Pragmatic Marketing Rule #9

This is the ninth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.

Rule #9: The building is full of product experts. Your company needs market experts.

There's nothing worse than a marketing person who knows little about the product they're marketing. Matters not whether you're "just" in marcomm, minimal fluency is required. The bar gets raised for product marketing and product management, of course.

But as the rule says, if you're in technology marketing: the building is full of product experts. Developers. Services folks. Sales engineers.

Nice if you can demonstrate your understanding of SOA, your appreciation of MDM, your giga-intimacy with bits, bytes, and all assortments of herz's.

What the company also (and really) needs from marketing is insight on what's happening in the market - in general.

• What's the competition up to?
• What trends - technical and business - do you need to keep an eye on?
• What's up with the wonderful world of compliance and regulation? (Eek, it's everywhere.)
• What's going on in the verticals of interest?

Not to mention what's happening in the market - in particular. I.e., your customers, your prospects.

• What's lurking out there that might have an impact on your customers and prospects - and how they might benefit from your product at this particular time.
• And just how do those customers use your product?
• What connections are they making between the features and benefits?
• What are they asking for?
• What do they need that they aren't asking for?