Cold Open
Great. So I will just count us down and we will get going.
All right.
Jeff Frick:
Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick coming to you from the home office for another episode of 'Turn the Lens', and I'm really excited about this next episode. This guest I've known her for a long time. She's a phenomenal expert in this area called marketing and product marketing specifically in the world has changed. And she's been in the internet since the very, very beginning. So I'm psyched to get a little bit of historical perspective and more importantly, she's got some exciting news that we'll talk about. Once we get started so welcoming into the magic of the internet, uh, she is Martina Chenko, uh, Martina, you got so many titles. You're a partner at Costa Noah ventures. You're a lecturer at UC Berkeley. You're a member of something called the Silicon valley product group, and most exciting, a new author of your new book loved. So first off, congratulations on the book and great to see you. Welcome.
Martina Lauchengco:
Thank you. You, you have the advanced copy there. It's not even out yet.
Jeff Frick:
It's a mess. It's full of nasty. It's just, it's, it's got bent pages and dog ears and a whole lot of, uh,
Martina Lauchengco:
I love it. I love it.
Jeff Frick:
A whole lot of yellow highlighters. So first off, great to see you. So what is your primary? What is your primary role of all those titles and what do you keep yourself busy with every day?
Martina Lauchengco:
Well, my day in day out job is at Costa Nova ventures where I'm a partner and I work with early stage startups. And I do literally everything that I talk about in the book with these companies every day. So that is my primary job.
Jeff Frick:
Right. So let's get into it. Let's get into the book and thank you for sending me the advanced copy. Um, you start out right at the beginning with, with, I think a really interesting statement that you're talking about, product marketing, the skill, not product marketers, the people. And I think it's a very subtle but interesting distinction. You're talking about things that anybody can do. You just have to take the time and get the expertise and learn and execute. I wonder that I, I would imagine you've run into some, uh, people that don't think that that's the case in your, in your history.
Martina Lauchengco:
Yeah, but I would say it's largely been the work that I've done with early stage startups that has influenced this because typically they are resource constrained and this work must be done. It's the most fundamental marketing work. And a lot of people think, oh, I wanna sell, I should hire someone in sales. But if you don't have that product marketing foundation in place, sales won't be successful. Oh, I want a pipeline. Let me hire someone in demand generation, but they are not saying the right things to actually position you so that people know why they should care. Cuz you know, an invitation to a webinar is dime a dozen. How many of us just delete those? The moment we see them. That's why a lot of people don't understand that all the things that they want out of marketing or when they, they get funded and they say, okay, what's your marketing plan? People say, good. I wanna do a website. I would do all these things. And what I realized was people just didn't have this understanding of what is the fundamental foundation on which everything else builds. And that is especially in technology. It is a product marketing foundation cuz every technology company begins with a technology product. And so that's why I wanted to help shine a brighter light on if you are in technology, you need to understand what product marketing is so that wherever you are in whatever stage company, you know what it means to do it well.
Jeff Frick:
Right. You talk a ton about product market fit. In fact, you even say PMF, I think every now and then I listen to some, some conversations you had in some other interviews. But what's interesting about tech companies and especially new tech companies is often the market doesn't know it needs, it needs that product yet. And often, you know, you were at some really early stage companies and I'll just, you know, pick, pick Netscape. Um, you know, the world didn't know it needed a browser and the world certainly didn't know that the browser was gonna end up being, you know, the most effective application delivery vehicle ever. How do you address that when the, when there isn't necessarily a market and, and the customer doesn't necessarily know that they need this thing, it's a very unique challenge versus, you know, kind of optimizing and trying to get a few extra points of share in, in a mature market space.
Martina Lauchengco:
Yeah. That is such a great question. Jeff and the early stage startup companies I work with the vast majority of them are in this place where they are at the bleeding edge of what must be done. They've done this. They've discovered something that works really well in another company like, oh, we did this at Uber and they were 10 years ahead of most companies. And now we're trying to commercialize it and make it available to people who are five years behind. How do we show them that this is where, what they need or a security company that I'm working with right now where after they have a conversation, they say, wow, I didn't know this existed. This is super important. We really want this. But up till now, then their framing had been an old one and this is what, this is a lot of the art of product marketing, which is really truly understanding where the market and customers sit, what their mindset is, what their perceptions are and product marketing's about building a lot of those bridges so that the market can understand the context in which there is value for your product. And I, I talk in the book about the four fundamentals of product marketing and the very first one, which is why it's so fundamental. I actually don't spend a ton of time on it. The book, other than it's everywhere <laugh> is being an ambassador between customer and market insights. And that's bringing it both ways. It's taking the market and the customer insights that are relevant into the company to help position the product well, but it's also then representing it to the product team saying, Hey, if we let's make sure that what we're building is meeting this more acute need that we're hearing now that we're actually out there on the market and it's, it's being, it's sitting at that intersection between the go to market teams, someone at sales, it might be saying, Hey, if we have this feature, I know I could sell a lot more metabolizing that through to, and together with the product team and understanding, okay, what is the intent of what customers are trying to do? And what are the market implications, which is what the product market would deal with and what are the product implications, which is what the product manager would deal with. Right? So it is, um, it's a lot of work. And to your point about product market fit, it is very messy <laugh> and it is never ending.
Jeff Frick:
Right. So another, another really significant thing that's that's happened since, um, in recent years, right? Is this, this change of starting with a market requirements document, right. An MRD and then a product requirements document a PRD, which are these big encyclopedic stacks of PowerPoint slides, and then to create a product because you didn't get a chance. You didn't get a second chance. Uh, very frequently. Now you, you have a great story in your book about, you know, working at Microsoft and working on word and trying to get the two versions of apple and, and, and, and the PC version up to sync. Um, you know, it's, it's what, what, what often happens I think with the product managers is you kind of fall in love with the features and you start to fall in love with the product. And often we see people kind of forget about the, the, the problem that they're trying to solve. And, you know, the, the interesting use case that you tell 'em that story about, about adding an automated spell check without having to actually trigger the action within the app to get the spell check is such as this unique little twist in having a super high value feature. That's slightly under the covers. How do you expose it and how do you make sure that that's the right thing? And don't just get on this crazy. You talk about the old days of shrink wrap software where it's, you know, is featur, just how many features can you stick on the box on that laundry list? And it didn't really make a big difference. it's a different world today.
Martina Lauchengco:
We were talking today. Yeah. Two, two totally different worlds. And, uh, the one that I initially started my career in, which was, you got stuck with the product that you had for two years, and you had to, you kinda had to make it work with whatever you had. And in that era. So this is 30 years ago. You could fall in love with features and you could market the heck out of them because there were three major word processors, three major choices. There weren't a million different ways to get things done. And in the current era, it doesn't matter what you're trying to do. There is, uh, an incredible amount of choice, and there's an incredible amount of competition in every single category. And on top of that, of course, we have all the agile development processes and you mentioned PRDs and MRDs, like that's like scratching on a chalkboard for me. I'm like, oh God, I can't even hear those words cuz it feels so like old world in the same way that a chalkboard is these days. So which by the way, at UC Berkeley, I still have some classrooms where I have to use chalkboards. I'm like, are you kidding me? Get the chalk all over me. It's kind of funny. But anyway, to get back to it, agile processes have totally changed how products get developed and using high fidelity prototypes to communicate and help people understand what is it that people are trying to get done. And you're managing stories and story backlog. So it's, it's totally changed, modern product development has in a good way. I think what, what hasn't necessarily, what can't evolve necessarily as much or as quickly is the go to market side because you've gotta train people on what to do. And then they kind of, they gotta go with what they have or understand it, or a, a boatload of marketers. You have tons of marketing specialists, that're doing their job. And they're trying to make sure that they're, they see something that works and they double down on it. So the, that the shift that has happened on the product side is demanding that go to market teams also reexamine, what is it that we do and how do we do it? And how do we make sure that we're taking advantage of this incredible velocity that we have and this incredible stuff that's happening.
Jeff Frick:
So, so one of the really interesting battles that you were right in the middle of with the Netscape, , Microsoft back in the day is, you know, is a browser, an application, is it a company or is it a feature? And, and, you know, Microsoft in, in their competitive, uh, battle with when Netscape at the time, right? Decided that a browser wasn't an application. It was a feature, uh, within an operating system. But I think it's a really interesting point. And it's all about how you frame and you talk about the goal of the product manager is to frame the conversation, uh, around your product because you don't have full control of what other one everyone is saying. And there's so much information out there, you know, there there's, there's way more, more information for the customers to find out both about you and your product and your competition than there ever was before. But, but I think the, the Netscape browser, Microsoft Explorer thing is so interesting because it really is a battle of framing the conversation. So when you talk to people about how they should frame it and really kind of taking it up a level, if, if you're talking to some entrepreneur where, and when you say, Hey, listen, that that's not a company, right. That that's a feature or that's a product, or even it's a bug, right? Sometimes a bug can be a feature too, if it's in the right context.
Martina Lauchengco:
Yeah. Well, um, you talk about framing as being probably one of the most important parts of the product marketing discipline, which is set a frame first, before you start talking about your product. And just two days ago, I was working with an entrepreneur who basically set a frame that put people's minds in a different space. So he was doing a certain kind of security, but he was talking about a different kind of security. So cloud security versus data security, and the moment you set the word at cloud security, people think one thing, a whole set of competitors, a whole set of products that were completely different than where this person was operating. And when we got down to it, it's like, you've begin the conversation having to dig yourself out of a hole because you've set a frame that sends people's minds to a, a completely different place. So the first task is to orient. I mean, it's kind of like, we don't go anywhere these days without checking Google maps first, where is it that I'm trying to go? How do I get there? How do I plan this in my day? I'm setting a frame so I can put it in a context. And when it comes to products, everyone's trying to do exactly the same thing. They're trying to map what you are saying to their mental map of the world. And no two mental maps are exactly the same, right? This is why before anyone talks about a product of any kind in any category, the most important thing to do is to set the frame, let me set the frame, let me set the table. Where are we? What, what are we trying to do? And as it relates to new products, which is where I spend a lot of my time, uh, a habit we have is setting people's frames into the future. Hey, this really great thing that you want. Uh, let's talk about that. And there's so much between that person's day to day and, and the entrepreneur who's trying to sell this person on a future. That for a lot of people is two, three, sometimes longer years ahead. And you kind of have to give them the, the stepping stones, the breadcrumbs to get there and to follow your thinking and say, Hey, so are you experiencing this problem? And is it a pain in the butt? Yes. Okay. Well, here is an interesting thing that you can do about it, and that will make this a lot better. Here's why, and here's a product that can do it. And most of the time, the companies that I work with, they have inverted that here's this really cool product that can do this really awesome thing. Isn't that blended, and it can connect to these things that you're already doing. And here's the category that it's in. Yeah. And if you just think about the, the mental journey that most people need to go through, it's inverted. And I think that's a, that's the only takeaway people get from this. If you wanna be more market minded and understand a product marketing mindset, really ground yourself in that customer's mindset, again, that I'm ambassador customer market insights. That's like thing one.
Jeff Frick:
Right. Well, it's funny cuz every time you interview a product manager on a release of some new product, right. They're just like, they're like a proud parent, right? They're so happy that they birthed the baby and they, they wanna talk about every little thing that it does. And I think sometimes they forget about, you know, who it was for and what's the application and the customer and, and, and get overly product focused and stop really thinking about the solution and get kind of locked in. But I want to shift gears a little bit on that because one of the things, the, the challenges for a startup, right? The old adage that you either need to be 10 times better or want to the cost just to get people to change your behavior, right. They've already got established systems, they've got established protocols to get them to change, to bring in your new thing. It can't just be a little bit better, right? It's gotta be a lot better. And then one of the things you talk about in the value of storytelling as a marketer, it, and I tell people this a lot, right? And it's not, can you express it to your buyer? Can your buyer express it to their boss? Right? Because ultimately you're working to build internal, uh, champions who are ultimately gonna sell the deal. Right? You can sell it to your buyer, but ultimately your buyer's gotta sell the deal inside. And they're not gonna remember your spec sheet and they're not gonna remember all those details. So it really kind of drives home this value of keeping it, keeping it at a high level conversation about the core problems that you're trying to solve.
Martina Lauchengco:
Well, it probably makes sense for me to take a step back and, and cover what are the four fundamentals of product marketing. Now I've talked about the first one, a lot, which is fundamental one your an ambassador between the customer market insights. Fundamental two is you are a strategist where you're directing that products go to market. So you're seeing all the things that you and I are talking about and saying, well, what do we need to do? What's the work here? What are the right activities to bring us there? But what you're just ask me about our fundamental three and four fundamental three is being a storyteller, which is shaping how the product, how the world thinks about your product and fundamental four, which is you're an evangelist, which is enabling others to tell your story and the big thing in modern marketing to your point about, Hey, you need to be 10 times better. or 1/10th the cost for again, most of the world in which I live in is pretty new technology where the early adopters cost. Isn't the primary reason why they're making that decision. And it is much more about it has to be 10 times better. And I actually had this conversation with a, an older company, 10 years old, and they're trying to change market perception about their product. And one of the things we talk about is it's not enough to be a little better. You need to be 10 times better in an area that counts a lot for it to be noticed because in the modern era for people to talk about things, again, we have so many things in our lives that we're doing that we're using that are great, but for something to really stand out and be something we wanna talk about with others, it does have to be 10 times better. Or if you think about this in a net promoter score context, it needs to be 50, 60 seventies, eighties, because that's something to talk about, oh my Gosh, Jeff, you wouldn't like Jeff, last time you and I spoke, you were talking about this sound soundboard. You're like, oh, Martina check out the soundboard. And you were playing these sound effects. And I was like, just tell me what that is and I'm gonna buy it because you showed me it's value immediately. And you were talking about it with so much enthusiasm. You showed me immediately how you would use it. She were showing not just telling. And I was like, that makes complete sense. Now had you started our conversation saying, Martina, you know what you need is this really cool soundboard? I would've been like, whatever, Jeff, I don't have a professional studio. I don't need that. So it's all about, you know, how we engage in that conversation. And then I did the same thing. I went straight to my husband and I said, Chris, you wanna believe this cool sound effects that Jeff was playing me? It wasn't like, Hey, we need the soundboard. Here's the name of the product. Right. It was the experience that I was able to, that you shared with me, that I wasn't able to share with my husband that made him say, oh yeah, we should look into that. So that's great. That's what everybody's trying to do. And that's the modern marketing context is that there were 20 other things that my husband and I could have talked about that day. You shared something that was, oh, it gave me a story to tell, I have to applause. Hey, who, who doesn't. Play me some applause Jeff (applause sound)
Jeff Frick:
Well, I think that's great. Well, want segue, uh, to the modern world, right? Cause there's just so much more information out there, a), uh, that you control and that you don't control b) you know, we've seen in, in, in YouTube and I've watched a lot of YouTube cuz I like to, to see what's happening. I think that's kind of a cutting edge, medium and, and they're very much all the product people all get their stuff out early and have this, this small army of people promoting their products and doing test reviews. Um, so from kind of a content publishing point of view, um, from, with your marketing hat, how do you do it different in a world where there's so much information, uh, and it's not an asymmetric world anymore. And, and not only to, um, you know, I think, I think older people don't like all that other stuff out there, but, to actually embrace it and empower it and make it part of your total program.
Martina Lauchengco:
Yeah. So this is one where if, if you're, if you don't have knowledge of people like, oh, do content just put content out there. No, cuz everybody else is doing the same thing. Put out, this is the, the fundamental three storyteller, shape how the world thinks about your product, which means have point of view and it should be strong. Don't, don't be vanilla about it cuz there's plenty of vanilla. Sometimes it's being provocative. Sometimes it's having a controversial point of view. I think it, I think we should be doing more at the command line versus in graphical user interfaces cuz it's snappier it's faster and PS. There are millions of colors available in the command line interface that most people don't even know about. That will make most people go 'Really? I had no idea. I think of command line. I'm thinking of, you know, a handful of colors and certainly not a equivalent of a graphical unit interface.' So that's introducing that, that makes me lean in because it's something that I haven't heard. It's new. It's interesting. And maybe that's an example of a product that, that right now, there's an entrepreneur that is having that those precise conversations and people are leaning in because it's different than what they currently believe. It is. Uh, it is making them feel more informed, more educated and it's sparking their imagination in ways that are surprising them. So anytime you can do that, spark imagination, educate someone with something they didn't know. Those are the types of, of points of view that are, will carry a little further, will be a little bit more interesting. I now got something that I didn't have before. That was a gift and that lets me in my next conversation, carry that on and help illuminate others. So the best kind of content is going to lay a foundation for again, why your product would have value and that's going to start to shape a market in which people will perceive, oh, whatever it is that you're doing is clearly gonna have more value to me. This can happen in advance of a product being available.
Jeff Frick:
Right. That's Great. All right. So now I get, I got another one for you. So the, the difference between, um, value, uh, and cost when you're, when you're trying to figure out, you know, your pricing, um, and then specifically once you get your pricing and then there's packaging, which I think a lot of people confuse with pricing is just, it's, it's a simple bundle with a discount. How should people think about kind of cost versus the value, um, as a product manager and then how should they think about kind of packaging, bundling? Um, there's right. This, this constant, well, there's, there's, there's bundling within your own product suite, but then there's different topic, which is the bundling and unbundling of suites and applications like your experience with your Microsoft in the days, but value and cost, uh, and packaging. What do you tell people?
Martina Lauchengco:
So pricing is an art unto itself. That's something to know. And there are people that are amazing specialists at it, but in terms of the fundamental principles, think of pricing from the perspective of value engineering, not what does it cost me and what does it cost someone else? And you ask, ask about value. Cost is relative to someone's perceived value. If you told me, Hey, that soundboard is going to be $25, they'd be like, yeah. Oh my Gosh, I'm ordering that yesterday. If you sell, tell me it's $2,500, I might think about it more, but I'm gonna look at it through the lens of what's the value, is that creating that amount of value. It's not, even though you just added two zeros to the price, I'm gonna walk away. The way in which I'm making that decision is well, is it worth that much to me? Does it have that much value to me? And then I'll decide whether or not I lean in or not. So if you think about pricing, it's very, very important to think about how much value will we be providing this organization that we said, <laugh> everybody likes to look pricing through the lens in which they can understand, which is okay, what can I compare this to? And the sense of value often is a relative one. Well, I'm paying this much for this vendor that I already use that does something that's valuable. How does this cost compare and is the value equal to me? So there's not an absolute sense of value. It's usually a relative one within a domain. So you mentioned that I teach students at Berkeley and we always do this final exam where people are, are actually doing market research and, market running market tests for actual products. And a lot of their lens for value is relative to my Spotify subscription, five bucks for, or my Amazon prime subscription for them. It's really cheap, but it's so worth it in value. And because they get so much value out of that tiny little cost, that's sort of like the unit of which they measure everything else, right? Well, is this more than my Spotify subscription or my Amazon prime subscription or not? And that's kind of the anchor for them
Jeff Frick:
Interesting.
Martina Lauchengco:
And then you asked about packaging and packaging is really where you can make things much more meaningful for a specific target audience or around a specific business goal. And, and that's the way I would think about it, which is not just, oh, we can bundle these things together. It's, I'm trying to reach a different market. So I talk about students, if we're trying to reach medical students, we might package something just for medical students, so that it's very, very clear for them. And the value calculus is specific to them. I'm preparing for these specific exams where I get access to these very specific features that I might need, because I need to be able to view view tissue samples in a flashcard set, that someone that's just looking at equations where quizzing themselves for a Spanish exam doesn't need. And so that's why you might package something, cuz it actually helps simplify the decision making for someone that's trying to assess value.
Jeff Frick:
Right? So it's really kind of packaging it around the use case for the customer This is great. All right, I've got another one for you. Um, so one of the things that we see today, right, it's just this hyper-personalization in everything that we get, right? Our feeds are all hyper personalized. Um, our news is hyper personalized, everything we gets hyper personalized and you know, and we, we talk about it often kind of the consumerization, uh, of, of, of B2B, right? Everyone, as you just said, your expectation is set by the best that you have on your phone, not necessarily the best business app or the, or the best app that you have at work. So as you think about micro segmentation versus kind of traditional segmentation where you had, you know, big buckets of differentiation, now people want it much tighter. How, how are you seeing kind of modern B2B companies think about micro segmentation, which probably begs a lot of questions about data, uh, to make it less of, we got five categories of customers, but now it's a much a finer grain way to look at the world.
Martina Lauchengco:
Yeah. Well, well the key thing that you said there, Jeff is, is B2B and, and it's a whole interesting world there and you all said another important word, which is data. It is extremely data driven. And what is really challenging about the B2B world is you might have the same. I just had this conversation yesterday where we're like, well, is this dev op or dev sec ops? And does anyone in dev sec ops actually have that title? Or is that just what they're doing? Titles are all over the place. Job responsibilities have broad ranges. And I shared this story about how there was this, uh, company that was trying to get evaluated by Uber. And they had their head of sales go in and say, Hey, we think you're a really good match. And we think we can meet this need. And they said, oh, we've already evaluated you. And this Rep said, you're not even in our CRM as, as a lead, how could you have already evaluated us? And they went back and they looked at their marketing automation software and they found over 70 people from Uber in all different organizations had gotten a little bit of information, not enough to cross into a lead threshold of some kind, not enough to put up a flag in their internal systems, cuz it was 70 different people that had done and participated in some way in this quote unquote "assessment" but it was sufficient for that company to make a decision. This isn't something that we need or want. That's an, that's a great example, probably an extreme example of what happens in the modern B2B buying cycle. It is no longer here's the, there might be a clear decision maker, but the influencer, really is that it's a broad mix. It's not as easy to, to target. Oh, if we have this person, this title, that's the right person to be talking to, might be way more people influencing the decision way more self-service driven than it was in the past. So the implications of that are... It's really, really important to pay attention to whether or not to, to all the things that are influencing a buying decision that are invisible. You won't necessarily see this, you won't necessarily get signal. And so the kinds of things to lean in on might be unexpected things like technographics, is a tech stack in place. That would mean that is that's indicative of the fact that these guys would be reasonably successful with our products. Like if they don't have the presence of product a B or C, it's probably gonna be hard for them to be successful. So maybe let's wait until that's in place. So technographics might, especially for tech companies might actually have a big influence on whether or not they're a good match. And then it might be the style in which an organization is organized. So if you have hundreds of data, engineers and thousands of data analysts, you're a very mature data organization. And you're trying to do a lot with it. Does the title matter there or is it, are, is that the style of organization that would experience problems that would make them have this need? So those are examples of how I, I won't even call it micro segmentation in B2B. It's kind of like, Hey, you need to understand where there is, where there might be pull and where there's a network, let's call it an internal network, that could be pulling and advocating and evangelizing because they have self-served and discovered, this might be interesting. Irrespective of the rest of the customer journey, which is still all the other stuff you talked about, oh, are, is, do they have the right revenue? Or are they in the right industries? All that stuff still matters, but it's all that other stuff in the modern customer journey that actually winds up being really impactful, hard to track, hard to make visible, but equally important to service.
Jeff Frick:
Right. <laugh> as you're saying that I can't help, but think of the old marketing mantra, right. which is I know, I'm wasting half of my marketing budget, I just don't know which, which half and, and for 70 people to enter your system at some point and to miss it, to miss them all is really not, <laugh> not, not good, but it just begs this question, right. Because the, as you said, the buyer journey is so different and people's, um, engagement with you as a company along that path, their amount of information, um, that they could have collected is so wide and disparate. So are you, are you planning they're coming in at, at step A, B or C? I mean, how, how are you, you know, kind of planning for that from a content point of view, knowing that, um, it's just not so clean and simple, uh, as, as it used to.
Martina Lauchengco:
Yeah. Well, I, one of the things I say in the book is presume that everyone is most suspicious and least interested in what the official marketing point of view is from your website. So that's like the, the, the, anything that is smacks of like official product collateral or here's an official case study. Uh, that's, that's gonna be a data point. It's actually not gonna be this major thing that we used to think. I go, I'm telling the world about this. And so it it's the, you know, depending on which statistic you believe, you know, somewhere in the 70% of all buying decisions are actually being driven by self-service, people are Splunking around, going to forums, asking their friends so much of this is happening in a way where they don't want it to be part of an official process. So if you think about where, where your official stuff can create influence it's at that last 30%. And so you're casting a net, an information net that lets people discover and feel validated by their perceptions in, as they're doing that self exploring. So what might that mean? It might mean there's a press article that covers you saying like, yeah, this is legitimate company in this interesting space. It might mean that in a competitor's website, they actually have comparison with you. Oh, they must be important because someone else is comparing themselves to them. Right. It might mean in something like G2, that is a comparison site you're listed, you're positively reviewed in Glassdoor. The employees really rave about working there, there are all these other, Crunchbase you're listed is the listing and what you do there, consistent with what you, what is described inside of Google. If they're different in every, like this has actually happened in a company I worked with, every official form you went to was a slightly different description. Like, well, they must have evolved a lot or which one is accurate. Nobody actually knows. So it's, it's making sure your digital, um, front lawn basically is an order. So because everyone's hanging out there before they even knock out on the door, 70% of the time is like before they're knocking on the door. And I think it's just realizing that, so that the right level of importance is placed on all those other ways in someone's experiencing what you say and whether or not it feels credible to them by the time they land on the official stuff. Right.
Jeff Frick:
What is the last piece they're usually looking for on say, uh, on say a well qualified buyer, you know, they've, they've done their homework when they finally get to you, is it validation on a challenge? Is it, uh, just some type of confirmation, um, that I'm looking for? What's usually kind of the last piece that they can't get without visiting the actual company.
Martina Lauchengco:
Actually, I don't know if there's any one last piece and I think this is, this is the ups <laugh> the, the plus and minus of the modern buyer journey is someone went off on their own, discovered something, and they can go straight to being a converted customer. I don't wanna talk to anyone. I just wanna click, buy and just be done with it. I don't wanna talk to anybody, that is a hundred percent possible. And then the inverse of that is true, which is like they take a year, they kind of come back and forth, back and forth. There's no one way. And there's no one thing. So I, I think a lot of the, on the B2B side in particular is just making sure that you're support. It's kinda like a classroom. We have to make sure every learning style is supported. We can't just only teach in lecture style or only teach in experiential styles. We have to have a little bit of each of those things to bring the point home and hope one of them lands, we don't get to, we don't get to poll our learners and say, what kind of learner are you? <laugh> right. And we always have a very diverse class, right? So same thing with your customer base, they're gonna wanna learn differently. And what convinces them in the end ultimately is gonna be highly variable. It's probably, usually not just one thing. If it is like we're cheap, we're free or something like that. That's not ideal <laugh> right. Because it's basically, it, it boils your value down to one thing that somebody else can take from you. So it's actually good that it's never just one thing
Jeff Frick:
Right. Shifting gears a little bit, in terms of ecosystems, and leveraging ecosystems to have a better chance at go to market, you know, partners, whether that be, you know, an open source ecosystem that you participate in, maybe that'd be an industry consortium or some type of group that you are with, or maybe it's a large system integrator, right? Cause you, you can find some system integrator that, that, that trusts you. And they actually have a much more trusted seat at the table at the Fortune 100 than, than some startup that nobody knows and, and don't necessarily wanna take a risk. So again, how does, how does the kind of ecosystem partnerships work into product management in terms of, getting some leverage?
Martina Lauchengco:
Well, it is important both for product managers and for product marketers and product marketing in general, and for the product manager, it might be a faster way to get some, uh, some functionality into the product. For the product marketing aspect. It might be a faster way to get a bigger market footprint, and it might be a shared commercial arrangement. It might be a pure marketing arrangement where it's like, Hey, let's share lists. Those are much lighter weight. And I'd say generally underutilized, like, Hey, we have a lot of the same customers that we wanna reach. Let's just join forces and do a contest together or something like that. It doesn't have this have to be the super heavy lift, but as it relates to the market side and the go to market side, this is one where you are judged ultimately by the company that you keep. So if you're the only one that's saying your message, and no one else is saying it, it kind of makes it hard for it to feel credible. But if you lock arms, not just with partners, but with people you see as peers that are also saying similar things or, or that elevate you. So you might be a small startup and you have the big four consulting companies saying, this is great. And the best way to do this solve this problem that you fortune 500 company is having, is by using this company that you've never heard of, but the technology is awesome. Then it's a way to basically move into market faster and with the implied endorsement and validation of those partners. So it could be a super powerful go to market tool for sure.
Jeff Frick:
Right. That's great. I wanna, uh, shift gears a little bit, Martina, and talk about some of your early career and, and leadership and some of the people that you work for. I mean, um, you know, I got gray hair, uh, the names of some of the people that you work for. I mean, everybody knows a Andreessen Horowitz, right. You know, a16z, they don't even use the names anymore. Right. But you actually worked for Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, back when they were operators. And, um, you know, for people that don't know the history, go back and look, I mean, Netscape navigator was such an such an interesting concept even to have a browser based display of, of, of application information back then was basically just text, but, you know, so innovative. Um, and then, and then Loudcloud. And I, I remember when Loudcloud I'm like, what, you know, infrastructure's a service. Wow. Interesting concept. That's never gonna happen. Um <laugh> but I wonder if you can share, you know, you and I, and I've seen some of your talks and I've read the book, there's some hard lessons, uh, that you got early on from some of those guys. I wonder if you could share some of the ones that, that really resonated with you that you've taken forward.
Martina Lauchengco:
Yeah. Well, as it relates to Netscape, that was, I mean, I started my career at Microsoft where I learned, I mean, like, I was at Microsoft word and Microsoft Office. And I learned an incredible amount of discipline around strategy and how do you do it? And if you are systematic about combining go-to-market strategy with product, there's no market, you won't win largely because everyone else just isn't that disciplined. <laugh> like, it was amazing. It's like, this is not hard stuff. If people just had strategy and were disciplined about his application. They would get there too, but right. It was remarkable how little other companies operated that way. So that I learned that at Microsoft, which was insanely valuable. And I would say Netscape when I got there, this was really early days. This was just after it went public and it was barely organized chaos. It was total culture shock. And it was a bunch of geniuses that brought people that could move as fast as they could and would just put stuff out literally overnight, oh, we need to do this thing. Okay. Let's come up with a press release. Oh, we have this little bit of a, a kernel of a product and the press release would go out there. And then the product teams are chasing to catch up and then we'd put it out on the internet where
Jeff Frick:
And you're coming from Microsoft where you, you released a new version of word every two years.
Martina Lauchengco:
Right. Exactly, and the process to release was insane. It was like this, I don't even know how many pages long and a committee that needed to review. And here it was like, okay, ready to push boom. It's out on the internet. People are touching it right now. And, and finding bugs, I'm like what? But having those two in contrast with one another, just kind of helped me understand the value of both the, the level at which Netscape was able to innovate. And, and the speed with which it was able to bring things to market was insane and much more indicative of what happens today. It was kind of the foundation lane of what modern product development actually looks like. And what, what I think is different now, having you lived in Seattle and that highly disciplined market and world. And I feel like Amazon has a little bit of this DNA, and down here that the one thing I see that's viscerally different about Silicon valley is this the belief in the speed and the capacity for innovation, it's just off the charts. Like no one has like, is magic here. And it really does feel different. And I experienced that and it was amazing. And I'd say Marc very much, um, embodied that. And what was unique about Ben was he had all of that, but he could also sit down and say like, well, what, what does it actually take for us to make this happen? And more importantly, what Ben had that was, that I think most people don't realize is truly exquisite about him as a human is his EQ is as good as his IQ and his IQ is off the charts, but he could read people and understand the situation and an incredible way. And that's what made him so effective with organizations and so effective as an executive is he understood not just technically what was happening, not just had the vision for the future, but he could understand the implications for the human beings that were trying to make the work happen. And that's what made him absolutely singular as a leader and like forever a model for me in my life.
Jeff Frick:
Right now you share a rough story though, with him. Um, in, in one of the things I saw getting ready for this, where, you know, you had an answer, uh, to his question that you had investigated and you thought that was the right answer. And you were doing your responsibility by providing the right answer. And if I recall, he said to you, 'Thanks. I get it. I don't like it, next option.' And you didn't have one. And, you were really reflective in this. I think it was a talk you're giving that, you know, the right answer, isn't always the right answer. And I wonder if you can, you know, kind of share some perspective of that moment and, you know, it's the hardest things in which we learned that, that we carry forward, you know, kind of how that went down.
Martina Lauchengco:
Yeah. That was, that was actually a moment with Marc Andreessen. And it was, we were, infrastructure as a service didn't exist as a concept. And we were trying to figure out what it was. And I went out and I talked to all these customers and analysts and their world is gonna be oriented around what they know, which was managed services. And it just seemed too far a leap, people just didn't couldn't piece together, all of the parts that we wanted to talk about at LoudCloud. And so I was advocating, it's like, let's meet the customers where they are, because it's just too big, a leap. And Marc said, I don't like it. What else do you got? And I've done all this research. And I thought, my job as the head of marketing was to come up with the right answer. And he didn't like it. He's like, it's not gonna work for me. So what else you got? And I had nothing. And so I went to Ben, who was the CEO, and I said, Ben, isn't it, my job to try and figure out what the right thing is and advise from a market point of view, this is all the market has capacity for. He's like, yeah, technically, but Marc is the, the Chairman and the Founder of this company. And if Marc, isn't going to, if it doesn't work for Marc, it's just not gonna work. And my big lesson there, especially in the arena that I work with now, is founders of companies and, and they're ones that are particularly luminous and, and have incredible sway and influence in the industry. They are special. And some, and it's not that they are always right, but we have to meet them where they are. And it's not always about, there's no precisely right way to go to market. And I think that was a big thing that I needed to learn, which is there isn't only one way. And so there's gonna be a way to find way to make this work for all the parties included. And that was a big thing that I, that I took from that moment. It was like, okay, sometimes you just, uh, sometimes your job is to know what the right thing to do is not what the right answer is. Right. And those two different things. So that was a big lesson for me
Jeff Frick:
Subtle, subtle, and hard. Um, so, and then, so then you joined Costanoa (Ventures) a while back. Um, it was funny. I was watching the video, Greg, introducing you. Um <laugh>. And, and, and you, you had some reservations about joining the old boy club, and then I saw another video, you said, it's the old boys' club, just that I thought, but, you're enjoying it clearly, you know, Greg, um, you know, have a history together. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about, you know, kind of the, you know, the, the practice now of getting work to work with a portfolio of companies you're on a bunch of boards, um, and that experience, you know, from what you're doing every day at Costanoa
Martina Lauchengco:
Yeah. Well, as you said, when I first joined, I was like, oh my God, Venture's such a boys club. And to Greg's incredible credit and Costanoa, the team at large, like very intentionally tried to shift that, certainly be an example at our firm. As a firm now we are 60% women, 40% men to the point where I'm like, do we need to start hiring guys like, uh, Jim Wilson, who's my, one of the partners on the operating side, he's the only guy in the entire builder ops team. And sometimes I'm like, oh, I hope Jim doesn't feel lonely, like who, who says that in a venture firm, but it was because we were so intentional about how we built that it got to that place. So that I think, any one that makes this concerted effort to move in that positive direction, you can get there as long as you're very purposeful and intentional about it. So that we're trying to be an example for the venture industry, but as it relates to my day to day and what I do, why I'm so surprised how much I like it. It's just this constant intellectual challenge where all these market puzzles that you and I are talking about now, that's my daily life. I'm trying to figure out in real time together with these founders, each of them have different markets and vastly different categories, data security, insider threats. Um, what else was I doing? Uh, enterprise authorization. Um, so vastly, vastly different things. Oh, and just yesterday, end of the day was about the very rare consumer investment that we make, um, Lockit, which is, you know, on your lock screen and like, how do, how do we hire ahead of growth? And what does that look like? And where do we source that? And look for good applications in the app store and try and, and contact people through LinkedIn there. So my brain must always be learning. I'm always stretched. I always get to learn about what's new and exciting. That's gonna make an impact on people's lives 3, 4, 5 years, 10 years from now, which if you'd asked me when I started my career, I never thought I'd be at the bleeding edge or understanding the bleeding edge of what's technically possible. And that's exciting and energizing
Jeff Frick:
You worked at Loudcloud, Come on Martina, you worked at Loudcloud for God's sake. You were so far ahead of the curve.
Tell me about Silicon Valley Product Group. This is the third as I, I didn't read the first two, full disclosure, but there's two other books in this series. So what is, what is Silicon Valley Product Group, give us a quick, overview
Martina Lauchengco:
Silicon Valley Product Group. So the, this is third in the series. The first was INSPIRED, written by Marty Cagan. That was about the fundamentals of product management. The second was written by Marty Cagan and Chris Jones, and it's called EMPOWERED and it's about empowered product teams. So it's more about the leadership of product teams, empowered product teams and distinguishing them from feature teams, which is what a lot of companies actually do run. And then this is the third, which is all right, you've got these products that you built, how does it actually go to market? And how do you think about that? So that's why LOVED and product marketing was the third in the series.
Jeff Frick:
Awesome. Well thank you for taking the time today and thank you for putting out such a fun book. And, and again, I love it. It's just like it's skills, just practice and go to work, which is just like communication and everything else. Right. Don't get your head wrapped around in your ego, but, but the, to close, I wanna, I wanna close with your time in Berkeley with your students, cuz I think it's always, you know, good to look at at the youth and see the inspiration of what's coming up. So I wonder, you know, as, as you get to, I don't know, how often do you teach, um, you know, give us a little background, what kind of classes and what are some of the things that you get to see, uh, working with young people.
Martina Lauchengco:
I have taught for 10 years at UC Berkeley in the Graduate School of Engineering at the Fung Institute of Engineering Leadership. And so it's a part of us trying to make better engineering leaders by giving them skills that are outside of the core engineering courses. So organizational behavior, negotiations, in my case. I teach marketing and product management and what I'd say my, my, the greatest joy in teaching and why I love doing it is most engineers when they come into it. Like I had this, I just got an email from a student this year saying I just picked this class because it worked for my schedule. Not because I had any interest in what I thought was marketing and product management, but having taken your class now, I am really interested in both and wanna take more classes and wanna continue my learning journey and think I might even wanna look at product management as a potential job path. And that to me is why I, I love teaching because especially teaching engineers relative to, if you taught in a business school where a lot of people are already marketing product management oriented, right? A lot of engineers don't realize what it actually is and then have an experience and realize, oh, this actually is cool stuff and it's not evil and it's not just advertising or promoting something or being salesy. There's actually some real thought and, and interest that goes into this. If every engineer who's building a product had a little bit more market mindset, we would just have much better products on the planet. Right? And so that's why I love teaching and inspiring that next generation is, they leave my class having had a direct experience, trying to figure out, do you run market tests and figure out the market implications. So they have to bend their brain in a way that isn't natural for them. And it turns on this light bulb that is just really exciting to see. So that's, it, it gives me great hope that they're always interested and engaged. And even if they came in skeptical that they exit, uh, with their, a light bulb turned on.
Jeff Frick:
Good, good. Well, I mean, it's such an important, uh, intersection between departments between marketing and engineering product and, and engineering, then they gotta build it and these people are trying to tell them what to build and we'd even get to kind of the natural friction that's there. And then there's the natural friction between sales, uh, and product marketing. As you said, if I only had just that one more perfect slide, I could sell a thousand things, which we don't <laugh> necessarily the case, but, um,
Martina Lauchengco:
No slides, Jeff, no slides, this is modern marketing, it's a conversation
Jeff Frick
I'm all about no slides, trust me.
Martina Lauchengco:
That's why, which, which by the way, I'm gonna give you credit for, you realize how important video is as, as part of the, the modern toolkit and you are leaning into it. And that's great. So Bravo, Jeff.
Jeff Frick:
Thank you. Thank you. We'' I've been doing it for a long time. Um, so, uh, so thank you very much. Congratulations on the book. Uh, everyone should run out and get their own copy. They won't want mine cuz it's all ragged and, and, uh, and haggard now. But, uh, congratulations again, it's always great to catch up. You know, you're such a sophisticated marketer. I'm, I'm kind of an old school, uh, slouch when it comes to that stuff. So I always learned something, uh, and entertained and, uh, and educated, which is, I think the, the key things to communication.
Martina Lauchengco:
Well Jeff, thank you. It's always just an absolute pleasure to speak with you.
Jeff Frick
Well thank you. And, uh, best with the book. Although you, you are already tweeting that you're number one on the Amazon list before it even came out
Martina Lauchengco:
It's been amazing. Yeah, no, it's still in pre-release and it's been, uh, number one, new release in business marketing, business, entrepreneurship, product management, sometimes business development. I have no idea how, how Amazon does their categorization, but I'm like, I'll take it, whatever.
Jeff Frick:
Take the credit, take the credit when you get it, cuz you, cause you'll get the blame when you get the blame. So take the credit.
Martina Lauchengco:
Exactly. So thanks everybody. I appreciate all the support so much.
Jeff Frick:
All right, well thanks a lot. She's Martina. I'm Jeff. You're watching 'Turn the Lens' with Jeff Frick. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.
Martina Lauchengco:
Bye. Thanks Jeff.
Cold Close:
Awesome.
