The art and science of building efficient product marketing teams

I am bringing up often ignored or overlooked aspects of the skill building and training needs of today’s product marketing teams. Read this article in whichever way you deem fit – as a senior executive wondering why the internal talent pipeline is so thin or as an entry-level marketing associate who wants to understand what it takes to step up.

There are no quick fixes in this article about building a self-learning, self-correcting, continuously experimenting team. Your team members as individual contributors may be the best at what they do, but if they lack the critical overlap of basic understanding across different areas of the business, then working as a team could be difficult.

Let me be more specific. Your CRM team should be proactively asking your data analysts about the sample size required for statistical significance to evaluate campaign performances. The design team should be able to communicate the principles behind proximity, similarity and symmetry of your product design to your customer service teams. The marketing team should be able to explain to your data analysts the psychology of relativity and scarcity used in a promotion. Primarily, there is a need to communicate the fundamentals and be aware of it regardless of which team you belong to. How else is a healthy friction created?

Today’s product and marketing functions require team members to be knowledgeable about psychology, design, mathematics and technology. Fundamentally, be a master of one and jack of all. This is also needed to address any gaps in skills and experience that may exist between teams. It could be as simple as making it work between an experienced designer and new member of the email marketing team, or an internally promoted business intelligence lead and a seasoned COO.

The next question is how do we work towards creating this environment? We often view skill upgrading and training as an ad hoc activity that ticks boxes for the annual appraisals. What it needs is a disciplined structure of training, time and practice. It is possible to create a multi-disciplinary training programme in budgets of three to four figures, and big and small team sizes. Just search for the right set of courses on MOOC portals like Udemy, Coursera and edX.

A year ago, I successfully implemented a similar exercise where all product marketing team members had to go through the same set of courses regardless of their orientations and skill sets.

Emotional quotient

Now I have dealt with technically enabling teams with the right skill sets, let me cover the part that can’t be addressed in this manner: the emotional quotient of your team members, and especially those with people responsibilities.

An important lesson I have learned is they cannot claim to be ‘customer oriented’ without being ‘team oriented’ – if they fail to display maturity in one of the areas, there’s a huge probability that they will fail in the other one too.

Data-driven decisions are important, but so is the ability to live with the fact that not everything needs or can be measured, and not all negative trends or indicators need to be reacted to immediately. Given the dynamic nature of the gaming industry, the ability to deal with changes, and be comfortable with imperfect solutions and the unknown, is often undervalued.

The notes in this article are a result of my work with quite a few colleagues and immediate managers in the past decade. Looks like I was lucky, as they all turned out to be simply amazing in their respective areas and good teachers as well.

Bhopendra Rathore is a product marketing and CRM professional with more than a decade’s experience across gaming and betting verticals. He is currently working as product director at No BS Bets.