Developing strategic positioning and messaging is crucial for several reasons, including the fact it allows you to differentiate your product from your competitors', build a consistent brand image, create messaging that resonates with your audience, etc.
Here's what these industry giants have to say about the topic:
- Caroline Caldwell (VP of Marketing at Blend360)
- Natalie Mullin (Developer Platform and Product Marketing Lead at Zoom)
- Abhishek Ratna (Head/VP of Product Marketing & Demand Generation at DevRev)
The importance of simplicity in product positioning and messaging
Caroline Caldwell
What advice do you have to give to somebody who's getting started when it comes to developing strategic positioning and messaging?
Natalie Mullin
As product marketers, we’re strategic partners to product from very early on in the product development process. Another foundational facet of being a PMM that goes along with that is bringing clarity from the beginning of the process and well beyond go-to-market.
And with strategic positioning and messaging, that’s when you have to deliver utmost clarity. In order to do that, you yourself have to be very clear on a few things:
- What’s your intended goal?
- What’s the ultimate outcome you need?
- What action do you need to be taking regarding your audience?
- Who do you want to take that action?
- What about your positioning and messaging is going to ultimately inspire them to take that action with your product versus a competitor’s?
Positioning and messaging are very much about bringing order to the chaos of all of the different messages that are thrown out there at customers by competitors and the market at large. And frankly, it's our responsibility to cut through that and equip our audience to zero in on our solutions.
From my perspective, it's about being very truthful, very direct, very intentional, and free from jargon and what I call ‘buzzword salad.’
I think people are afraid to be simple and direct, especially in tech marketing, and I say it to my team all the time: “Focus on outcomes, not output.” And that translates to positioning and messaging. It's not about how many words or how many big words you can throw out there, it's about outcomes.
Recently, I came across some positioning and messaging for a product out in the wild, and it was very heavy on buzzwords and on the problem and the problem statement.
Ginevra Mambretti
Of course, you need to acknowledge the problem, but the focus needs to be on your solution. You have so few characters and such limited time to grab somebody’s attention; they don't need commiseration, they need solutions. They need to be crystal clear on how you're differentiated from a competitor in terms of similar or adjacent products and solutions.
Another thing that’s really critical is that you always have to be thinking about where and how your positioning and messaging are going to be used and who’s going to be using it.
As PMMs, our audience isn’t just external, we have internal stakeholders too, so your positioning and messaging need to be authentic and repeatable. It needs to be something that your solutions architects, sales engineers, developer advocates, and evangelists can use and be consistent with.
Your enablement teams are also going to be using it to train salespeople. When they’re going out in the field, they need to be able to use that language too.
Your CTO is going to be using it with peers, other executives, and decision-makers, so your positioning and messaging need to be able to be used by them. And you want it to be authentic to those conversations and meaningful to the caliber and the types of conversations that those stakeholders are going to have to ultimately drive that awareness and adoption and usage of your technology.
One last thing is that I get very focused on how few words I can use to drive maximum value and meaning. I'm very much a word nerd. My background is in film studies. It's very heavy on psychology and the art of language.
You have this construct of the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the word you use. But then there's everything that’s signified by all of the meaning behind that word.
I very much use that as my personal north star to focus positioning and messaging and keep it focused on being simple but pithy, and about shared usability for impact and business outcomes.
Abhishek Ratna
Something that I've learned that’s helped me in my career is that when it comes to messaging to developers, context is everything. It's very easy to have simple but ultimately ineffective messaging because it doesn’t land with your audience.
What I've typically seen when marketers make that early transition into their local marketing, and I’ve made these mistakes too, is we end up making a couple of mistakes.
The first one is that we end up writing safe copy that promises vague results without explaining how these results were achieved. Developers can smell it from a mile away when you're making a claim or a promise that's not backed up by a very logical reason or rationale. That's an immediate no-no.
The other thing is that way too often we can get hyperbolic about the benefit or the end result that our product will allow our developers to attain, and we're not diving enough into the problems they're facing right now.
You have to understand that developers are problem solvers at heart. They already have a modus operandi or a set of heuristics for solving the problem at hand, or they don't care about solving it. In either case, you have to understand where they are in their journey and be very precise in the guidance you offer them so that they can engage with your message.
Anil Kumar Krishnashetty
Caroline Caldwell
What I love about this is that it applies to companies of any size. Whether you're working in a startup or whether you're in an enterprise, the strategic positioning, the models, and the watch-outs that we talked about apply across the board because the audience still needs those essential items like simplification and context.
How to get buy-in across the business
Caroline Caldwell
We know what we need to do for this developer audience, but sometimes we find difficulty in getting that buy-in across our partners, across our teams, and within our organization.
How do you go about getting that buy-in for positioning and messaging that's across cross-functional partners in the space?
Abhishek Ratna
It's important to recognize the swim lanes, especially if you're working at a midsize or large organization. Developer marketing is but one function that has to coexist with consumer marketing, developer relations, product marketing, engineering, and a bunch of stakeholders who are engaging your audience through different channels.
So, learning where you can have the most impact is important, and where your stakeholders look to you for having the right answers and the most impact is also crucial for this role.
One area where I found most of my stakeholders turned to developer marketers for insight is market research and audience research.
Non-marketers often look to us as the team with the most insight into our developers. But the more grounded our messaging is in customer research, the more we can showcase the data behind the how and the why of what we’re proposing, and the more likely we are to get favorable alignment and outcomes from our peers.
The good news is there are a lot of resources out there. I consume a lot of research from Stack Overflow and SlashData, which have great reports on the state of the developer industry.
If you're in a niche space, like I am in AI and ML development, then you have communities like Kaggle, which have a tonne of great research on the state of developers and the state of audiences. I highly encourage you to consume that research.
The other thing is also taking an active interest in the jobs to be done and the context. If you can articulate that research within the context of how your developers are solving their problems and your messaging is within that context, if your pain points are very precise, then it's very likely that your stakeholders will respect the message that you're creating because there's automatic credibility attached to your answer.
And, finally, collaborate away. Messaging development provides fascinating opportunities to collaborate with your stakeholders and build those bridges.
For example, we were bringing a machine learning compiler stack to market, and I actually organized messaging workshops with our engineering leaders and stakeholders. And it was fascinating when I heard them describe the pain points, the desired benefits, and the value that the solution will bring to our target audiences.
I was just blown away by the level of insight and depth, and that actually allowed me to create very powerful messaging.
You can use all these three levers.
Michael Stowe
Natalie Mullin
For me, it really cuts to the core of prioritizing. Ultimately, you can have all the inputs and opinions in the world and you can have all the research, but you still need to distill all of that into something that’s usable and that you can execute against.
In order to do that, you have to have the underlying buy-in, so you really have to prioritize who actually needs to have buy-in versus who needs awareness versus who's a contributor. Always be thinking about things in that RACI model, who needs to be informed, and prioritizing that way, but bringing stakeholders with you.
As PMMs, we’d love to go down endless research rabbit holes, but ultimately, things have to get done and you have to be a bit ruthless about that.
Caroline Caldwell
When we think about all the different audiences that we reach out to to give any of these updates, product announcements, or technical labs and demos, I think this really applies to how we think about the developer audience specifically.
How do we need to bring them along in our journey? And how do we work cross-functionally in our organization to make sure that what we're doing has a catered aspect to that developer audience, which may be slightly different to other personas we're also trying to reach? And taking that additional piece into context always helps create that strategy.
Prioritizing and demonstrating impact to a developer-specific audience
Caroline Caldwell
How do you consider prioritization and demonstrating impact to that developer-specific audience?
Natalie Mullin
Depending on what part of your business you're aligned to in terms of marketing and marketing resources, unfortunately, the reality is that we’re not at the top of the food chain for resources and budget.
That being said, I look at it as frankly a fun challenge. I'm a startup girl. I've been elbow to elbow with five dudes at Plug and Play in Sunnyvale, and I work for Zoom which is a very large company, so I’ve learned how to be very scrappy.
I think it's also a great forcing function for building and executing more integrated, solutions-focused marketing because ultimately, we can't talk about anything being a solution or a fully baked platform solution unless you're talking to your customers as developers.
Developers are our customers. For too long they've been treated as separate audiences with a divide, and that has to stop. There’s a different developer persona with distinct business needs, but they’re still customers or potential customers.
Zoom customers are not only using our front-end product, but we're also equipping them and giving them access to parts of that underlying technology that enables them to go and build that type of experience and that functionality into their own products for their own customers.It forces integrating a developer focus into that broader message around the product as a fully featured solution for customers.
I find it fun. It's an evergreen opportunity to find ways to integrate again into that broader customer marketing, and packaging for reach and impact across not just core programmers.
As a business, we have to infuse our positioning and messaging specific to our development solutions and value props across personas like CIO, CTO, programmer, DevOps, and architect because these are the same people who are evaluating Zoom meetings and webinars and other products, and they're looking for ways to extend those throughout their own business use cases.
Teresa Garanhel
There are ways to artfully fold into other things to maintain some of that priority with the overall marketing strategy and resources.
I always position it as I'm just incredibly nosy, but It's because I genuinely love understanding how the other parts of the business work together and orchestrating that. And I think we really get to do that on the dev marketing side of the house.
Abhishek Ratna
One simple thing that allows me to prioritize is being laser-focused on the user. It's always easier when we work back from the end user and we can highlight the top problems that they're working on. And that sometimes even allows me to help get prioritization for projects that may not be considered immediate priorities from our peers.
Caroline Caldwell
I think it's so important to make sure that we're hyper-focused on what we're trying to achieve, and I think that feeds into the prioritization because we can't boil the ocean here. We've got limited time and resources, and our developer audience has limited time and attention. We need to make sure that we're putting the right things in front of them and really prioritizing in that way.
One thing that stands out to me was something I saw the other day on my LinkedIn feed: never underestimate a developer as a potential buyer or influencer.
A lot of times we categorize a developer as this non-budget holder. But the truth is that developers come in all shapes, sizes, and forms, so we don't want to dismiss any possibilities with that developer audience because they’re very technical.
But because of that, they have enormous influence within their organizations when it comes to products, services, and tool adoptions, and being able to feed that back into the success of the company. It's so important to always prioritize but not limit that audience to the capability they may have.
Rethinking how we communicate technical concepts
Caroline Caldwell
When we think about prioritization and the strategic messaging of it, we really want to talk about how we're simplifying that technical jargon.
What do you think is the best way we can simplify technical jargon so that our audience understands, but not so much that it loses its essence, which is such a fine line to walk?
Abhishek Ratna
I do two things. When I got started in my career as a developer marketer, I started looking to more credible publications for inspiration. I’d actively consume and try to mimic the writing styles of the likes of Stack Overflow or Hacker News when the messaging piece was more technical.
And when it was more businessy or high level, I’d look to the likes of TechCrunch or VentureBeat so that I could adopt the mindset that these tech entrepreneurs had, which actually works well with developer audiences.
But then, getting into the nitty gritty, it's like you mentioned, Caroline, it's absolutely important to simplify ruthlessly. Developers prefer content that’s simple, contextual, and accurate, and the industry validates this thinking.
Within the AI and ML industry, Hugging Face has the most popular documentation in the community. I highly encourage marketers looking to understand how to be more simple, contextual, and accurate to read through their docs.
Here's a very simple hack that I’ve found. I realized that my axiom is nouns over verbs. What that means is I’d retain the nouns to the extent possible to hold on to the specificity, but ruthlessly hack away at the words.
Teresa Garanhel
Let me give you an example. This was a sentence my PM and engineering team gave me:
XYZ is a unified compiler stack that defragments the silos across ML front-ends and hardware back-ends.
It’s great, but what does it mean?
So I rewrote this as: XYZ is a unified compiler stack that allows you to work with any ML framework on any target hardware.
The benefit comes through and the message is clear. And when the message is clear, it's powerful. And this sentence was actually used at a Google Cloud Next keynote by an executive of ours.
So, hack away, simplify, and clarify with context. That's my mantra. But I’d love to hear from Natalie.
Natalie Mullin
We as developer marketers are quite lucky in that there's this great companion to our content: technical documentation.
On the Zoom side, we have an extensive doc site. Our docs team is a phenomenal group of people. They're really wonderful to collaborate with.
And because we have resources like that, that frees us up on the marketing side to not have to rely so much on really technical jargon or overall technical language and our more upfront positioning and messaging.
For example, “Here's our key positioning and messaging. Hopefully, we've inspired you to take the next step of wanting to see our documentation to get started and learn more.”
It's not even about it being palatable. I don't even look at it as empowering developers. They don't need to be empowered. That's jargon that I loathe. We're dealing with very smart, scrappy people who love documentation. They can figure it out. They're used to using the community and the forums and knowledge bases to solve. They're empowered.
Teresa Garanhel
You want the core of your positioning and messaging to get them to go to the documentation. That’s one of the primary CTAs as a developer marketer. We want the CTO to say yes and sign an agreement. We want the developer advocate and the TSA to say, “Yep, this looks like a great solution that we can implement.”
But it's, “Show me your documentation. Get me in a test environment. Let me play around with your build flow.”
Ultimately, we can be very simple, and it's just making sure that we’re inspiring them to take that next step. You don't need to dress it up. You don't need buzzwords. If you do, you're getting further and further away from what you should be doing.
Sometimes, I take myself and other people through this exercise. Strip every single adjective, adverb, descriptor, and accessory word. Pull it all out of there, and what do you have left? That's okay. It's very simple. It's to the point. Is it inspiring your intended audience to go do what you want them to do? Great. It's okay to be simple.
Mastering developer messaging: Key takeaways
Natalie Mullin
Keep it simple. Prioritize for outcomes, not output. Be focused on inspiring your audience and your personas to do the actions that you want them to take and be authentic about it.
And finally, it's a team sport. Use your primary stakeholders, bring people together, and bring them with you. Ultimately, I’ve seen a lot of success there in driving those mutual outcomes.
Adeife Adeoye
Abhishek Ratna
I have three takeaways. One of them is that context is everything. While keeping it simple, don't lose the context. And that will allow you to create powerful messaging.
My hack is kind of a shameless plug to this, but nouns over verbs seems to work well in multiple developer contexts. So, I’d encourage you to try that and I’d love to hear what you find.
The third thing is collaboration. That's key, especially when developing messaging and positioning for more strategic projects. It's very important to bring your PM and user research stakeholders early into that conversation so there’s shared ownership, and that'll allow this messaging to percolate down through the organization.
Caroline Caldwell
I’d just expand upon two quick points. The importance of strategic positioning and messaging as a whole isn’t something to be ignored in terms of our developer audience. It's such a key element to putting anything in front of this audience.
It’s about going along and using these different models and tools and collaboration points, but making sure that we're actually prioritizing the message and the positioning itself at the start of this journey is so important for this audience.
And the other thing I’d say is expand beyond just collaborating with internal stakeholders. Collaborate with your developer community and audience as well. What do they want to see? What questions do they have?
Go and become an active member of a forum, or go and join StackOverflow and look at the conversations that are happening there as well. That way, you can really think about who that end user is and if it’s really going to get that benefit across to them, rather than just your company's perspective.
Collaboration all around is really key to making the positioning correct.
Katie Miller
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