PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONALS feat. Kayla Medica

*Welcome to PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONALS, a new curated content stream where I interview people who are extremely good at what they do, so that people building businesses who need some niche specialists to come in and help them grow, can find them easier. Enjoy! - Gaz

I met Kayla many moons ago through mutual friends and when I would be frequently running the event FuckUp Nights Sydney, in Sydney. She attended a few times, and even ended up speaking at one. And I continued to take a keen interest in her work in Product Marketing which seemed to be quite a time before that is a very regular thing now.

Then, with my involvement in the Generate B2B Marketing Community (along with Axel Sukianto) I became a bit more exposed to her curation and coordination skillz, as over 1000 professional marketers, and myself, gather on slack and gather at conferences to nerd out on marketing and marketing tools and continually lean on each other for emotional support since founders ‘don’t get marketing.’

Enjoy the chat! Kayla also has a wicked sense of humour, so if you join. Generate, you can hear it in person.

Gaz:

Kayla, we’re honing in on Product Marketing today, and then we’ll go off in a million other directions I’m sure, as we’re prone to do. We’re publishing this article after you have just run the Generate Conference (again) for a bunch of B2B marketers, you’re writing a newsletter, working with clients, you’ve written a book, there’s a bit going on! But let’s start with where you’re a professional professional and go from there…

Kayla:

I got into Product Marketing because I was working in a generalist marketing role - I was the only marketer in Australia for this company, we had a UK team, but they didn't really have a lot to do with Aus. I was doing everything, and I was way past the point of burnout.

And so I did a stocktake at all the things I was doing, and it was just too many balls that I was juggling. I just couldn't keep doing it.

And so I had to look at everything I was doing, put everything into a ‘I like it’ or ‘I don't like it’ list.

You know: managing FB ads, that went into ‘I don't like it.’

Doing customer interviews went into ‘I like it.’

At the end of the list, I took some of the roles and responsibilities I had and just started putting it into job searches as keywords to see like what roles were coming back.

I didn't even know what job title I was looking for. I was just trying to find a job that matched the description.

And kind of equally, it came up as Product Marketing or customer engagement marketing.

Essentially, the theme was deep: Relationships with customers and not just ‘here's a lead to pass it on and never speak to that person again.’

So I applied for both and the first job I got back was Product Marketing. And the way I see it now is very much that a Product Marketer's role is to be… some people say be the advocate for the market, but I would say be the advocate for the product, because depending on the life cycle of the product, you could be doing very different things.

So if the product doesn't exist yet and you're doing market research, that's a very different role to if the product is established and you're doing maintenance or you're doing feature releases.

And then there's sunsetting a product as well, which I’ve done previously for a product that was the best performing product in Australia, but the worst performing in the UK. Us in Australia, we're like, ‘please, please don't do that.’ But they did, they rebuilt the entire platform, as part of a bigger plan. So that’s how I went into Product Marketing, and I would describe Product Marketing as the buddy system for the product, more like a researcher, more of a product person, maybe more of a customer person.

Gaz:

How does that sort of influence interactions between product and, how do I say, your interactions between product team and, let's say, either sales or customer success?

Kayla:

Yeah, so where I would place product marketing in an org chart depends on the org, but wherever there is more support for it. If marketing doesn't understand product marketing, isn't going to give it a budget, isn't really going to help it do what it needs to do. If it makes more sense for the product marketer to be under the product division then do that, but my general advice whenever someone asks me this is ‘which leader in the business understands product marketing and is going to give it the support that it needs?’

I find that you can work really heavily with one team and kind of neglect the others, which usually builds a good relationship with them, but then maybe you've gone into the next quarter, and now you need to work with a different team and you neglect the team that you started with, and it can be quite a tough relationship to maintain.

It builds up this relationship: “I've done a bunch of great work, but now I'm not going to do any more work for you for the next six months” and some teams take that pretty hard, and some are like, “I get it.”

You're just moving on to the next thing. You're not actually a permanent member of this team.

Gaz:

Let me ask about tension, and the role that tension plays in teams, especially like high performing or the need to highly scale teams. There’s obviously that consistent tension between sales and marketing, but based on your own experience or what you've observed other product marketers and how they interact with products?

Kayla:

There's all this discourse around what a Product Marketer should be.

‘They should be strategic’, ‘they shouldn't be doing execution’, ‘they shouldn't be writing copy’, ‘they should be focused on blah, blah, blah, blah, and they're not there to make pitch decks for you.’

And I find it so strange that it has become normalised for a whole function, all these product marketers, basically saying, “it's not my job.”

Like what other role has ever really done that? And whether it should be one thing or should be another, one of the most common things that we say about product marketing is it depends on the business.

What does a business need? A Product Marketing role at one company could be completely different to a product marketing role at a different company.

So that's what I would say about Product Marketers and tension. And then in terms of the tension between sales and marketing, I honestly think it's just a matter of people not really putting their best foot forward.

So on both sides of that relationship, you will hear, “oh, they don't really get what we do. They don't understand what I need, they don’t listen.”

And it's because both parties are coming to meetings trying to be heard but not trying to listen.

And so it's always centered around themselves, which is very opposite to how we tell people to market and sell.

Gaz:

Being that marketing is so often the glue between various departments (my biased opinion, you can;t change it) I’d like to then ask you a question about asking the right questions.

So often in my experience, working with Product Managers, or UX Designers or whatever, you’ll have that famous line “It Depends” delivered back when a question is asked.

Kayla:

The first thing is don't be afraid to ask dumb questions. When I was younger, I worked in a company that majority spoke Japanese and my vocabulary wasn't native level.

So there was so many times I'd be like, “I don't know what you just said, can you please explain it to me?” And that really taught me to, again, get over myself and just ask dumb questions to get to the answer faster. Now that I'm in a more senior role, I also see it as: if leaders ask dumb questions, you make it okay for juniors to ask dumb questions too.

Culturally, you're setting a standard that encourages people to admit when they don't know something and ask for explanation. The second thing is referencing before, I say “it depends” on so many things.

If you want to stop saying that, maybe ask a question before you say it. And again, clarify. “So ok, before I get into it, what is it that you want to achieve?” Or, “what actually is the problem that you're experiencing?”

Gaz:

Ok, now, tools! How do you do your job and what are you usually armed with?

Kayla:

So, I am not that tech savvy, I would say.

From a day-to-day perspective, my to-do list is in a notebook, pen and paper.

Usually at the start of the week, I'll write down everything I need to do that week, and I'll look at the week before and see if there's anything that needs to transfer over.

I've tried using productivity tools, and I just don't update them, so that they become obsolete. All of my business stuff is run on the Google suite, so Docs, Sheets, Gmail etc

Again, you don't need to overcomplicate it. And then for bookkeeping and accounting, I use Rounded, which is an Australian startup that I recommend whenever someone asks me about finances. And it was recommended to me by someone that I really respected and taught me a lot about being self-employed.

But everything else, honestly, optional. I have a bunch of subscriptions. I have Adobe Creative Cloud. I've got SEMrush. I've got all these other things…yeah… they're not vital for my business.

Gaz:

So... from a marketing perspective, let's just say, from a funnel filling perspective or whatever, or getting the product more known in market, I’m interested to understand your perspective of the further articulation or explanation of the dynamics of what the team’s leadership are trying to achieve from an investment and fundraise scenario?

Now, with respect to the founders, they've got a lot going on ultimately, but what they do need is the customers and the users to be using the product to illustrate whatever needs to be illustrated, whether revenue users, you know, other indicators that this is trending upwards, so that they can go and get that next wave of funding and that they've shown enough sort of signals that this is continuing to meet product market fit.

Have you had experience where that's completely undervalued in terms of the internal communication required to get onboard the same mission? Or have you seen a shift in recent times in how founders communicate this to the team in a product marketing context?

Kayla:

Yeah, I find the funding landscape is in a real moment of change at the moment. So previously, the journey seemed to be linear previously.

The way that you would get funding was pretty step-by-step laid out for you.

And now it's like we invest in the individual, not necessarily the company. So the numbers don't always matter.

And I've worked in companies where during a fundraise, the marketing switched to fundraising marketing and completely neglected top of funnel.

So if your pitch deck is, you know, six months out of date or representing figures from before you made that strategic switch, you're not going to deliver what you said you were going to deliver anyway.

So yeah, I feel like you should just do the basics really well for marketing year round.

Gaz:

So, building product marketing functions and operations and the construction of teams - you wrote a book on it!

Tell us about that experience of an extension of a consistent narrative (newsletter) becoming a book? You’re a published author now!

Kayla:

Yeah, thank you. So actually the book kind of came out of doing the newsletter. I've done the newsletter (Mehdeeka) since 2020.

Initially I did it because I was looking for a job and I didn't have a huge marketing network. How many issues so far? Over 100. 120 maybe? I started the newsletter because I wanted an excuse to build a network of marketers who can potentially give me a referral…

Gaz:

It feels like right now I'm asking you for a job then.

Kayla:

We can refer each other later. But yeah, so that was my reason for making it. And then I have always really enjoyed writing broadly.

And so even after I got a new job and the newsletter didn't help with getting the job at all, I just kept doing it because I felt the urge to open up a new tab and tap away at my keyboard and rage, right?

It's actually pretty funny. The boss that I had when I started the newsletter, I didn't know that he was reading it.

Like, I wasn't hiding it from him, but I wrote a company blog or something and he was like, “oh, you know, it's fine but like, where's that fire from your newsletter? Like, I really want to see that passion?”

And I was like, ‘I don't think you realise that newsletter is like rage written after you pissed me off at work.’

So I kept doing it for me more than anyone else. And it's been good. And then when I decided to work myself and commit to that, I was writing down my process for myself as a checklist to any time I come on to a new customer, like this is the process, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then that document started getting really big. And I was considering just releasing it as a newsletter issue, but I was like, if I beefed this up and added some anecdotes and addressed a lot of that, it depends.

And like, if it's this, then this, if it's that, then that, it could be something bigger. And so everything in the book is not in the newsletter. It's totally its own contained thing. So I'm really proud of that. And I don't edit my newsletter. I write and schedule straight away.

I don't read my own work, but the book I actually have read so many times. I'm sick of it.

And I got so many other people to read it and proofread it for me. And it was edited and it was restructured so many times.

And so I think it actually is like some of my best writing, a year long process overall.

Gaz:

How about next plans? More books, more writing?

Kayla:

And then it'll be small so that it's still interactive and you're still getting individual time with me to troubleshoot things.

And then I'll run that ideally like once a month. I don't know if the demand will be there for once a month as soon as I start. So it might start smaller and grow over time. I think that's a scalable way for me to show people what they need to be able to do it themselves.

Gaz:

So, if you were to stick up for your craft, for marketing, what would you express in that regard?

And what I mean by that is, you know, that marketing can be undervalued in terms of both the breadth of all it solves, and also, people missing the trick here.

It's not just a social post. Like, there's so much more that goes into it. So what is the thing not to be undervalued in this particular Product Marketing sense, for business value?

Kayla:

So what I would say in regards to Product Marketing specifically is that even though the job title seems new and trendy, the role itself is new, but the responsibilities of the role are not. At all.

Instead of having one person who's delegated to that and has the job title of Product Marketer, everybody in the whole company would have been doing a little bit of it.

Someone's thinking about how much should this cost? Maybe that's finance. Someone's thinking about what name should this product have? Maybe that's the founder.

Like someone is thinking about how do we explain what this product does? That could be marketing and that could be sales.

And so what has happened and the reason the role has become the role it is now is that we've really leaned into the whole “if it doesn't get measured, it doesn't happen.”

And all of those little pieces that are fragmented across the company, if you look at a job description of a salesperson, very rarely does it say you have to actually design the pitch, test it with customers and hone it.

The expectation is that as a salesperson, you'll be given a playbook and you just follow it. For the founder, yeah, you're probably thinking about pricing, you're probably thinking about positioning all the time, but is that really where your time should be spent?

So if you want all of those little pieces to work together, get a Product Marketer, set them KPIs, give them reviews, and all those things will happen.

Gaz:

Awesome. Always good to stick up for marketing. Let’s finish on Generate - what is the most enjoyable thing about steering Generate (the slack community and the conference)?

Kayla:

First I was just a regular member of Generate, and then because I was self-employed and looking for camaraderie, I was very active, then I got to know Axel (Sukianto) more personally, and he asked whether I wanted to officially come on in some sort of capacity and help be an organiser? Obviously, I said yes, because we're talking about now.

A lot of people were asking questions. A lot of people were answering questions. It wasn't this echo chamber of a single person asking a thousand questions and never answering any.

Everyone was quite generous. Everyone was quite honest in ways that you don't see in marketing very often in terms of like, ‘hey, we tried this and it didn't work and here's why. And if I was going to try it again, here's what I would change.’ Or, you know, ‘this is my budget.’

Yep. So that's what I really love about Generate is that people have... Embraced the whole, like, hey, even if my competitors are in here, we're all doing the same job.

We're all trying to do the same thing. And we all have the same challenges of, like, you know, our budgets are getting smaller, our headcount is getting smaller, our targets are getting bigger.

If one of us cracks the code, all of us can crack the code. So, like, it's a real rising tide that's all boats mentality in there.

And I don't really know why that is in general and not in other communities because all the same ingredients are there.

And maybe it's Axel's very strict curation of who's in there and the fact that he talks to everyone before they join? But, yeah, that's what I love.

Gaz:

Well, Kayla, thanks very much for being part of PROFESSIONAL PROFESSIONALS, I’ll include your curated recommendation below (and I had a ball at Generate Conference this year, thanks!)

Follow Kayla on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayla-medica/

Mehdeeka Newsletter: https://mehdeeka.substack.com/

The Mehdeeka Method Book: https://www.amazon.com.au/Mehdeeka-Method-transform-marketing-machines-ebook/dp/B0DHV59T5F

Generate: https://www.generate.community/

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