Loved

Chapter 29Product Marketing by Stage: Early, Growth, Mature

Los Angeles is car country, which is why Michelle Denogean, a seasoned car industry Chief Marketing Officer, calls it home. But she was willing to make the long commute to San Francisco because Roadster—a startup that helped car dealers sell online—landed the country's largest dealerships as customers and was in hyper-growth mode.

The product team was filled with veteran engineers. They'd “been there, done that” at multiple companies together and were highly productive. But it meant the go-to-market teams felt like outsiders, disconnected from what was being built.

Michelle wanted to close this gap with product marketers. She made sure the product team interviewed all the candidates since they'd be working so closely together.

By Michelle's standards, the quality of candidates was high. All of them had years of deep car industry and product marketing experience.

But the product teams kept passing on candidates, citing “not deep enough on product.”

By the third rejection, she pushed the team harder on why they kept saying no. That's when she learned the product team was looking for something totally different: a person to help Roadster's customers use the product more in their day-to-day work.

It was a complete surprise to Michelle, who felt such work was more suited to either a product manager focused on product engagement or customer success manager, not a product marketer. She discussed and then recalibrated the ...