In this episode of The Unicorny Marketing Show, we pull back the curtain on a crucial, yet often overlooked, role in marketing: product marketing. Host Dom Hawes sits down with Leonard Burger to explore how product marketers act as the glue that binds sales, engineering, customer success, and strategy.

With product marketing well-established in the US but still emerging in the UK, this conversation digs into the core responsibilities that product marketers handle every day—simplifying complex products, aligning internal teams, and ensuring the customer’s voice drives business decisions.

Key points:

• Product marketing as the essential glue between departments.
• The phases of product marketing, from internal conversations to messaging and deployment.
• Product marketers’ role in bridging gaps between teams, including sales, engineering, and customer success.
• How side hustles can contribute to the core roles in marketing.

If you're curious about the wider role of product marketing, this episode will shed light on how it influences various parts of a business.

About Leonard Burger

Leo is a product marketing specialist by day and fintech geek by night. Currently active in fintech marketing, his professional experience spans across multiple industries and countries. Besides marketing he also has a passion for startups, innovation and venture capital.

Links 

Full show notes: Unicorny.co.uk 

LinkedIn: Leonard Burger | Dom Hawes 

Website: Leonard Burger bio

Sponsor: Selbey Anderson 

Other items referenced in this episode:

Product Marketing Misunderstood by Richard King and Bryony Pearce

The Customer-Funded Business by John Mullins

Chapter summaries

The Role of Product Marketing in Business

Dom Hawes introduces the episode, focusing on product marketing's role as a key connector between different business functions. Leonard Burger, the guest, is introduced.

Leonard's Journey into Product Marketing

Leonard shares his career journey, from starting as a pricing analyst to becoming a product marketer, and explains the unique responsibilities that come with this role.

Key Qualities of a Product Marketer

Leonard discusses the essential traits for product marketers, including curiosity and the ability to understand technical details while connecting them to broader business goals.

Defining product marketing and its core responsibilities

Leonard explains how product marketing evolved from the tech sector, especially in Silicon Valley, and its role in connecting technical and strategic elements within a company.

Product marketing misunderstood

Leonard talks about the misconceptions surrounding product marketing in Europe and discusses how positioning and messaging are the core responsibilities of the role.

The four-phase plan for product marketing

Dom summarises Leonard's process for successful product marketing: understanding the product, crafting a message, identifying the audience, and developing product demos.

Product marketers as the bridge between departments

Leonard explains how product marketing builds bridges between departments like engineering, sales, and customer success, helping everyone work cohesively toward product success.

The challenges of aligning product marketing with other functions

Leonard discusses the challenges product marketers face in aligning with other teams and the time it takes to show the long-term value of product marketing.

The importance of face-to-face collaboration

Leonard stresses the importance of maintaining regular, informal communication within the office to keep marketing aligned with other departments, especially in a hybrid work environment.

Internal marketing of products

Leonard highlights the often-overlooked role of marketing products internally, ensuring that everyone in the organisation understands the product's value and story.

Wrapping up: Product marketing as strategic marketing

Dom highlights that product marketing now covers many traditional marketing roles, focusing on cross-department connections and consistent messaging both internally and externally.

What if the real power behind successful marketing wasn't found in the flashy campaigns or the latest tech tools, but in the unseen forces that quietly connect departments, align activities and give products a voice that truly resonates with customers? Today, we are peeling back the layers on a role that often operates behind the scenes. But it's absolutely essential to the future of marketing. And as you will discover, it's at the core of many of the conversations that we've already had here on the Unicorny marketing show. It's a role that's well established in America, but it isn't widely seen on this side of the pond yet. And we're going to tell you all about it right after this. You're listening to Unicorny and I'm your host, Dom Hawes.

Now, in past episodes, we've explored everything from the importance of brand storytelling to the rise of tech driven innovation in business. This time, we're turning the spotlight onto product marketing, an often misunderstood yet vital role that acts as the glue binding sales, engineering and customer success together. It's a role that transforms technical complexity into compelling narratives and shapes the very direction of a company's product strategy. And in a world where markets are shifting faster than ever, the relevance of this role cannot be overstated. And we're not stopping there. In true unicorn fashion, we're going to push beyond the job description to explore how marketers are finding inspiration in places you might not expect. Side hustles, personal projects and flexible work models that are reshaping the way we work. They're reshaping our workspaces.

Well, we're going to show you how these external pursuits are feeding back into core roles, driving creativity and keeping marketers on the cutting edge of trends. If you've been with us before, you will know that we like to challenge conventional thinking and today's episode does just that, revealing how product marketing breaks down silos within organisations, but more importantly, drives innovation and engagement. Just what's needed in the fast paced world that we are all clinging on to. Let's get started.

Delighted to welcome Leonard Burger to the studio today, our first ever product marketer.

First ever.

Oh, no pressure then.

No pressure. A bit of pressure.

Only a little bit. Well, it's very nice to have you here because it's the first of the P's, always. When people talk about the four P's of marketing, it always starts with product. Yes, and although I whinge all the time about how marketing these days is seen as pretty much promotion, only, we haven't really done much about product or.

Price or indeed place.

So maybe that starts today. Welcome anyway.

Thank you. Yeah.

Where have you come to us from today?

I've come from Bristol.

Very nice.

I bet it's absolutely roasting at this time of year, isn't it?

It is, yeah. Still quite rainy, but I think it's one of the sunniest cities in England. So.

Is it?

It is.

It's very nice.

On average, when you're not pushing statues into the docks, it's a nice place to.

It's quite a revolutionary city, which is good for a product marketer because we also do storytelling. So that's quite a few stories in Bristol there are.

And a very big creative industry as well.

True. And yeah, music especially.

Yeah, music and film.

We used to go down to Bristol, do our post production.

Cary grand is from Bristol.

Oh really?

Yeah.

There you go.

He was born street behind my son's school.

Wow. Okay.

Who knew? Why don't we start by you telling us a bit about your background and how you ended up in product marketing.

It's a long journey to come to product marketing. I think that one of the reasons for that is because the discipline is fairly new in UK and Europe. I started off as more of a marketing and pricing analyst at a small dealership group in the southwest. Because of my never ending curiosity, I ended up in market research and I think that formed my thinking around products and place and price and all of these things within marketing. So that was more of the marketing research side. I was talking to cpgs about how their products were selling and where they were selling and how good they were selling or well, they were selling.

This was at Nielsen, so I was there for about four years that was more standardised, was managing client relations, doing the analytics and kind of presenting back to various departments within brand marketing or pricing. All of these things eventually. Then I ended up in a random conversation, which I have a lot. I have a lot of random conversations, both virtual and in person with the MD of Ipsos in the Netherlands. So I'm originally dutch, so that helped. It was a dutch conversation and he kind of said, why don't you come over for a more proper kind of formal interview? Which I did. I travelled to the Netherlands because obviously I'm based in Bristol.

I've been there for twelve years and I had a nice conversation about tech and fintech and ive been following the industry for a long time, which is one of the topics we all dive into as well. I was asked to present back what I knew about fintech. I had a very nice short, to the point presentation about the UK fintech scene to a dutch audience, which was interesting. They were mostly looking after financial services in the Netherlands. Based on that one interview, they decided to hire me as a product consultant. They had a different title for it, but I called it product consultant because essentially what Ipsos does is they have various verticals within their organisation that deploy all kinds of research methodologies.

And my role was to talk to clients, talk internally to researchers, talk to various people within different departments and kind of have those conversations, understand what the client needs in terms of research, what kind of answers they're actually looking for. Because often it's something simple whereby it, when we're talking about a product, as you say, the product is at the heart of everything. We're trying to bring something to the market and the product can be tangible or intangible. So deploying research is basically understanding your buyer Personas and that is also a core part of what a product marketer does. So this kind of formed me over the roughly two years that I worked at Ipsos to realise that I love product management and product marketing management.

So at first I kind of dove into product management and thought, okay, I'm quite geeky so I like Python, I tried doing it. I think I'm too much of a social animal to sit down and code every day. I ended up kind of going down the product marketing route and I got a call from a recruiter who was working at Sopra Banking at the time and she kind of said, do you want to work for a fintech? I don't think so. Pro banking can be classed a fintech. They've over 5000 people and they're part of a larger group. But obviously it's always good to think that you could be part of the cool gang. So one thing led to another and I started my first official kind of product marketing role two and a half years ago now at Sopra Banking.

That sums it up nicely in terms of my career, but also in terms of my interesting the geekiness and fintech as well being at the heart of all of that.

Do you think that kind of geekiness, the sort of curiosity, but to a very small degree, is an essential quality for product marketers?

Definitely, yeah. I think you, to be a successful product marketer I think you have to be both a bit, very curious, a bit geeky. So wanting to go down the rabbit hole of any given topic, obviously business related, but equally being a generalist, so understanding the different functions within a company and understanding why they're there, what everyone is doing, and then try and find a way to connect those dots internally.

I think it's interesting, the route that you've taken in. You mentioned price and you've mentioned place.

And mentioned market research.

You spent four years at Nielsen, which everyone will know. It sounds like product marketing is the inheritor of what traditional marketing might have been, minus the promotion piece.

Yes. Yeah, definitely. I think so. Product marketing kind of originated in Silicon Valley. I'd say it's the tech sector that came up with it, product management wise. They needed some people to connect the dots on the technical side, so connected devs, connect the organisation with the strategy and all of that stuff. And then I like to see product marketing as the layer on top of that. Because if you talk to a product manager, it often gets very technical, which for most people, if you understand the business and you understand the product is not really an issue. But if you are a busy bank CEO, for example, you can't really dive into all of the technicalities. You just want a simple story. And that's where the product marketing manager comes in, the messaging, the positioning. Where do you position your product?

In front of the right audience. Price obviously comes in later. That's a later stage, because at first you want to be in the right place with the right product, in front of the right audience, be it CEO's, be it CFO's, it depends. Depends on the product you have.

We've sort of skirted around this. Let's definitively at least get an opinion on what we think the core responsibilities of a product marketer are, as opposed to a more generic marketing role.

I'd say it differs from company to company, from market to market. Again, it's having originated in the US, in the UK and Europe, we're a bit behind. So a lot of the day to day of a product marketer is to explain what value they bring to the organisation. There's two people in the UK that started the product marketing alliance and they actually wrote a book called product Marketing misunderstood. So that's quite interesting because it tells you that a lot of people need this kind of explaining and they've done a survey. The result of that survey was that positioning and messaging is kind of the core responsibility of any given product marketer.

And again, I've had various conversations with people looking to get into product marketing and I always say that the first thing you should do, especially if you're already working in an organisation and you're looking to kind of transition to product marketing, or if you're going into a new organisation, I'd say have those internal conversations and talk to everyone within the. Within the business. What is their understanding, what is the story of the products that you're selling as a company, and what is the story of your company as well? Because you can mix and match those in terms of the positioning and messaging. There's always an interesting story from the founders, from how you got from being founded to where you are now. And there's pivots along the way as well, in terms of product and how the product morphs into what it is today.

The core responsibility is very much finding out that internally, but then also doing some market research. At that very first stage of product marketing, depending on your organisation, there's kind of a standardised framework that you could deploy where stage one is having those internal conversations, but equally having in depth conversations with your product managers. So you do hope that if you come into an organisation as a product marketer, that you have an established product management function within that organisation. Not always the case, but there will be people that are responsible for product and you'll have those conversations with them. What is the product roadmap like? What are you envisioning for the next six to twelve months, and how should weave that into how we talk about product? Now, the second stage is kind of defining your messaging.

So you've got your messaging document, that's kind of stage two. There's all kinds of standardised templates, boilerplates that you need for events and all of these kind of things. Again, you can tweak those based on what you need, but I'd say that's kind of the core story that everyone should tell. So again, you can deploy that messaging document across the organisation. There's a cheat sheet at the beginning, usually, that you can kind of distribute to the third, wider organisation. Then you go into the various other stages. It's never that linear in any given organisation, but you kind of try to get that linear red line and doing this stuff while also doing other stuff in the background. But that's your core responsibility. Then you start deploying stuff. Depending on the product, you might have LinkedIn campaigns, Instagram campaigns.

Again, B, two C and B two B. Product marketers are very different things. I wouldn't say that you couldn't do either, or I think you could do both if you're curious, geeky individual that loves thinking about product and innovation and all of these things. And then you've got stage four, whereby you do more in depth stuff. So you create your demo, your product demo, something short, snappy. Depending on your product, it might be a 32nd video, it might be a two minute video and then getting that into the right places in front of the right people. Again, going back to those initial phages where you've done your research either on your own or by outsourcing it or depending on the size of the organisation, you might have an intelligence market, intelligence team within your organisation.

And that's kind of the four stages roughly I would say, of product marketing and your core responsibilities.

I'm imagining in your current role, without going into too much detail about a particular company, but if we just use that as a canvas, you've got a product marketing team, there's a product management team. So the management I'm guessing are doing feature sets, the roadmap, that kind of stuff. You've got a general marketing team, I'd imagine, and you've got product marketing in terms of like a day in the life of what's the difference between the work that the product marketer is doing rather than the marketing department?

Again, it depends on the organisation you might be embedded in the marketing team. In some organisations, what I've seen, I'm quite active in the startup ecosystem as well. So what I've seen in various scale ups is that they're embedded in the product team. I would almost say that ideally you have your product marketer as a free, depending on the size of your organisation you might have multiple, but they're operating as their own entity. Coming back to the main difference between the marketers life and a product marketer's life marketing has various, as we all know, you have digital marketing, you have field marketing, all of these things and they have a core focus. If you're a field marketer, obviously you take care of the facilities around events. Do we have our posters, do we have our roll ups, do we have all of those things?

Now what is on those roll ups? That's the product marketers, the responsibility. So you would work as a product marketer with all of these different departments within marketing to make sure that what they put on LinkedIn or what they put on the roll up at an event is correct and it's the correct story.

That's for your product.

Right, for your product. Exactly.

So thesis here being that the products are so complicated, yes. It needs a specialist dedicated to them.

Exactly. That makes sense and that's why it originated in Silicon Valley, because a lot of tech products are fairly complex to understand. So you need to simplify that as a product marketer to simplify, anything that's complex of all of us being intelligent human beings at heart, is a lot of work.

Yeah, it's really hard.

It is really hard in two sentences telling a story of, you know.

And the problem is the people that haven't seen the work happen, they come back and you tell them what this thing is, and they go, that's not very hard. Exactly. They've got no idea.

And they try to do it themselves.

They try to do it themselves.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, there you have it, folks. A four phase plan for how you go about product marketing. Phase one, do your homework. Get around the company. Talk to the engineers, the technical people, and understand not only how your product works, but what it solves for your customers. Phase two, convert your understanding into a message, a benefit led piece of writing. This gives you the basis for just about anything you produce, from a boilerplate to a shelf wobbler. Phase three, identify where your customers are and convert the messaging into stories that drive them to phase four, where you go deeper by creating fulfilment pieces, like short films and demos that actually show the product in action or that provide a case study of what it does for the customer. Lovely stuff. But I think there's more to what Leonard is telling us here, my friends.

And it's bigger than a four phase process, as useful as that is. Leonard is really telling us that product marketing today is what many of used to call marketing because it's all about understanding what you're selling, what it does for customers, who they are, and where to find them. Oh, and, of course, what to say to them. Now, that's three out of the four P's, right? Product, place, and promotion. It's a highly strategic mix, and it's only missing price. And that's because price has become so complicated these days, it kind of makes sense for it to be determined elsewhere in the now. I am going to run the risk.

Of getting myself cancelled or no platformed.

But maybe it's time we removed the word price from the four P's and replaced it with position. It's highly debatable. I know. I'm definitely going to get cancelled. But position is within our purview, and it does get at the old objective of price to find the space in comparison to the competition. And that's kind of what positioning does. But let's park that crazy talk, because I want to revel in this moment for a minute. In a marketing world where it feels like everything has come down to promotion, isn't it refreshing to talk about the whole gambit of what we do. Isn't it great to talk about the varied steps needed to take a business and its products to market? In fact, I like what Leonard's saying so much, it's making me wonder how he relates to all of the other departments.

In an organisation, as a marketer, focusing on promotion, you're kind of siloed. But when you regain control of the whole process of marketing, you've got to get right across your whole firm. Let's get Leonard's point of view on that right now.

So there's one thing I've learned throughout my career. Engineers, particularly in tech, hate marketers. They think they're all idiots.

They tend to like me. That's fine.

Exactly. This is the point I'm coming to. How does product marketing help bridge the gap between different departments, like, for example, engineering, sales, customer experience or marketing? Because it's an age old conflict that. And it seems to me that with product marketers, that doesn't exist.

Correct. I think product marketers are kind of the glue in between all of the different departments, or they're meant to be. Yeah. So obviously, depending on how good the product marketer is or how well they can establish themselves within the organisation, because that's also, again, the misunderstood point that I made earlier. So there is a kind of a Venn diagram, again, product marketing alliance. I refer to them a lot. Obviously, they're kind of the main staple organisation or community within product marketing. They've got a Venn diagram that kind of shows various circles. So again, it's sales, marketing, product and customer success, or client account management, whatever you want to call that. And then you see product marketing at the heart of that.

So product marketing is kind of the glue between all of those departments and product, essentially, or hopefully you'll have your product managers have good relationships with your engineers and you wouldn't necessarily need the engineers to like you as a marketer. But again, it's good as a product marketer, also have those conversations with engineers. So did you understand a certain amount of the technicalities that you know, the languages that are the coding languages that are being used and all of these things? If you have an interest in that would be good, but it's not necessity. If you have a good, established product management department. Again, product marketing being at the heart of those.

They are meant to build those bridges and connecting those dots between sales, customer success, marketing and product, because you'd have product doing something and then sales may be going to product saying, oh, we need this but if you build a product exactly the way in which a client describes it in a sales meeting, you're going to end up with a monstrous beast that looks nothing like a product and that's only going to work for them and probably only for a very short time. So it's better to have product and product marketing kind of working closely together than being the translator between sales and product, and being the translator between marketing and sales as well. So as a product marketer, you'd also find yourself in conversations.

Maybe your digital marketing team is being berated by a salesperson like, oh, you're not bringing in any mqls or SQLs. And then as broad markets, you try to define that issue of what is Sil saying? What is the voice of the customer? But again, this also depends on how well all of those departments led you in. And that's also a skill you need to have. You need to have those skills to make people not necessarily like you, but at least make them want to talk to you, make sales want to invite you to a sales call, or in a follow up call to a sales call, like where you know you've had this call with a major prospect that it's a major revenue opportunity. What did they say? Win loss analysis.

Again, it's another thing that product marketers do whereby you have to talk to those salespeople, but also potentially to customer success because they might have conversations with clients who are maybe complaining about something or they're interested in another product. What are they saying? Really being the voice of the customer internally as a product marketer, and then connecting those internal dots as well. I think that's how you as a product marketer would build those bridges.

I was a bit flippant, maybe. In fact, definitely when we started saying that engineers hate marketing. But, you know, I've met many, many engineers who think that marketing doesn't need to exist. And I think part of the problem is that they speak a different language. And maybe product marketing is a bridge because in your case, you've got a technical background and you know the coding languages because you're deeply ingrained in the product itself. And the benefit to the customer. Definitely, there is literally a bridge that they can see.

So we've talked about the role and.

We'Ve talked about how you can help bridge gaps. But what challenges are there in trying to align product marketing with some of the other functions? What are the headaches that product marketers have to deal with?

A lot of headaches. You need to, obviously, relationship management is hard we know that, be it external or internal. So making sure that sales is happy with what is happening in terms of marketing is also sometimes, you sometimes end up in a conversation with a salesperson saying, oh, this isn't working, that isn't working, why isn't that working? And you'd have to explain on behalf of your marketing colleagues again as a product marketer as to why that might be. But equally, the value that product marketers create is a long term thing. So having those conversations with all the different departments and also your senior leadership about the value you're bringing and the impact of doing the job right takes a longer time.

If you are relatively new as an organisation, relatively new with your product marketing function, it will take some time, it won't be overnight that the impact of doing research on your buyer Personas and making tweaks to your messaging, positioning your product in a different place, it just doesn't happen within the first, it doesn't even happen within the first three months. It takes literally months for it to take effect. And then maybe your LinkedIn campaigns all of a sudden start performing a lot better. You're in front of the right audiences and all of those things. The challenge is there is consistently on a daily basis because your CEO might come in or your CEO might come in, not revenue. And then sales is going to say, well, actually, yeah, it's because marketing is not doing their job.

And then the product marketers, but we hired a product marketer, he was going to come or she was going to come in and fix everything. It's not going to be that fast, right? You're not going to see a multiply effect to your mqls. So again, having to explain that value that you bring on a daily basis to all the various actors within the organisation, I think that's the biggest challenge that product marketers face, especially in UK and Europe, where it's a relatively new distribution.

And I'd imagine, I'm picturing now, where an organisation has or is developing a product marketing capability, there being some conflict maybe with the corporate marketing team who are probably having some of that work taken off them, and also maybe a little bit of conflict with sales, because this is almost like a challenge balancing role, because you've got the market that's asking for functionality and asking for innovation, you've got your product management and engineering team who are trying to build roadmaps, you're trying to satisfy and keep customers happy, that you're moving in the right direction while managing all this other stuff.

At the same time.

Yes.

Do you work 59 days? How does that happen?

It is tricky. And I think at the core of all of this is a go to market. Right? So as an organisation, products are at the core of your organisation because that's what you sell and people lose track of that or lose sight of that sometimes if they're very focused on their role. If you are data analyst, or if you are a business analyst, or you are coding for just a particular feature within the product, you might not see holistically, you might not see what it is actually we're doing and what we're trying to sell. Making sure that you retain your sanity as a product marketer, that's really important. Making sure that, again, coming back to your point about innovation, market demands, keeping an eye, keeping a track on all of those things. You'd have to find whatever industry you're in.

You have to find the kind of the key things. There might be a podcast, or there might be some other very niche podcasts that you can follow. You can listen back to it, read up on some summaries of what is happening in your market. And that could be relatively quick. Keep your finger on the market pools while also having those conversations internally. Earlier, were standing outside, we're talking about homework, for example, and office working, and I think that's post Covid. A lot of organisations are grappling with that. Do we go back to the office fully? Do we do hybrid working? Do we allow people to work remotely fully? And I think that's one of those things. The face to face contact is super important, especially for a product marketer. I'm not saying that all product marketers should be office based five days a week.

Definitely. I wouldn't be able to, my school runs to take care of and all of that. But it is important to have regular contact there, even if it's a ten minute conversation, because you know what's going on. You see that salesperson, or you see that product manager, or even the other day I was talking to an engineer, he was saying exactly what you said earlier. What is marketing like? He literally just came, what is it? What does it do? I don't see it. And then I basically fed him the same line and say, look, especially in product marketing, obviously marketing is slightly separate, but again, we're intertwined, holistically, understanding what it is we're selling and making sure it's in front of the right people at the right place, right time to make sure that they buy it.

Because if you're coding away there and you're focusing on that, which is super important, but it's not getting sold, or you're not seeing what's happening in the market, or you're not keeping your finger on the pool, so you'll end up like Kodak or you'll end up like Nokia. So those are obviously the most famous examples. But there's so many. There's loads of them. That's marketing's role. You make sure that your product is at the right place, right time. And those are the, you know, the four P's, the five P's. I don't know how many P's we've come.

We're only allowed four on this.

We're only four.

There are seven.

There's seven.

We're scared of Ritson and we don't want the other three.

Back in the day, when I was a university, I had the four. The four P's. Right. And keep it basic, keep it holistic, to holistically understand anything, you need to keep it basic and then, you know, all the complexities there. Take it in. But then you have to translate that again.

Well, speaking of keeping it basic, of course, we all know, because we study Kotler, that the purpose of a company is to create a customer. The unfortunate thing is to get the customer. We need a product. So when engineers come and say, what does marketing do? We should be saying, well, we only need you because we need the product.

Right.

Because our purpose is to create a customer. And that's what we do.

Yes.

There's a power flip that needs to happen somewhere, I think.

True. Maybe not. I think so, yeah. I think the power flip might be within product marketing. It might be whereby, if you understand some of the technicalities, again, working closely with your product, I've read the book customer funded businesses. I think it's a professor in the US that wrote it a long time ago. But I loved how he was kind of. It was the early days of, I would say, product marketing, product management, coming to Europe and UK. How you describe, like, actually you can build your product together with your customer and imagine the understanding you'd have. You know, you're getting those early customers as a smaller startup, especially if you can build it together. And I know various founders that are doing that right now in the fintech industry, they have three or four early customers.

They are obviously, the customers are very open to them, they have good relationships. So they can build this together, because the customers have a lot of market insight as well. They're operational, they have their competitors, which, again, those competitors might be your future customers. They understand that competitive intel, they build your product together. And that power flip might happen when we can connect all of those dots, making sure that everyone has those conversations. And then there's the internal product marketing. And I think internal product marketing happens through internal newsletters and all of these things. Some of the phases of product marketing create collateral, obviously, sales, collateral, sales, enablement. That's part of a product marketer's job as well. But some of those demos, what some people might forget is to actually market their product to an internal audience.

So if you as an internal, if you're a product marketer, you're doing all of these things. It's fairly simple to kind of say, oh, actually we've got this 92nd demo, why don't I send it around to everyone in the company, have them have a look at it, and all of a sudden, you know, everyone that was so fully focused on whatever it is they're doing within the organisation, all of a sudden they understand the whole, actually, okay, this is actually what we're doing, this is what we're selling. And actually my dad knows the CEO of this bank and hey, I can send this to my dad and my dad could have a conversation or he comes over and has coffee sometimes and we have a nice conversation about football. But now all of a sudden, what is it actually that I do?

Oh, actually I'm an engineer in this company that does this. So that internal product marketing element using existing materials, you don't have to, it doesn't have to take hours and hours to do that. You just repurpose it and clearly send it to an internal audience to make sure that everyone's telling the same story.

That's really cool. What a terrifying thought. You mean everyone in the company actually knows what the company does and can explain it?

That would be crazy.

That would be Madden as you're talking. I'm thinking. So you may or may not know, we had Geoffrey Moore on Unicorny last December. And that co creation at the early stages, that's very much the innovation stage of the crossing the chasm technology adoption lifecycle. And what it strikes me is that actually as a product marketer, you're the navigator of that product right through the adoption lifecycle. So it seems to me that you are the person or the role that you are doing at the moment is the person and that is informing the organisation about those important pivotal moments in a product evolution as that technology gets adopted.

Definitely. I think it depends on your skillset and it depends on where you come everyone's different, obviously as a product marketer, but they tend to have commonalities. Again, being a generalist, being very curious and all of these things, if you can establish yourself well, again, doing all of those things that I described earlier, of having all of those conversations and explaining the value that you bring on a daily basis, again, you have to keep it short because as you say, you do a lot. You're part of that journey. You will be made part of that journey by everyone in co creation. And again, if you're lucky, it depends on the industry. You might also enter those client calls and have those conversations with clients.

And then you can, rather than just seeing a summary of a sales call or seeing summary notes or talking about it with a salesperson, obviously the way the salesperson tells you about what the client is telling them is different. So again, if you can do all of those things, truly understand that journey of innovation, you might even be able to identify as a product marketer, you might even be able to identify something somewhere along the line whereby you could tweak that to say, actually all of these customers are saying one thing and we're missing it. For example, in research, something pops up, we're missing it. Then you go to your product manager and then maybe they have a conversation and they would say, oh yeah, we tried doing that. Or no, our engineer said don't do it because no one wants that.

And then you have that evidence of saying, actually, yes, you should do this because this would create value for all of our customers, not just one. So I think, yeah, definitely you're part of that co creation process. You're part of, if you can, again, if you can establish yourself well, and that's a, I'd say maybe a shout out to all the CEO's and the cmos and the cpos and whatever c suite. Product marketing is important. I've seen it become more important. Like the company I used to work for, ipsos, they've now hired a head of product marketing as well. Because I'm not saying that I was the instigator, but I've had those conversations there early on saying, actually, if you productize research, because essentially it's a service, but they were talking about research.

We're talking about this, actually, if you productize all of those things, it doesn't have to be the same product each time, but there's a red line through a brand health assessment or a red line to a jobs to be done project. And if you do those things, if you productize it, you can truly create that value and you can simplify it for everyone internally. Again, coming back to storytelling, which is a key thing that product marketers do as well. You make sure that everyone tells the same story, but equally, you make sure that they tell the story in such a way that leaves a person wanting.

More, which I'm going to do right now. I've wanted all the way through this to talk about service and productized service. You just hinted at it. We're not going to talk about that in the next episode, but I would like you to come back at some stage in the future to talk about how you productise service and then how you manage productized service. But for today, we're going to call a halt there. Thank you very much indeed. I. And in the next episode, part two, we're going to start looking at a very modern phenomenon, which is embracing side hustles and how you bring learnings from outside into your daily work.

Looking forward to it.

The more I talk with Leonard, the more I feel like we should just drop the word product from his job description of product marketer. Not that there's anything wrong with. With being product oriented. Far from it. What this focus is showing us is that Leonard is actually a good old fashioned marketer. He's doing all the steps required to take a product to market and his goal is a happy customer. And in my book, there is no finer description of what our job is all about. He's even talking about how you bridge the gap between the external and internal views of an organisation. For me, that's something of a holy grail in our job, because when you can blur the lines between external promotion and internal behaviour, then you're really winning.

Now, on this thought, I've mentioned NASA's janitor before, but it's a story I love. When he was asked what his job was, his answer was to put men in space. Now, I don't particularly care whether that story is true or not. What I love about it is that it speaks to the ambition that we marketers should have, and that is to do our jobs so well that wherever you intersect our firm, inside or out of, up to the boardroom or down to the janitors basement, it bleeds the mission. And Leonard is clear on how he sees his role in all of this. He is the conduit. When we go back to his Venn diagram, pretty much everything and everybody is in there. Product and technical specialist, sales, finance, the voice of the customer and so on.

And he sits right at the centre of it. That's marketing. That is the whole kit and caboodle, pretty much. And what he uses to make sure that his role as a conduit works is a common language or one that makes sense for the business and the product people he's talking to. Now, that's something that's come up in many of our previous pods, the need to talk about things from the perspective of the business and not this language of marketing. It's a really important theme, and I do want you to listen out for it in future on this podcast. But even more than that, I want you to look out for it at work. When you're trying to get other departments on site, when you're trying to advance the course of marketing in your organisation. Look at how you're expressing yourself.

Are you talking your language or are you talking theirs? Okay, I think that's probably it for an invariant lightning, part one. And as I said to Leonard just now in part two, we're going to switch gears a little and look at the future. What does Leonard see happening in product marketing next? And in this, I want to include side hustles. Now, they're becoming a common theme these days, and I want to talk to Leonard about what they can teach us. What do we learn about product marketing from them? And how can we apply them to our day jobs? I promise you, it's going to be fascinating. Now, just for the record, I am not advocating that everybody on earth sets up a company in parallel with the one they're working for. That is not what we're talking about.

But I'm not going to tell you what we are talking about. You're going to have to listen. So join me for part two next time. And until then, if you haven't already done it, please subscribe to the show.

The bigger we get, the better we get.

And then, of course, the next pod will just appear like magic in your feed. What's not to laugh about that? See ya.

You have been listening to Unicorny. I'm your host, Dom Hawes. Nichola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor, and Peter Powell is our scriptwriter.