How I Wrote My 3 Most Viral Posts

1. ARAatir Abdul Rauf0:00

   I feel that when I started doing PM, I was so bogged down by making sure that I was doing releases, writing the PRDs, working with designers, engineers, and I think that's still an important part of the job. I'm not, I'm not diminishing that. But I felt that I missed out on a lot of the business value simply because I didn't understand the concepts. Interesting thing about this one is the visual is so simple. Every product out there has a magic moment, and it's important that that magic moment is protected. So even if you've achieved product market fit, there's no guarantee that you're gonna stay within it.

2. AGAakash Gupta0:33

   Then if you look at the writing on this post, like, Aatir nailed it with the research. Each and every paragraph and line is, like, brand-new detail.

3. ARAatir Abdul Rauf0:41

   In terms of comments, because you've got tons over here, how do you deal with them? Like, uh, obviously there are appreciative comments, and then there are, there are, like, uh, the negative ones. Some of them obviously have very interesting points of... So advice number one-

4. AGAakash Gupta0:58

   Really quickly, I think a crazy stat is that more than 50% of you listening are not subscribed. If you can subscribe on YouTube, follow on Apple or Spotify podcasts, my commitment to you is that we'll continue to make this content better and better. And now on to today's episode. Hey, Aatir.

5. ARAatir Abdul Rauf1:18

   Hey, Aakash. How are you?

6. AGAakash Gupta1:20

   Great. It's been so long. What are we gonna be doing today?

7. ARAatir Abdul Rauf1:24

   Today, we're gonna break down three of each other's LinkedIn posts, which we really love, and, uh, we're gonna go deep dive into them and, uh, figure out what we love about them.

8. AGAakash Gupta1:33

   Awesome. So let's get into this journey of the post. I wanna start with your latest post on the new trio. All right. So walk us through this. Who is the new trio in product?

9. ARAatir Abdul Rauf1:44

   Yeah. And I, I think before we even explore the new trio, I think we need to reference the, the old trio. And, uh, a caveat over here that we're not, or at least I'm not saying that that old trio is irrelevant anymore, which was the product manager, the engineer, and the designer. Um, previously, the question that we used to ask was that, you know, "What is the bu- product that we need to build?" And, uh, "Is it the right product? Who do we need to b- to build it for?" And, uh, "What's the b- right strategy around that?" But now what we're seeing is with the emergence of AI and now the whole effort of building product and building features is collapsing because of technological advancements, I think it's becoming a lot more important for companies to start working on their go-to-market strategy, their differentiation, their positioning and messaging, along with how they smoothen out their acquisition and retention expansion channels. And I feel that while the product manager, engineering, designer trio still is relevant to get the right product, uh, to build out the right g- go-to-market strategy and build bridges to right consumers, you need a lot, uh, uh, some other stakeholders into the mix. And that's where the product manager, who still owns what the product needs to be, is relevant, but then you also have the product marketer who creates those resonating messages, reaches out to the audiences, and makes them, you know, really convinced that this is the product that they need to buy. And then once those have established that covalent bond, uh, then the growth marketer comes in and then just catalyzes the entire ecosystem by making sure the acquisition and retention is supercharged. So I believe that moving forward, SaaS companies will need this trio to scale product market fit, and not just build the o- the right product, but also build the right product such that unit economics work out and the businesses essentially thrive. Um, so if you go back to Marty Cagan's, uh, you know, four properties for a product, we already talk about, you know, valuable, uh, products and then feasibility, then there's viability, and then there's, uh, uh, you know, desirability, so on and so forth. I feel that the question about feasibility, whether we can build it, is becoming less relevant, uh, although it still needs to be considered because you don't wanna throw your resources everywhere. But now the question is a lot more about, if we do build it, will it actually scale, and can we actually crack a profit out of it? And now that we've emerged out of the growth at any cost era, I think this is just gonna be the new trio that's gonna lead us into the future.

10. AGAakash Gupta4:21

    And I think it speaks a little bit to the rise of the product marketing and growth functions, which are a little bit newer, but now that they're picking up in their prevalence, this trio is actually something that can exist.

11. ARAatir Abdul Rauf4:35

    Yeah, absolutely. Um, I think there's a lot more education going around around, at least, especially the product marketer role, which was kind of like ambiguous at, at one point, and now more founders and leadership, uh, teams are finding value in product marketing because there was always this disconnect between, you know, the product kitchen, which was churning out this product and the features, and how customers were consuming it and understanding what it was. And I actually felt this back even in vFairs as well as other products, that we, we, we would, uh, you know, push out a number of features, and we would talk to customers later on, and there were a couple problems that were prevalent. One, they wouldn't know that they even existed. That was a awareness issue. And the second thing was that they didn't really understand the value of that product and in a language that they could resonate with. And that's where we started understanding that product marketing is gonna be that bridge that we may be churning out or coming out with some amazing features, but for customers to really understand it in the context of their use case, you need someone to own that messaging and positioning. Um, and that's why product marketers are just becoming more and more relevant to the conversation. And I think with growth, now that there's a lot more education out there in growth tactics, especially we're gonna talk about growth, uh, loops, uh, in a bit as well, I think, uh, that's just becoming, uh, a part and parcel of how you're gonna scale a business once you've established product market fit. In this trio, I have to-You know, throw in a caveat. I feel that the product manager and product marketer role are the prerequisites, and they have to first establish, you know, a very strong bond with each other and make sure that they own the launch. But the growth owner is probably not someone that comes in day one. They actually join the equation after some semblance of product market is fit has been established. But then they're, they're a really key player in making sure the business scales.

12. AGAakash Gupta6:34

    So you wrote about how the common mission here is to achieve sustainable PMF. Is this kind of based on the idea that PMF is always collapsing, and you always need-

13. ARAatir Abdul Rauf6:43

    Yeah

14. AGAakash Gupta6:44

    ... to be working to ke- maintain it?

15. ARAatir Abdul Rauf6:46

    Yeah. You know, the analogy that I used to give, uh, for PMF was that if you have a blow dryer and then you put a ping pong ball on top of it, and then you still have to just maintain it. So even the slightest external force on the ping pong will dislodge it from that airstream, and that's what PMF is. Like, we've already seen it since 2021 that so many market dynamics change and shift. AI just came into the, uh, foray and, you know, it kind of like displaced so many different startups and products, and they had to pivot. The pandemic was another factor, uh, but these are more extreme cases. Even at, at a niche level, there are market dynamics that keep on changing, so even if you've achieved product market fit, there's no guarantee that you're gonna stay within it. So this is really important that, you know, the previous trio was really focused on building the right product. Here, the question is that, okay, e- even if we have the desirable product at hand, how do we make sure that we remain cost efficient, we reach the right audiences, we keep on growing, uh, and then we don't lose on because, you know, uh, customers have churned, and we, we keep on, uh, that retention rate that's, uh, desirable for our stakeholders. So that's where this trio sort of specializes, and that's the value that they're gonna bring.

16. AGAakash Gupta8:03

    So what are these areas of shared understanding?

17. ARAatir Abdul Rauf8:07

    Yeah. Um, just like any trio, you need to have all those three, uh, stakeholders to sort of converge and, um, agree on a charter of things that, that, th- that are important for the company. Because if you don't have that alignment, then all these three stakeholders might be working in different directions, and they're rowing in different directions. So the first part, which is obvious, is the vision. That needs to be one vision of what they sort of see where the product is gonna be. What is that one problem that, that they really wanna solve for the pro- for the customer, and how do they want to change the ecosystem? What-- Who's the villain in the equation? And they identify that this is the status quo that they're gonna be challenging. Then there can be a number of different pain points within, um, within that particular domain, and all the three stakeholders need to agree, like, how do we prioritize those problems? What is the most important problem in that stack, and, uh, and what are the first two that we're gonna be targeting, and which ones are gonna be deprioritized? Then there's a, a concept called magic moment, and I feel that every product has one or two aha moments that surpass every other aha moment that they have to offer. So, you know, when you think about booking.com, the aha moment is when you have that booking and when you arrive at that hotel and when you check in and, you know, it actually serves your value. When it comes to with, for Uber, it's when the car arrives and you get in and, and, you know, you're, you're at the place you want to be, and so on and so forth. Every product out there has a magic moment, and it's important that that magic moment is protected. So you don't want the growth marketer to start coming up with experiments where the magic moment doesn't even appear in that growth flow. The product marketer needs to know that this is something that needs to be prevalent in all the positioning statements or the messaging, and the product manager needs to make sure that th- this is, this magic moment is protected, and it doesn't lose its, its permanence or, or its essence. And then that ties into the metrics that matter. All three need to know what's the one metric that really the customers and the product really cares about, apart from revenue. Revenue is kind of like everything and, and profitability. But, uh, but then you also have some product metrics, uh, uh, and North Star metrics that you would want to optimize for. And then finally, the playing field, what you're up against, and adoption barriers. Like, what are the typical objections that customers have? And if you know and understand that these are the objections that you want to minimize to create more growth, all three can work together to, to achieve that. Yeah.

18. AGAakash Gupta10:37

    And then you describe some of the individual goals. How would you summarize those?

19. ARAatir Abdul Rauf10:42

    Yeah. So, uh, like if I was to create little mantras for, for each one of them, so product manager is still doing what they do with the other trio, which is building the right product for the right market. And the product marketer, uh, is, you know, articulating that value and architecting that GTM strategy so that they reach the right audiences, uh, and that too in a cost efficient manner. And then once those two are, are operating, the growth mar- marketer or the growth owner comes in, and they accelerate that entire ecosystem, making sure acceleration of, uh, acquisition and retention expansion happens organically. Now, that could ha- happen by injecting growth loops. That could happen by doing a lot of experiments in the acquisition or retention aspects. Um, but all those three have their individual goals, uh, but they all come together to, to achieve a common purpose. So, so yeah, that, those are, uh, the mantras that they have.

20. AGAakash Gupta11:39

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21. ARAatir Abdul Rauf13:36

    Yeah, exactly. One thing that I, I truly believe is that, um, when you have a trio or a dual, uh, role, you wanna have as much coverage as possible in terms of influence, because if you have all the bases covered, you can really drive a product or a business forward. And what I like about this particular trio is that their union of influence is nearly the entire company. So when it comes to a product manager, they're working with designers, engineers, and research. Product marketers are working with the sales side or the revenue-facing side, and then growth marketers are working a l- lot more with internal stakeholders and data and analytics. And then all of those three sort of combined, uh, create a central influence on the executive leadership. So, so I like the fact that there's universal coverage in terms of influence.

22. AGAakash Gupta14:26

    I like how you've laid it out there. So then you detailed this with the activities, and the PMs are getting discovery, prototyping, prioritization, roadmap, feedback analysis. That's what everyone knows about. What are growth and PMM owning?

23. ARAatir Abdul Rauf14:40

    Yeah. So PMM, it will be owning positioning, like how do you position your product in face of competition? How do you differentiate yourself? The messaging that you're gonna be using, the actual words for that. The launches, which is extremely important. How do you introduce a product or feature into the market, not only just for new prospects, but even your existing customers? As I mentioned, one of the problems that we had was that we kept on expanding our product, but even our existing customers weren't aware about the new features that would be launched and how they were contextualized for their use case. Um, and then apart from that, it's go-to-market strategy. What kind of brand awareness channels or, uh, cost-effective, uh, acquisition channels are you gonna exploit? So when I think about products like HockeyStack, right, um, you may not know what they're, they're doing e- specifically in terms of product, but I see them everywhere. I'm a marketing leader. I see them everywhere on LinkedIn, on their ABM campaigns. I see them on Reddit. People are talking about them. And they've done that not by throwing a fortune at paid media, but, but making sure that they are very, very strategic about the audiences they want to reach. If you think about RB2B or SparkToro, you know, they're two SaaS platforms. They're great innovations in and of itself, but if you think about how they did f- founder-led brand, that's a product marketing activity for me, and the way they've made a choice of targeting the right persona. And when it comes to growth, it's, you know, making sure that h- looking at the journey, that acquisition journey that, uh, customers are having into the product, and then over time, reminding them of the value that the product is providing through retention hooks and bringing them back into the product and making sure that they, they keep on seeing that value. And then growth loops, right? So how can you make a user sort of bring another user in by doing some action? When you look at Figma, uh, a user is not only just creating a Figma file, but they're also sharing that out. Now, that could be within the organization or externally, and that just introduces another user into the ecosystem. LinkedIn is the same thing. You create a pro- you create a post. Somebody shares it. That post might travel into a WhatsApp or a, a Telegram thread. Somebody might sign up for LinkedIn just because of looking at that post and, and then interacting with it. Um, and then conducting A/B tests. Now, obviously everything isn't, uh, set in stone, so you have to test a lot to make sure you understand what the audience behavior is, and you can optimize for that. So those are some sampling of activities. I haven't covered all of them, but, uh, it should give you a good idea how they work together.

24. AGAakash Gupta17:14

    Awesome. And then throughout this post, you go through more on the PMM-PMM alliance-

25. ARAatir Abdul Rauf17:18

    Yeah

26. AGAakash Gupta17:19

    ... PMM growth alliance, unpacking these alliances.

27. ARAatir Abdul Rauf17:23

    Yeah.

28. AGAakash Gupta17:23

    When you came up with this post, what really motivated you to talk about this new trio?

29. ARAatir Abdul Rauf17:30

    Yeah. Um, so I think we had been talking so much about the old trio, and the challenge that I was facing was that, uh, I felt that product management and product marketing typically in many organizations are siloed, and product marketing is seen as a marketing function that sits under them, and there's a sort of like a handoff process. The product will create the product, and then they'll just hand it off to product marketing and, "Go ahead and do your email marketing campaigns and whatever." And the communication between them, uh, as well as, uh, the communication with growth is very limited. It's almost as if it's like APIs just handing off parameters to each other. Like, that's not the way it should be, and that's the-- I first felt this within vFairs, and I said that, you know, "We need to break this model."Product managers and product marketers should be talking to each other from the start of the development cycle, and they should be exchanging notes, whether that's for discovery or voice of customer. They should be talking about market feedback loops a lot more so that product is more informed about what to build and product marketers are more informed about what the product capabilities and limitations are. And that's where I thought that, you know, we talk about, uh, different alliances, but this one seems to be a lot more prevalent. And with the advent of AI, I think it's just gonna become even more, um, more evident that this is required and needed. And as, as you mentioned, product marketers are becoming-- you know, there's a lot more awareness about how product marketing helps, and there's a lot better distinction between traditional marketing and product marketing. I think it's just apt to, uh, to introduce this concept. I, I don't think there are many companies who have adopted this, although, like, you could say that, uh, you know, in-- they haven't really formalized the trio as such. But, uh, they do have, um, success stories which are built around product growth and, uh, product marketing coming and doing their bit to, uh, scale the company.

30. AGAakash Gupta19:25

    And so have you guys taken up this trio at vFairs?

Episode duration: 1:16:36