When you create a new product, there are 2 types of marketing activities: the easy ones and the hard ones.
Easy marketing activities: press releases, brochures, new websites, SEO, social media posts, etc. Most of the time these activities just feed the egos of non-customers, partners, the board, the entrepreneur and industry pundits.
Hard marketing is about engaging customers, finding them, creating a solution for them, making it easy for them to buy from you, and being a trustworthy vendor. This is product management (aka “real marketing”).
Developing a successful product requires a strong foundation of product management, and the key to building that foundation is asking the right questions. By starting with what we know and what we can master, we can create a specific and simple concept that will serve as the foundation for more ambitious and abstract features.
Engineers and entrepreneurs have traditionally lacked the skills around engaging customers: they tend to hide behind the customer and not show up. But without product and customer development, and translating needs into actual features, there’s nothing.
