One

of the things that are so important about this is because you can create like a system. You can get everyone to agree to the system and almost take like the bias out of the launch. And so most companies have multiple product managers, maybe multiple product lines, multiple streams of a roadmap. And they can get really easy as a product marketer to feel like each PM is asking for priority for their launch. But if you kind of as a collective unit, like this should not be done in isolation, just the PMM team. But if the PMM team and the PMM team all agree on the criteria for what would make all of these tier one, tier two, tier three, as well as how much effort and resources and budget we would allocate to it, then it becomes super easy to just work together to say, Hey, what's on the roadmap the next quarter? Let's all tear this together based on the criteria. And it's not, you know, the loudest person in the room gets the most resources. It's not, well, I love this project. I like keep hearing from customers everyone wants it. It's like, I don't know, Jason, if you agree, or but in my experience, this has been one of the best benefits of it. This

should be like a shared process. Your product should feel like it was part their idea, part of your idea versus it, if you just do this in a vacuum, then you go to product and try to just say, Hey, here's this process we're going to use from now on it's not going to work.

I want to get Andy's take on this because like, so if you don't know the competitive market and internally you tear things like you're tearing, how do you determine that like, okay, this could be valuable to the customer? How do you balance this is valuable to customer? But it's also a differentiator in the market because I think that those those could be competing things like, I know you said, Jason, like, bringing more business value. One of the things to bring more business value is also that you're differentiated in the market and your product's different, like something that you can bring a cool feature into the market or a cool add on or a cool thing. But it could be exactly the same as your competitors. Are you really still fighting your competitors? So how do you and the in this tier strategy help the tiering and weave in this competitive and data that you've collected to make sure that where we're heading business value wise is differentiated better than the customer? And then we can also lay in better messaging in each tier launch. It's super

important to talk about differentiation and we always want to be different. The important thing to remember here is that, yeah, like, we do want to stand out, but we also need to make it clear how similar we are to some of our category leaders, especially for like those up and coming startups. And here's why, right? It's a delicate balance. Why do you want to be similar? Well, it's one of the biggest channels for growth and new customers. It's poaching them from your competitors. And the hardest thing for a lot of your customers is actually just leaving. It's a pain in the butt. Nobody really wants to leave and like do something different. And like they're not going to leave up, change their entire workflow, do a bunch of migration for three months just for a product that's even like 20% better. In a lot of cases, they need it to be like significantly better. And so it really depends on your position, right? Again, we want to be different, but in a lot of cases, you might find a lot of value in being similar, being really easy to use and having a great migration process away from that competitor so that people can use some of your smaller, more differentiated features that they might find really valuable. Again, this is really true, especially for like the more like well established categories that again, there's a bunch of category leaders, you might be an up and comer. So yes, being different is super super important. I don't want to like take away from that. But I do think that sometimes we we overlook the importance of sometimes being similar and making sure that we can like ground everyone's perspective from like, Oh yeah, we can be an actual alternative for this other category leader. We have all the things that you know and love about that tool, but we approach some of these other aspects a little bit differently. And we think for the best. So that's something to kind of keep in mind. And the other thing that's that is really important to keep in mind too, is you know, I was talking with Jason in tomorrow about this the other day, but like, so many launches aren't differentiators. There are plenty of launches where it's like, no, it's like an integration with Salesforce or something like that. You know what I mean? Like we can't you can't just constantly be churning out differentiated feature here like every single month. Like it's crazy to be expecting that. And so so much of differentiation I've found that like really work like when it works, it really works is in the delivery. And again, this is this this all is encompassed under competitive and market Intel too. Like, what are people used to like when they are given a new product launch or they're like being pushed like this new feature or whatever. How can we go against the grain a little bit and stand out a little bit more? We've seen this with a bunch of different companies now. I think one that kind of comes to mind for me was it was a company gong. I'm sure most people are familiar with them, but they released a sales engagement product not too long ago called gong engage. And this is not a new like crazy feature, right? It is like there is a sales engagement category. There are category leaders. And so them coming out with it's like not super differentiated, but their messaging was very differentiated and that they were saying like, Oh, it was like last to market or first. What was it again? Tomorrow?

Basically, the whole message was like they learned from everyone else's mistakes, right? And they have a whole manifesto about it. It was

unique because normally you come out to market and you're like, Oh, we're the only ones that have this yada yada yada. But they took a little bit of a different approach and it stuck out to me because I'm familiar with the space. And I was like, Oh, that's okay. I got it. And so now it gets into the mind of someone who's in the space and all that kind of stuff. So in either case, yes, it's important to differentiate. Sometimes you have to go outside of the actual product lens though. And you need to think, okay, how can we differentiate from a channel perspective, how we're talking to customers, maybe from a promotional perspective, we want to throw a video behind this. Or like, we want to launch it on product on, you know what I mean? Like there's a lot of different ways that you can differentiate outside of just like leaning on like capabilities. Because if you do that, you're going to get really stuck. And it's going to be really hard to stand out consistently. When

people think of like product differentiation, they always think of the product, but it could be, are we differentiating through like the distribution channels we're going through, the messaging we're going through. And I think Andy talked about all this. Like, is our customer service better than them? Like our internal things better than them? Do we have like a better bundle than them? Is our pricing different than them? Like, there's so many different factors that than the product that could be. And then also like, is it easy to leave this person? Or can we do a campaign that's like, well, buy out your contract and blah, blah, blah, like people do like there's so many different things. If we do something similar, ish to our customer, we could work on a strategy of how we want to bring those new customers or take those customers away. So I love that you mentioned that it could be a similar thing. Like, some people could have not went with you three months ago, because you didn't have an integration with Salesforce. And now you have an integration with Salesforce. So how are you

going to? Exactly. Yeah. And you might keep track of who says no for what specific reasons. And then once you add that feature, reach back out to those people, do a specific campaign, if it's a large enough audience. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of different ways that you can go about it. So as long as you branch out a little bit from that product specific mindset, there's a lot of different directions you can go.

It's also, I think your work that you're doing could be like passed on to product development and be like, actually the market, based on all the competitors we've heard, the Salesforce integration is probably the number one reason why people are choosing us over our competitors. So maybe we shouldn't prioritize this feature. We should prioritize this one because of the work you've done doing the competitive analysis. And this is why it's so important to do the compare like know what the landscape is so you can tell your product team like actually you guys are going down the wrong direction with this. We we actually losing a lot more deals because we just don't have an integration with Salesforce. I just don't think about that.

I forget if it was tomorrow or Jason, in our course, one of you had like a it was like a flow chart that showed like where you overlap with product, product marketing versus product. And like that market research and competitive and market intel, that's one of those areas for sure that like you need both both teams need to have a solid handle on the market and competitors in order to build a great product, be differentiated, but also be similar enough to where you can stand on your own and take customers from other competitors. But then there are some areas where it's like, okay, we've got it from here, we're going to keep going, we're going to launch this thing.