I mean, PlayStation was fun. So my role there was an interesting one. Because the way that PlayStation structures product marketing, product management actually mirrors like what brand management looks like in CPG companies, in the sense that I actually had full kind of end-to-end P&L responsibility. I was responsible for kind of like both product planning and longer-range franchise planning for the games that I worked on, as well as the actual sole end-to-end marketing campaign structure. All the way through launch and post launch, I was doing sales strategy for enabling our channel sales motion. I was doing integrated campaign planning for the actual launch itself and managing all of our agency relationships and media buying. So it was like a big, chunky role doing a whole bunch of stuff, basically overseeing specific products. And so I was working on God of War, Gran Turismo, a bunch of fun games, while I was there.

Alex Kracov: And so how does that work? Because you're not actually making the games, right? You're maybe not a product manager in that traditional sense. But then, you're talking to the game makers. Then at some point, they sort of hand off the process to you to commercialize it. How early in that process did you sort of get involved?

Derek Osgood: Yeah, it's funny. I mean, it's definitely not quite the same as like product management in tech companies where you're actually working directly with engineering on writing out user stories and actually building the product itself. But it was like, we were involved at the earliest stages. So it's kind of like a funky publisher-studio relationship, where we were actually at the very earliest stages of the game gets even concepted. And we would be involved in the greenlight process. Basically, doing market sizing, trying to identify like, okay, how much demand is there potentially for this concept? Doing a lot of early focus groups to identify what that product should look like. Like for example, when launching - I actually didn't work on the more recent God of War franchises. But a lot of the research done to inform like, oh, that should be set in Viking days instead of set in ancient Greece, that happened in some of the research that we were doing for God of War: Ascension, which I worked on. So it's like you're looking years and years out, and doing what I would categorize as much more true product management where you're actually doing really business planning for the product you're building.

Alex Kracov: Super interesting. I'd love to kind of go behind the scenes of one of these launches. I don't know if God of War is a good example or if there's another one. So you do all this research. You're working with the developers. At some point, there's a game that's getting close to being finished. What happens next? How does that commercialization process start, and what does that even look like?

Derek Osgood: Gaming is interesting. Again, because it's so launch-heavy as a culture, right? 90% of your sales happen in the first 60 to 90 days of the game launching. Basically, getting the launch rate is almost life and death for the product. And so, so much of the marketing and all the promotion that you're doing is happening before the game actually ever even releases. It's all about just building demand upfront. So that when it does release, it becomes a cultural moment which can then have some legs of its own to run with, instead of you just having to go acquire new buyers for every single copy of the game.

The commercialization process is really chunky. Upfront, you're doing a ton of financial analysis and long-range planning on what the overall positioning, pricing strategy, what product you need to build. So all of the commercial planning around what add-ons are you selling alongside the core game, and how are you structuring pricing packages for that? What early offers are you giving to beta users that are going to incentivize them to use the beta? Because you need to get product feedback before the thing is actually ready for primetime. How are you structuring the beta as a promotional vehicle for the larger game? There's just all of this chunky work that happens before you even get to the stage of the campaign itself.

Then you basically have a launch campaign, where it breaks out into a couple of different phases, where you kind of have the initial announce of the game and revealing that it's going to even exist at some point to the world, followed by some kind of lighter weight nurturing to make sure that people don't forget about you between that announcement to when you actually start the meat of the campaign, which is really like the short window leading into launch. You're really doing like big TV advertising events. There's tons of digital advertising as well. I mean, this was back in the days when Facebook and Google advertising were just starting to emerge, and they didn't really exist yet. So we were really like TV, events-heavy and a lot of PR and comms work. That's kind of shifted, I think, in recent years to be a little bit more of a mix.

But it's a big meaty process. I could spend two hours going through the giant 10,000-step checklist that we had to get. All the packaging done, get all the packaging in the hands of all the partners that need it in order to get it live in retail storefronts, in order to enable support. It's just thinking about every single little piece of the business and businesses around the business, and how that launch is going to impact them and making sure they're all enabled to actually talk about the product effectively.

Alex Kracov: Super interesting. Yeah, as you're talking, it makes sense. It's just a lot of brand advertising, essentially. Like big mass market. Get this game in front of a lot of people. But then, there's all those weird little distribution partnerships. I assume GameStop was one. You already have to figure out what is our strategy with them, and how do you actually sell through those channels. Yeah, very interesting. Very different than what we're up to now in SaaS.

Derek Osgood: Yeah, I think it's the truest form of marketing, in the sense that you are really thinking about this thing as like an integrated campaign in a system. All the way from the very top-level awareness activity that you're doing down through how are you actually converting those people at the digital level. How are you then getting them to engage with and evangelize the product, which involves a lot of stuff that looks like pre-tech growth loops, and building out in-product virality and building out community engagement activities around the product? And so a lot of the tactics - actually, it's funny. I've gone through interviews in the past, and people are like, "Oh, I don't really want to hear about your gaming experience, because we're hiring for a SaaS marketing role." And I'm like, yeah, but the gaming experience that I have is probably more applicable to this than a lot of SaaS experience out there.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, I know. It makes you a well-rounded marketer. I think I used to do a lot of these big integrated campaigns for Google when I was a consultant for them. It gave me a lens of how do you structure a campaign with the air cover. I always think of it as war as my example. It's like you want to have the air cover. Then you have the troops on the ground fighting. You need to think through, okay, what are the different channels? How do you reach people? Because if you just invest into one little channel, you might get some fruit from that. But it really works better when you're hitting people from all these different angles. I think that applies no matter what the product you're trying to market.

Derek Osgood: And also crafting journeys that actually extend all the way through those angles. Like when we were building TV spots, we would have to target Google advertising around the language that we assumed and had researched that customers would be searching for coming out of that TV spot. Rather than just think about search for our product holistically, it was like, okay, there's going to be some other things that people are going to search for adjacently that come out from our TV creative. We need to think about how we convert those people through the funnel.

Alex Kracov: It must've been really fun having a giant budget too. I think that's one of the fun things about these big, big companies. I guess, kind of tangential to that, what's it like owning a P&L? What does that actually mean in practice in sort of the marketing sense? Is it essentially just like, here's my marketing dollars? I got to bring in X amount on the other side and have a giant model. Is it that sort of simple? What does that mean in practice?

Derek Osgood: I think one of the things that is an interesting dynamic in today's marketing orgs, especially in tech, is oftentimes marketing budgets are really broken out by functional areas. You actually have growth which is managing the digital buying budget. Then you have a brand team that's managing the awareness advertising budget. The problem is that, as we're just talking about, those things don't really work as a system. So me, as the P&L owner, I actually wasn't really doing nearly as much really granular tactical decision-making around how budgets were getting allocated. I was really chunking out strategic budgets for specific areas. So I was like, "Look. The brand budget is going to be this. The digital budget is going to be this. The events budget is going to be this." Then I would do some kind of big rock planning on what are the main things that need to work together and interoperate within those budgets. But it was about kind of systems designed around how marketing budgets were getting allocated.

Then on top of that, it's just a lot of like - I think the biggest thing is like when you're owning P&L, it's like there's just a lot more financial forecasting that you're doing. You're working with finance a lot more closely to understand, like, okay, how many units are we going to sell? What should the actual total budget look like relative to our growth goals? Then making on the fly adjustments, so that based on helping what signal you're able to correct or collect leading into it. So we'd be constantly adjusting. We started with a big giant budget, and then we gradually shrink it down depending on how pre-sales were going. Or, we'd expand it if it seemed like that thing have legs to really take off heading into launch.

Joining Rippling

Alex Kracov: Super interesting. I know we could talk about this all day, but I want to switch gears and talk about SaaS marketing and talk about first with your story with Rippling. Because you joined Rippling, I think, right around the series A, at a really important time for the company. I'm a Rippling user. I'm a big fan of Parker, so I'm very curious what it was like to work there. Maybe my first question is just like, how did you think about approaching product marketing for Rippling? Because I think what's tricky with Rippling is it is this compound startup. There's a lot of different products. There's a lot of pieces to it. So how did you sort of think about that in the early days?

Derek Osgood: Yeah, I've had a bad habit as a product marketer of picking really hard to product market products, as all of my roles that I go into. Because I like the challenge. I think in reality, Rippling is probably one of the hardest products out there to actually do product marketing for, partly because of bandwidth, partly because of the positioning challenges that come with compound startups. It's funny. I came out of Rippling and I was like, oh, my god. I'm so burnt out from trying to wrangle all of this stuff in my head and building this compound startup. Then I went out and started one. It has all the same characteristics.

And so I think the ways that I went into it, thinking about it, were, one, I think when you're building a compound startup like that, you have multiple different sub products that are all - you can't tell each of those stories all in one big package. You really need a unifying narrative that is at the platform level. So you actually really need to chunk out the way that you think about the product as a series of sub products. And treat it as a true portfolio where product marketing any individual component is actually really easy. You know how to position the payroll product relative to other payroll products. But you need to think about how that payroll product interacts with all the other products in your portfolio.

Then come up with what like now, I think, has been branded around Rippling Unity, which is this underlying concept of, hey, all of these things are better because they are tied into the employee record and because that employee record has all the characteristics that end up driving all the automation that those other tools use. Then you got to bring that to life with a bunch of different specific examples and case studies in order to make people actually believe the claims that you're making. Because a lot of times, the biggest risk when you're marketing a big platform, beyond people just not understanding what it does, is they have been burned so many times by a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none products that don't actually deliver value effectively. They give you kind of a B minus version of all of those different products. So the only way to overcome that is through heavy social proof and being able to really tie it to very, very specific workflows where you can surface exact recipes for how that product is going to work.

So it was a lot of toggling up and down between altitudes. I think a lot of product marketers in more straightforward companies, they get locked into the altitude of product that they're working at. They're like, okay, I own this feature set, or I own this individual product. They're not really great at toggling up to the platform level messaging back down to the product level messaging. You really need to build that muscle in your head in order to be able to effectively communicate these things.

Alex Kracov: What does this work actually look like? Are you creating a bunch of positioning docs and running it by Parker, and other people on the team to be like, "Hey, how does this work for our platform positioning and then for each of the different product positioning?" Then once you do that, do you just create a bunch of decks and websites and assets based off of that? What does that work kind of look like on a more day to day or granular level while you're there?

Derek Osgood: Yeah, so I think Rippling has a pretty unique, heavily execution-driven culture. And so I think we were just shipping stuff in a lot of cases. There wasn't as much review process involved. The way that I like to think about this is, like, you start from the very top. You need to trickle down in levels of granularity. The first thing that I did when I came in there was go through a full positioning exercise around the platform. Try and surface what are the things that are true about this thing, that are not true about any of the other adjacent products in the categories that we play in. And try to actually define, in this case, the rules of the category that we play in as well.

So I tried to put us into a box that was somewhat inclusive of some of the other competitors like Gusto and Zenefits but was also ownable enough that it could be specific to Rippling and only Rippling could really tick all of the boxes for the category that we were talking about playing in. Did that positioning work at the platform level? Ran a bunch of docs through Parker and Matt and some of the other folks at the company. There were a lot of workshops leading into that to get at those little kernels of truth. Then once we have that top over messaging, it's really about pulling that down quickly into the different sub-product messages and communicating what that product did. First and foremost, very clearly, what is that product through the lens of its existing category? I tried to not say, hey, we're not a payroll tool. We're something else. It was like the payroll product is a payroll product. But it's a payroll product that's better because it connects into this platform mobile message. And so using that platform story as the differentiator was really the way that we ended up winning in our great storytelling.

Alex Kracov: When I think about positioning, I always think of this framework as you can either reinvent a category or try and create a new category. I'm curious. Rippling is a little bit of both. Is that right? Is that the right read on it? I'm curious how you think about that framework, and which type of those choices do you prefer?

Derek Osgood: We kind of split the difference a little bit. I mean, Rippling is a little bit of both. The nice thing about what Rippling does is that it's kind of mashing together a couple of categories that are pretty well-defined and easy for people to shorthand and wrap their head around. So you'd be like, yeah, we're an HR software. HR software contains this big bucket of stuff underneath that. That includes payroll and benefits and everything else. And so we kind of leaned into that as the existing category baseline that we would frame around a little bit. But our whole goal was always to do some category creation. Because the only way that you could actually break people out of a direct one-to-one feature comparison with other HR tools was to tell this bigger category story about being the workforce management platform.

I don't have a bias to one or the other. I think that for 90% of companies, they should not go create a category. It comes with a lot of pain. It's an expensive process. It requires a lot of customer education, a lot of brand building over time. Frankly, most companies don't have the chops in house to do the narrative design to be able to actually tell a story that's compelling around creating a category. So most companies should just lean into their existing category and be really clear about, like, we are in this category. That gives customers a really clear frame of reference for what their product does at the baseline. But then, explain very clearly what separates them from that category and how they differentiate it.

When you're talking about growing categories that exist already, that's another strategy you can take. It's hard. That's equally hard to do. But it's much more prevalent in CPG, where you're taking a lot of a playbook from category creation but trying to just expand the pie overall for everybody within your space. I think you've seen that with a lot of AI companies, right? Their strategy should all be not create a category. It shouldn't be plugged into an existing category. It should be grow the category for their specific subset of AI infra, for example.

Founding Ignition

Alex Kracov: Yep, it makes a ton of sense. So now you're the CEO and co-founder of Ignition. Can you talk about the origin story behind Ignition and how you end up starting the company?

Derek Osgood: Yeah, for sure. So Ignition, we basically started because, as a product marketer and a product manager throughout my career, I've just been consistently disappointed with the lack of tools available for those roles. I think there are a couple of roles that basically span a really significant amount of surface area of disciplines and data. I found it really hard when launching products to drive alignment within those companies. Because of the fact, not that that it's tough to jump around all these tools. But basically, companies, as a whole, lacked shared context on who their customers were, what their customers cared about, how to talk about the products that they built.

You try and kind of slap band aids on this in the form of project management tools, so everybody has visibility into what's happening through the launch process. Sales enablement tools that everybody has access to all that collateral that's been created. Then you obviously have a bunch of docs and spreadsheets floating around that contain a lot of core positioning messaging data. But the problem is, none of those things actually unify the company around the core customer data that drives all the decision making.

Basically, we set out to build this platform that gives everybody transparency and visibility into the launch process so that the whole company could rally around commercializing a product and making it successful. But we wanted to drive that from the bottom up. Similar to Rippling and what we do with employee data, we want to drive that with customer data where we are actually plugging into all the different sources of data that exists in your company and externally to your company. Creating a cohesive view of who your customers are, who your competitors are, how you market against them, and then turning that into a much more actionable launch motion where you can actually use that stuff to identify product ideas, build go-to-market plans, and create all the collateral to feed those go-to-market plans. So it's all based on that same central view of the combo of your customer data and your data about your product.

Alex Kracov: It's a problem in product solution that very much resonates with me. I mean, at Lattice, product launches were always such an interesting stitch together process of using like Asana and Notion and all these different tools and Slack and all the different meetings. It was like herding cats. Then no one else, no one had the context. No one knew where to look. I think the only way we ever got it done was just meetings in face to face, which was not that efficient at all. It was just, yeah, very messy. So many thanks for what you guys are building.

Derek Osgood: Sheer force of will. It's like all the information lives in one PMM's head. It's just up to that person to just blast it in 10,000 different ways across the organization. And it never lands because it's so fragmented.

How to Find Product-Market Fit

Alex Kracov: Totally. And it worked. Yeah, to your point, it worked when it was all in my head. It worked when we were small enough and it was in my head. I can just flip my chair around and talk to the PM and talk to the designer. Alright. We're launching it. Is it good to go? But then, as soon as we had a traditional product marketing team, and then we had a product manager team and just all these different people, it became so messy so fast. So totally love what you guys are building. I'm curious, like, what does the journey to product-market fit been like for you? Because you mentioned it's kind of a compound startup. There's a ton of different things to build. That's an interesting puzzle. I'm going through this myself at Dock, so I'm curious. How do you think about that elusive search to find product-market fit?

Derek Osgood: Yeah, I think it's interesting because there's been a bunch of, obviously, market changes that have happened over the course of the company's life. The early version of the product that we were building was pre-AI existing. So a lot of the workflows and automation that we were building in the product was all workflow-based. Now it's been unlocked by actually being able to use AI to power a lot of this, in ways that we had originally thought knew that we were going to build but we've been able to build much, much faster. So I think the journey the product-market fit has been funky. Because our product has to cover so much surface area, right? Product marketers do so many things. You have documentation. You have all the, what is the status of things? You have all the asset management. You have all the research tools to actually go collect all of this data, and then obviously stitching all that stuff together and making it actually work in concert as a system. It's a really challenging product problem to build around.

And so we, for the first year of the company, we're basically building. All we were doing was building the house for this information. So we were building all the project management tools, all the documentation tools. We very clearly did not have product-market fit through that. But we knew that we had to build that in order to actually just cover the table stakes. Customers were demanding. Because their existing frame of reference around launches was project management. They were demanding project management tools out of us. We didn't want to build those, but we did anyway to kind of appease those early users. It kind of derailed us for a bit. We ended up moving off of our path to building the really differentiated stuff, which is like how do you use the research tools to get the data into the platform that feeds all these other actions? So then we spent the next year working with customers to refine the research tools, get some of the workflow built out.

At that point, we built so much surface area of product that a lot of the actual usability of it had gotten really messy. It just had become really complex and difficult to use. So it really wasn't until we actually were able to take those two parts, marry them together, and then do some cleanup to make sure that the system actually works cleanly in concert that we really felt like we hit what would be close to product-market fit. I think this product-market fit, I think, is like a journey that companies are always on. And you never really have it. And if you do have it, you have it for a very specific point in time, and it evolves. So I would say we're close. But I never want to say, like, oh, yeah, we have clear product-market fit. It's been just a journey of iteration and a lot of trying things, failing. We added new products. We're like, okay, if this one takes off, we'll lean into that one. We'll double down on it. It will just create the wedge. We'll focus on that for a bit and then come back around to these other parts and stitch it all back together. But what we've realized is that, again, the system on the whole is the problem. And so we actually had to build all of this surface area in order to be able to actually nail it.

Alex Kracov: I feel like product-market fit is rarely like what you read about on Twitter, or X, or whatever it's called. Where it's like, alright, one day, you just wake up and you have it. You have millions and millions of dollars coming into your bank account. I think it's exactly what you said. This is like a constant journey of iterating. And yeah, you might have product-market fit in one segment, but you don't have it in another. You're just constantly pushing. And so yeah, it's such an interesting puzzle.

I'm curious. You have this marketing background like I do. What has it been like building products yourself? Do you think of yourself as like the product manager for the product? I assume you have a technical co-founder too. How do you sort of think about actually running a product team? Because that's been one of my biggest learnings at Dock? I'm curious how you've been dealing with it.

Derek Osgood: Yeah, very much so. I mean, that's been a learning experience for me. I do have a technical co-founder. He's been a PM himself. And so it's nice that we have some quality product chops in house. I do view myself as like the product manager for the product because, realistically, a lot of it is productizing my own process. And so I'm really heavily involved in product. Early on, I did some early mock ups and early designs myself, which they were terrible. I think I probably set the company back six months by trying to design some of it myself for the early days.

The biggest learning for me has been - I had done a lot of product work in the past. Like at Rippling, I built our whole App Store, basically me and the designer and an engineer. Like at previous companies, I've done a ton of work around onboarding and being heavily involved in product experience from a product marketing perspective. But they were much more tightly scoped projects where it's like you're not really designing the whole system, right? I think I've seen you do a LinkedIn post or two about this, where you realize just how granularly you really need to get into those designs in order for them to actually work when you start thinking about real user flows and setting the screens and how all that stuff interacts together. It's just a level of depth that is really hard to wrap your head around at first as a marketer jumping into it. It's more like a culture shock than anything. I feel like I've got my head around it now. But the early days was a lot of missteps, partly because of my inexperience working at that level of granularity of product.

Alex Kracov: Totally. I'm okay at Figma. I think what's so interesting is like, I guess when you're building - we're used to building websites, and so it's much more easier. Like, hey, build the layout like this. Make this thing. But when it's product, like, okay. I would make like a figma design. My co-founder is a much better designer than me. But I would make a shitty Figma design. Then the engineering and co-founder will be like, "But wait. What does this button do? What does that thing do? What about this edge case?" Then you end up building 50 screens for a really simple thing that you thought. And so I don't know. That's been a really big learning experience. And I think now, we finally - I know that all those questions are going to come up, so we try and get ahead of it. But it still blows my mind just how granular you have to be.

Then our other big learning recently has been like just because it looks good in the designs, and even if we do all of those flows, it doesn't mean it's actually going to feel good in code. As soon as you get into the code, it might feel different. And so you need to give yourself permission to change it once it's in code too. I think now I feel much better about our process once I've had those two realizations.

Derek Osgood: That's the biggest trap. It can look perfect, and it can make total sense in design. Then you get it in code, and it doesn't really feel great at all. Sometimes it's to the point where it's unusable. And you don't really know until it's live.

I also think, as marketers, we're so used to giving feedback. Right? A lot of what we do is shape creative work. And so we're not the ones who are actually creating it in many cases. There's a lot of cases where you are. But at end of the day, a lot of the creative direction that I've done, I consider myself to be very good at giving quality feedback to shape something from the outside. But once you step into the weeds and you're actually doing the design work yourself, it's hard to level yourself back out to the altitude to be able to actually assess it as a user objectively and identify those weak points. I noticed myself when I'm on the workflows where I'm really heavily involved in the design and the specking of it, it ends up worse because I'm not actually able to level myself out as much as like if I'm working with my designer, and he's kind of driving it and I'm giving feedback externally.

Growing an Early Startup

Alex Kracov: Oh, totally. The perspective is so hard. Because it's so intuitive for you because you built it. So you know where the button is. You know where the things should go. Then you show it to someone else who has never seen it. They're like, "Wait, this doesn't make any sense." And so it's so interesting. It's honestly one of the best parts of growing the team at Dock. We can pull on other people at the company to be like, "Hey, does this make sense to you?" Because it made sense in my brain, but it might not make sense in every brain. Yeah, building the product has been the definitely the hardest thing about Dock but the most rewarding. I'm really enjoying learning the new skill set, yeah.

How have you approached growing Ignition? I know it's still early days for you guys. But in terms of the marketing and investment, are you doing founder-led sales? Are you doing a lot of podcasts like this? How have you sort of thought about getting that initial group of users?

Derek Osgood: Our earliest users were just me on LinkedIn pinging people directly, doing founder-led sales. I explicitly focused on people that I didn't know. I really didn't want people who were friends giving me early feedback. I think there's pros and cons to that. Obviously, it was tougher to get early feedback from those people because they're just less engaged. But it also, in my opinion, was truer validation for the product that we were building. So a lot of it was early LinkedIn, just pinging early days.

Since then, we've really focused on two main areas. One is building out SEO motions for ourselves and using. Because of the scope of the product that we have, breaking it into free tools that we can offer up as lead magnets and get people into the product and use as SEO magnets as well. Then a lot of outbound email. So we've been running a lot of the playbook that we had at Rippling, which is cold email at really significant scale. We aren't doing nearly the scale that we were doing when we were growing Rippling. But we've automated a lot of cold email and spent a lot of time message and persona testing that and just getting it to a really tightly operationalized state. I was selling for the longest time. I just recently brought on our first true AE, and it's been game changing. I think I realize I can kind of sell things. But realistically, I'm not a salesperson, and I shouldn't be doing that nearly as much as I was. So yeah, we've grown the team a little bit recently. We've added our first SDR. We've added our first marketer. We've added our first sales AE. But otherwise, it was like kind of me and myself and I just doing a lot of LinkedIn posting and LinkedIn DMing and cold email up until now.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, that first sales hire is a life changer. I think I had a similar thing where it's like, I'm okay at sales. I can go do the call, do the demo. So this should be all. I'm like, look at all the cool stuff I've built. Look at this thing. Look at this thing. Tell me. And I'm just trying to get feedback about the features I built, as opposed to understanding their problems and the solution and really building champions and all that stuff. And as we built the team at Dock, it's like, oh, yeah, I suck at sales. I'm way better as a marketer growth person.

Derek Osgood: So you just feature dump. That's fine when your product is really small. But I think both of us are building relatively chunky products with a lot of different workflows. It's hard to feature dump and be able to actually get somebody's head around the product if you do that.

How to Launch a Product

Alex Kracov: I'd love to spend the rest of our time just talking about product marketing and product launches a little bit more broadly. Because you're a wealth of knowledge here, and I was thinking about this stuff all day long. I think my first question is maybe a basic one. Who should lead a product launch?

Derek Osgood: I generally believe that it should be a product marketer. It does depend on the characteristics of that product marketer. Product marketers take a lot of different shapes and sizes. Some of them are not really great at leading launches. Because they're either not strategic or not operationalized enough. They may just be more kind of content and sales enablement-skewing product marketers. So it depends on the skill set. If not product marketing, then I generally think that actually the product manager should. Because they're just going to be the closest to the product itself and be able to align timeframes and has the most holistic view of who the customer is and why they care about it. But it does kind of depend on the structure of the marketing org. So if product marketing is well built out, I would say product marketing should. If they're not, then typically, it should be somebody in product.

Alex Kracov: Then what does the perfect product launch process look like? I'm sure it's different for every company and all that stuff. But are there typical phases that people can follow? Or somebody who's never really launched a product before, what advice would you say for them as sort of building a roadmap towards that launch?

Derek Osgood: I'll try and give a concise answer on this. Realistically, I could spend four days and probably not eat through the whole process because it's a big chunky one. I think, typically, you think about product launches as like you have an alpha, you have a beta, and you have a GA phase. Right? Most people think about launches through the lens of the actual product delivery cycle.

So up front, before alpha, you should be doing a bunch of research. Before the product is ever even built, product marketing should be tightly embedded with product. Actually, I'm doing a lot of generative customer discovery to understand who customers are, why they need this thing, what the problems that are being solved for them are and understanding the roadmap, also that. You should also be doing competitive intel of that period where you're understanding like, okay, what are the possible alternatives that customers could be using for this thing that you're launching? What are they good and bad at? Where are we going to actually separate ourselves, and where should we be focusing efforts from a messaging perspective?

Moving through the alpha period, like alpha is typically when you would just start onboarding some of your friendlies. You would onboard a couple of really trusted customers. Usually, it's more like dogfooding internally or working with partners or investors to gauge whether the product is solving the problems that you set out to solve. During that period, you're really doing a lot of core strategic development, understanding positioning messaging, what your channel plan is going to look like, and how you're actually going to roll out and communicate that product to people. What assets do you need to get created in order to launch it? During beta is when you're like doing a lot more of the executional work. It's when you're actually creating all of that collateral and even starting to do some of the external pre-promotion and starting to set up teasers, or exclusivity programs, or closed betas with a slightly broader group of customers that may have opted into a beta program.

Then at GA, when you actually launch it and make it publicly available, you obviously have launch day which is your big splashy launch. But a couple of weeks before that, you're doing a lot of internal training. So much of the launch process centers around enablement for internal teams. Everybody thinks about the launch as like the external particle launch and like the splashy, where are we launching to customers? Are we getting press? Are we doing a product count launch? What collateral did we create? But the important thing is, really, how do you introduce that product to the teams that are going to be talking to customers about it day in, day out for the next 6 to 12 months? Which is sales success, your marketing team, and getting the assets and collateral into their hands that they needed in order to be able to sell it. So you do a lot of training leading into launch day. Then you do a big splashy day to just put a lightning strike in the ground and make sure that the world pays attention to it. Then you should have an ongoing rolling thunder approach after that where you're taking a lot of the messaging that you used for that launch, and ideally continuing to trickle out other content and collateral to keep momentum on that launch for one, two, three months after launch.

I just did a podcast earlier today with Jeanette from Kajabi. She was saying that, basically, we're tearing down equals as recent AI Assistant launched. One of the creative things that they did is they did a blog post after launch talking about how they mean to the product that they had launched. It's like taking things that are decisions that you made during your launch process to extend the launch process by creating other downstream collateral. It's a really just easy low hanging fruit creative way for you to actually be able to carry that momentum beyond the day of launch itself. That's the biggest thing. It's like when you're thinking about launch, the one biggest piece of advice I would give is, like, think about it as a commercialization process. Don't think about it as a process leading up to launch day. You're doing a bunch of work leading into launch day, but you're also doing all that work to support a big post-launch selling process.

Alex Kracov: How do you know if a launch is successful? Do you just look at revenue tied back to that as user engagement? Do you recommend people set up goals ahead of time? This is something I always struggled with and we never really got right at Lattice. I'm curious what you think.

Derek Osgood: So you should definitely have goals leading into the launch and set up a true OKR structure for that launch. Again, we're talking more about kind of bigger product launches. There's also obviously smaller releases that are not going to have quite as much upfront planning. I think, usually, launches should be contributing to revenue. You're not building things at your company just for fun and for giggles. It's like you are doing this stuff because it is somehow, someway going to meaningfully contribute to the company's bottom line - whether that's retaining more customers, opening a new market, and having a new TAM to be able to go after, or creating more upsell opportunities with your existing customers. And so you should be mapping to those business metrics.

The way that I like to set goals for launches is, I like to set a business metric which is usually some kind of revenue target. It could be something like an upsell or cross-sell target if you're not talking about top line revenue. Then you set a marketing target, which is basically the objective at the strategic level of like, okay, we want to grow this category by this percent. Or, we want to penetrate this new category that we're entering by this percent. And so you try and actually get to just an objective level target for what the approach to marketing you're going to take is.

Then you have a communications goal which is, how much did we influence customer's perception of the product into whatever message you're trying to get across is? You can set up measurement for each of those different things, right? When you're talking about revenue targets, that's pretty easy. You're looking at overall revenue impact. How did that move up or down pre- and post-launch on average? Ideally, you're looking at a revenue growth rate. At the marketing target level, depending on what your goal is, category penetration, you're looking at, okay, of 10,000 customers in this category, we now have 1,000 of those. So we penetrated the market 10%. And when it comes to the communication goal, you're really doing that through qualitative surveying and understanding how customers regurgitate back to you the message that you tried to communicate in that launch. So there's a bunch of different ways to do it. I mean, that's a rudimentary structure for this. You can go a lot deeper in any one of those areas. But generally, I would always try and tie it back to revenue. Because otherwise, why are you investing the effort in launching the thing in the first place?

Alex Kracov: Yeah, I think it's a really, really helpful framework. You obviously talked to a lot of companies about launches. You see this a lot. Is there a trend that you see where the launch process always breaks down? Is there something where there's always kind of that problem area in the launch?

Derek Osgood: I mean, you can take your pick. I think every single company that I talked to, barring off very, very small set of exceptions, their launch processes in some way shape or form a mess. Usually, the biggest reason that it breaks down is because they don't have a process in the first place. They don't actually have a muscle built out. They don't have a defined set of steps that they're going to take. They don't have a defined way of understanding which launches are we going to invest effort in. And so there's no tearing framework in place to actually be able to identify, okay, this should be a big launch. This should be a medium launch. This should be a small launch. This thing, we shouldn't launch at all. That leads to them actually just scrambling at the last second, because they don't actually know what timeframes look like to be able to actually launch the thing. So they end up just basically spending a week leading into it. Then they just send one email to customers, and that's their launch. 30% of customers open it. Most of them don't actually engage. They forget about it two weeks later. Then that product ends up flopping. So it's very common. But the biggest place that people break down is, they either just don't have a process, or they don't do research to inform that long.

Alex Kracov: I think another one I'll add is just communication in general. I feel like when we're doing launches at Lattice, the moments where we messed up, it was like the PM thought it was a super important launch, but marketing didn't. Then that was communicated really poorly like priorities. Or like in the launch process, one team got left behind. We really focused on the sales team and enabling them, but we forgot about CS. Customers were forgotten about. We just forgot about each little stakeholder. Because it's a lot of work to manage all these different personas on the go-to-market team and across the company.

Derek Osgood: On the plan, they each need different subsets of information. They each need different types of enablement. I mean, go-to-market, at the end of the day, is an enablement exercise. It's all about getting the right information into the right team's hands at the right time, so they can actually go tell customers about it. And so if you don't communicate effectively, if you don't have a motion for getting those teams' visibility, and you don't have motion for getting information and assets into their hands, the launch fails no matter what, no matter how good your messaging is, no matter how good your marketing is.

How to Structure a Product Marketing Team

Alex Kracov: I'm curious how you think about the structure of a product marketing team and the different functions. At some scale, you can take your pick. Because you say product marketing is responsible for launches. Do you just have one PM who's doing all the launches? Do you segment the team by product area? How do you sort of think about those different structures of a product marketing team?

Derek Osgood: So I have a slightly spicy take on product marketing as it relates to marketing team structure on the whole. I came from PlayStation early on in my career. And like I mentioned in the beginning of the show, that was looked like a brand management role where I was actually doing a lot of integrated campaign planning. I truly believe that the best marketing orgs are structured in that way, where each product marketer is a product owner for their specific product line, or product, or whatever it is, whatever how you want to subsegment your business. That product marketer actually owns some degree of P&L for that product. The other marketing teams are actually acting as support teams for that product marketing team to execute go-to-market strategy around a much longer time horizon for their products. And so I typically recommend that a product marketing team is mostly aligned by product vertical.

Then if you have a PLG motion, there's some additional side product marketing work that tends to be pretty horizontal that sits alongside that, which usually you have potentially a pricing expert, potentially a sales enablement expert, potentially somebody who's focusing on onboarding in product and cross sell. Those can be horizontal roles, but they don't actually look like true product marketing in most cases. They're kind of like a subset of it. But the people who are really doing go-to-market, they're each aligned to a product vertical. Each of them owns the go-to-market for their own products.

Alex Kracov: Really cool. I like that set up a lot. And so then there's like a shared services within the marketing team for demand gen, digital, creative, all those things. Then the PMs act. They come with the positioning and the messaging, but then also act as the project managers to get all of that stuff done for the launch, or ongoing support, or whatever it is.

Derek Osgood: Yeah, and product marketing basically acts as air traffic control across all of that. The marketing budget on the whole ends up getting broken out. Where each product vertical has its own budget, but then you do have some shared service on the budget that sits across that for the demand gen and creative teams and what not.

Alex Kracov: One question that I think pretty much every founder who's maybe not a marketer ask themselves is like, what's the profile they should think of when they're hiring their first marketer? I'm sure you've been on calls being asked that yourself. Should it be someone with a product marketing background? Should it be more demand gen? Should it be somewhere in the middle? What's your take on that question?

Derek Osgood: I do think it very much depends. Unfortunately, as with all business questions, it's like, it kind of depends. For most startups, especially when they're technical founders who don't have a marketing background, I would definitely recommend starting with a product marketer. But you have to find the right product marketer. You have to find a product marketer who actually can flex into the growth marketing work, which a lot of them can. Especially if you're looking at product marketers from bigger companies, they just haven't had to go and operate the knobs on Facebook ads or on building out SEO programs. That's a level of tactical expertise that is tricky to find.

But I think that most startups, early on, the primary things that they suffer from are product marketing problems. It's like they're either priced wrong; they're positioning isn't clear or isn't hammered out. They haven't identified what the right persona for themselves to target is. Those are product marketing things. But if you have a very narrow, clear product where you feel like you have really clear message market fit and people understand what you do, and they're converting at a higher rate, all you got to do is generate leads. In that case, you should be really hiring a demand gen person who can just fill the funnel.

Being an Early Employee vs a Founder

Alex Kracov: So you've been an early employee at a number of companies and worked with tons of early stage companies as well. I'm curious how has it been different as a founder. Juxtaposing those two experiences, what's it been like being a founder for you?

Derek Osgood: It's funny. I mean, it feels pretty similar. I will say that the biggest thing is, I feel like I'm back at the beginning of my career again where it's like I went from classic - I forget what's the effect. It starts with a D. I'm blanking on it. But a classic case of, I thought that I knew everything, then I didn't know anything. Then I thought that I started getting good things again and really started to understand my roles as head of marketing, head of product at these companies. Then I dropped back into a new role where I'm suddenly just flailing around in the dark again on half of the things that I'm doing day to day. So it just feels like a big learning experience again. Then on top of that, it also is just like you're taking all of the complexity that exists of being an early employee in a department and then amplifying that by all the departments in the company. And so it's really hard being the first marketer in a company. It's really hard being - it's five times harder being the first marketer for a salesperson, first product person, first everything else. So it's just more intense in most cases.

Alex Kracov: It's a very humbling experience. I think you start questioning yourself like, wait, do I actually know what I'm talking about, this or that? There's so much rejection and so much uncertainty as you're building and doing things. And it's funny. You talked to a family member and they're like, oh, you're the CEO. It's like, well, CEO really means I'm just doing all this bench work all the time. I have an early employee on every function. It's such a funny thing, yeah. But existentially, you just have that pressure too of, like, "Am I going to make it? Is this going to work?" I feel like I feel that way more as the CEO than I did as an early-stage employee. Because I was like, yeah, whatever, it doesn't work. His problem. I'll go do something else.

Derek Osgood: Yeah, fortunately, you just go get another job. As a founder, you feel like your entire identity is tied up in the company. You're just like, if it doesn't work, then my life is over.

Alex Kracov: Yeah, so true. Maybe a good way to end it would be, like, what are you most excited about for Ignition this year? Is there a product you're excited about just the year ahead? How are you thinking about things?

Derek Osgood: Well, two things I'm excited about. Well, kind of cheat here. One is, we were talking about measurement for launches. We got some really cool measurements stuff coming in the end of May. That's going to help truly prove the impact of launches and normalize that across all the other growth metrics in your company. But I think the thing that I'm most excited about that's happening in a much more near-term capacity is, in early April, we're going to really have wrapped up this whole underlying data layer. Right now, if you think about how Ignition works, there's a bunch of specific workflows where we help collect data and do things with it, for example, in competitive Intel. But it's all going to feed one giant underlying data lake so that basically everything that you would do as a product marketer can be automated based off of your actual customer feedback.

For example, you're going to have all the customer conversations that are happening across your company. It will be able to create all the feature ideas for you out of that for your product team. It will be able to map that to upsell opportunities for the sales team based on your account data. So that when those things ship, we can automatically notify sales and tell them about the thing that they should go sell. Then when the product marketing team is building out their go-to-market plans, we can create all the collateral for those go-to-market plans. Not just based on your messaging and some basic GPT rapper-style inputs but based on actual customer language. It's refined based on your top 10 customers. So you can basically get a full end-to-end product roadmap, go-to-market plan, and all the content, a feedback campaign built out for you almost instantaneously.

Alex Kracov: Really cool. Really, really cool. Especially, like, I always struggled to close the loop with a customer or a sales prospect. You build a thing because somebody asked you for it. Then you're like you do that three months later, and then you never close that loop. And so that's amazing that you guys really make that super easy. If people want to check out Ignition, reach out to you, where is the best place to find you?

Derek Osgood: I mean, Ignition, we're at haveignition.com if you want to go check out the product. But if you want to get in touch with me, I'm all over LinkedIn. It's linkedin.com/derekosgood3, I think. So get in touch.

Alex Kracov: Awesome. Thank you so much for the time today.

Derek Osgood: Yeah, thanks for having me, Alex. This is a blast.