Category: From work

This is my second time in a NBD, new business development unit. Both struggled. They’re different companies, but some patterns remain.

• NBD of billion dollar corporation.
• Highly anticipated by the corp office.
• Heavy expansion on engineer headcount.
• Product oriented, usually to satisfy a couple of potential key accounts.
• Relies on existing channels of the corporation, ranging from ODM to distribution model.

The dilemma is about face. The face between corporate expectation and doing the dirty job of knocking door-to-door. From my two experiences, the fragmented and laborious works don’t look well compared to the logos and TAM of key accounts. How could it? It must rise just as the sibling business units.

Meanwhile, engineer recruitment and corp investment continuous to snowball. Sunk cost fallacy kicks in. I have yet to see it’s final destiny, but it will not die nor will it prosper in 3 to 5 years.

Yellow highlight from page 219, Can’t Hurt Me by David Goggins.

• You will be made fun of.
• You will feel insecure.
• You may not be the best all the time.
• You may be the only black, white, Asian, Latino, female, male, gay, lesbian or [fill in your identity here] in a given situation.
• There will be times when you feel alone.

Filling in my identity after rejections on documentation management system implementation. Product Marketing: this would disrupt the workflow; IT: Sharepoint is USD$ 2,000 per terabyte, no budget.

• [only PMM with the least resource but 2 business units to serve]
• [only one person but doing the work that even four couldn’t done well]
• [only one person but needs to test product, shootout, position product, building value proposition; a job of 3 teams]
• [doing DMS that my colleagues doesn’t give a shit and maybe even tries to stop it]
• [a product marketer who needs to be responsible for DMS design]

Okay. Time to get back to work.

Thinking this would be a good idea to paint a concept of VSaaS, I snapped this photo on the way off HSRT ride. With Google’s Nano Banana and couple of product photos, I could turn this into what I have imaged!

Whether this is a good visual is subjective, but it saved me a least one mail and 10 minutes of explanation. Unbelievable.

Next questions is, how can I get more of these “references”?

Randomly done prompt:

Creativity is hard to come by and the market pace nowadays is incredible fast with AI. How can we shorten the time of content creation? Austin Kleon’s book Steal Like An Artist introduced me the idea of a swipe folder.

After 3 years of collection, here’s what my Google Drive looks like. Since I use Windows at work and Mac at home, Google’s browser based approach made it flexible for me to switch between device and platform.

This part of the interview between Acquired Podcast and TSMC founder, Morris Chang, about the correlation between organization structure and customer gave me an explanation to my current role in product marketing facing a divisional structure.

Today’s surveillance is about solution selling as network camera and NVRs becoming a commodity. The increasing number of smaller retail stores adopting consumer security products, such as Xiaomi and Tapo, explains the fact that basic surveillance is no longer a technical barrier. Enterprise customers, on the other side, look for more curate business solution and services. Respectively, solution is a combination of overlapping mix of products.

Who should cover the ground of offering the solution if product development is in an divisional organization? The role often falls into the next role in line, be product marketing, regional product manager, sales engineer, pre-sales, and sales. This requires the next-in-line function team to be well versed in the product and customer pain point in order to build the solution stacks.

Product marketing, in this situation, is faced to be product first, marketing second to filter the influx products. Tactical implementations that gave me room to survive:

1. Hire those with experience in sales or customer service.
2. New member training program to build the fundamental understanding of all products.
3. Framework of value proposition to streamline the specification into customer benefits.