Transcription

• Speaker #0

  Hello, I am Carlota, and I am the host of this podcast. Product Marketing Stories is the first French podcast dedicated to product marketing. Every week, listen to an episode where product marketers, but not only, share methodologies, tips, and concrete learnings so you can apply them in your daily job. The aim of this podcast is to make product marketing understandable and accessible to the French tech ecosystem.

• Speaker #1

  Hi Theresa, how are you?

• Speaker #2

  Hi, nice to meet you, nice to see you.

• Speaker #1

  To start, can you present yourself, who you are, where you're working?

• Speaker #2

  Sure, my name is Theresa Gschwanther. I am the Head of Product Marketing at Qonto. Qonto, for those of you who don't know, is a fintech company. We serve SMEs to honestly just simplify their day-to-day finances. That's our objective.

• Speaker #1

  And since when are you working at Conto?

• Speaker #2

  Now for over three years. So I've seen quite a lot from, I think we were 200 people at the very beginning. Now we're at 1,400. So it's been a bit of a journey.

• Speaker #1

  Your talk this morning, just before, was about strategic narratives. Can you tell me why you wanted to talk? about this statistic.

• Speaker #2

  So as I mentioned, I've been at Conto, I've seen a lot of different things. And back when I started, our objective was to show customer value by showing how fast we innovate and how fast we iterate and ship product. And so in the past, we were really focused on shipping fast, shipping a lot. Now that we've become bigger and our product has become a lot more complex, it's actually become really difficult for our customers to understand what we're even talking about, which use case we're highlighting now, you know, it's become a bit overwhelming for them. And that's why I think at this moment in time, it's super important for us to focus on strategic product narratives. that are bundled together in the right moment in time for the customer, rather than just letting them know that we're launching all the time, because they know that already.

• Speaker #1

  So it's about when you have a new feature, for example, you define the priority of this feature, is it important or not, and then you define when you will launch it.

• Speaker #2

  Correct. So it also actually helps us to influence the product roadmap a little bit, because, again, we overlay this with company objectives. So when we see that we have super intense targets for H1, for instance, but we don't have a clear acquisition feature, we highlight that to the product team and that might mean that they reshuffle some things so that we have something to sell earlier on in the year, for example.

• Speaker #1

  I believe it's not so easy to do it when it's also shifting the way you work, the way you want to communicate on the market. So how did you do that?

• Speaker #2

  Definitely bitfalls. It's difficult. So, for example, and I'm sure most people who listen in product marketing are aware, very often we have shifting timelines from product. And so. you might know that you have to communicate at the end of April because that's a huge, important tax deadline in Conto's example, for example. So we know we can't move that date, but we might have to change the features that are included in our bundle because maybe products didn't deliver on time. And so a pitfall for me is on fixing your storyline too much on that one feature that's part of the story bundle is difficult. For those, we actually do have tiering in place, like I mentioned in my talk earlier, Tier 1 features are ones that are the most important per quarter. So we only have four per year is the idea. And for those, actually, we do get locked in from the product and tech team that no matter what they will deliver on that date, even if they have to shift resources, they will do it. For the others, no. And so that's where my one pitfall and advice to everybody who wants to do this would be focus on a high level storyline at first and don't get too hooked up on what features we have to include. So I give you a silly example, but we have one coming up around how we help small businesses. And we wanted to desperately include a couple of spend management features, but actually they're not going to be ready at that time. So we need to then just take a step back and really focus more high level on use cases. which allows us to then also communicate about existing features that they probably didn't even associate with their own use case. So I would say, like, stay flexible in terms of feature specificities and more focus on use cases that you can then talk about either by using existing features or also by teasing new ones.

• Speaker #1

  It changes the way you think about features because normally you start with the features and then you build the story. You decide, okay, we'll talk about this feature at this moment and you just... changing the way you think about the product and to the customer.

• Speaker #2

  For sure, I think that's what's the most important switch that we made in this example, because we don't lead with features anymore. Again, we have hundreds of them. It's too complicated. But a small business customer might come to us for five specific use cases. So we can speak about the use case no matter whether or not we have a new feature. Ideally, we have a new feature. But I think that's the biggest shift that we've also proven to be successful, especially with a fluctuating product and tech roadmap.

• Speaker #1

  And how do you ensure the collaboration with the stakeholders, with product team, tech team, marketing team? Because you can't do everything alone when you're a PMM.

• Speaker #2

  Yes, it's not easy. I will be very honest with you. We work with over 20 teams for one launch. So hundreds of people, imagine, like you have obviously all the different channel owners, you have the market owners, but you also then have central teams like design and content. So. It's quite difficult, especially on the growth side, to make sure everyone's aligned on that priority. But actually what we've managed to prove, so there's two things I would keep in mind. One, most importantly, you all have to have the same objective. And so this is important because that way everybody feels like what they're doing will also help them individually. And so the way that we do this is we take the company objectives and we align each launch that we're trying to do, each bundle, with why are we doing it. And so, for example, at the kickoff that we do with all the stakeholders, we spend 90% of the time actually not talking about the storyline at all. We share that as a pre-read, but we focus on, guys, why are we here? Like, how is it going to help you in Spain? How is it going to help you in... I don't know, in social media. And we really try to tie their own personal objectives with this overarching, okay, this is our launch objective that ties directly into the company objective. So I think that's the first thing that we need to do. And then the second thing I think is to celebrate success and prove that this works. And now that we've done the first bundle launch, we saw that the overarching impact we have to customers, acquisition, adoption is so much more strong. Because of the fact that we have consistent messaging. And I think that's also something that stakeholders have noticed because in the past, I don't know, let's say the content team was working on how to convince small customers to come to Conto, while the social media team was creating campaigns on company creation. Like it was just a mess. And so finally, we're all looking in the same direction, you know, and so I think that also can help collaboration a lot. But it's not easy. They love the fact that they now know when to expect it. So it's like we're not going to come out of nowhere and ask you, hey, can you turn this around by tomorrow? But instead, we're actually really focused on, okay, don't worry, but the next one will be in a month's time, and we're going to kick off six weeks before that and just manage their expectations.

• Speaker #1

  How did you measure the success of the strategic launches?

• Speaker #2

  That's very difficult because, of course, you have 17 different touch points. And so in our case, we did A-B tests. So we tried to understand, okay, if we were to keep the page as it was before, and by the way, sorry, when I say page, I think usually the easiest way to measure success is lead generation from the website. So of course, we have 17 different channels, but we focus on website because that's a bit more interesting and it'll help us. And on that one, we did do an A-B test, driving leads to both versions, but the one that was consistent with our messaging across all the touch points. That's the one that had over 20% higher uptick in contract signed or lead generation.

• Speaker #1

  Incredible.

• Speaker #2

  Yeah, it was a huge team success. I don't want to take credit at all. PMM, and that's what I mentioned in my speech just now. What's so unique about us is the fact that we are at the core and we can make this possible. But of course, the work that we do is a fraction to everybody's work, because we will need every single team to deliver in order to make this a success.

• Speaker #1

  Usually we can't control everything, but we can influence much more.

• Speaker #2

  For sure. And I think that's also as you start celebrating successes internally, which I know is a bit difficult in the French culture. That's true. So we're working on that also in Contour. That also then creates a nice culture between product and growth because now product understands, oh, okay, if I have my feature ready for this bundle, wow, the amount of attention my feature will get is actually incredible. And so it's kind of creating this healthy, I wouldn't say tension, but, you know, it does healthy kind of collaboration and vision to see, okay, let's all get around these monthly launch bundles because we know that they will impact the business.

• Speaker #1

  Thank you a lot, Teresa, for this snack. content yeah thank you it's a pleasure to have you in the podcast and thank you for having me have a good rest of the day enjoy the rest of the session you too