Loved

Chapter 12Product Marketing in the Age of Agile

When Jade became the team's product marketer, she was excited to prove herself. She listened intently at her first product team standup and was quick to point out a feature that would be good to actively market.

At the standup the following week, she expected to hear an update on that feature. When she didn't, she asked the product manager and was told they had already released it, as documented in last week's release notes.

Shocked, she asked why anyone hadn't told her. The product manager replied they had—in the release notes. Jade scrambled the marketing team together to email existing customers and do the social promotion she had planned.

On the flip side, Jim, an engineering lead, had several teams hard at work over multiple release cycles to do large performance and stability improvements. The engineers waited to see something in the company's marketing about the product's now blazing performance but saw nothing. Jim wondered, after all this engineering effort, what gives?

This is the challenge of product and go-to-market alignment in the age of agile. The velocity, lack of predictability, and lightweight forms of communication and documentation make it hard for both sides. It is particularly challenging with continuous delivery of product. Go-to-market teams rely on more predictable cadences and planning to do their jobs well. For product teams, what gets marketed and why doesn't always make sense or correlate to effort. ...