It feels like every startup wants to create a new category. 

Category creation has become the holy grail — but it’s not the only way to win.

Differentiating your company within an emerging category can be just as powerful.

(And it’s not all on you to explain what your new category means.)

In the final episode of Season 2, Jason Gatoff, VP of Product Marketing at Pendo, shares a ton of great advice, including:

--- Why colleagues and key stakeholders should be part of your messaging journey

--- How to level up your messaging by collaborating with your content and brand teams

--- Why you should never call your company a leader (leave that to the analysts and review sites)

Sometimes product marketers have to launch a little early. Sometimes they have to launch a LOT early 🙂 

So how do you create a positioning and messaging strategy for a product that isn’t fully formed or completely understood? When you haven’t got end-to-end use cases or customer feedback?

You go back to basics and draw from what you already know.

In this episode, Jiong Liu, Director of Product Marketing, Customer Identity at Okta, talks through an awesome example of how she did just that. Including:

--- Having a ton of conversations with customers to understand their vision for the future, their roadmaps, and the possibilities for the product. 

--- Pairing the vision back to real-world, ready-to-go use cases.

--- Deeply understanding the needs of the user and buyer personas involved. 

Not enough people talk about using your intuition during messaging development. Because it’s a total secret weapon.

The best product marketing teams have a gut sense about which messages will land with their customers, resulting in stronger hypotheses and faster messaging development cycles. 

And you can learn how to build your messaging intuition too.

In this episode of Adventures in Messaging, Jordan Greene, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Outreach, shares how his team nurtures their intuition every week, including:

--- Having frequent interactions with buyers and ideal prospects (even if it’s a quick coffee or 10 min chat).
--- Passively listening to sales call recordings at scale (one of his colleagues listened to 10,000 in one year!).
--- Sandwiching quantitative data between qualitative feedback to test and validate.

This plus what it’s like creating and building a new category, what it means to be “customer obsessed”, and how knowing your customer is embodied into the daily, weekly, and monthly rituals of the team.