PMM Summer School: How to get through the software marketing school and stay geeky?

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    Recently in St. Petersburg, JetBrains' summer school for marketing software products (PMM summer school), which has already been mentioned here and here, has ended . The ink has not yet dried, the lectures have not been forgotten, and the organizers have not yet slept, but I hasten to share my impressions of marketing, products, PMM and JetBrains. Holivar about marketing is inexhaustible, so welcome to!

    My friends were skeptical about the courses of Product Marketing Manager and Product Manager, assuring that these people will brainwash me and I will lose my technical intellect 8). As it turned out, this is an obsessive stamp of perception, or rather, complete ignorance of marketing. Analytics, metrics, statistics, modeling, experiments, forecasting, big data and everything that can somehow help in the stochastic process - this is what marketing is. Finally, you can apply tons of knowledge about IT and mathematics to a specific product. And that's great! It seems that this is the dream of a real geek ...

    40 hours of product marketing management lectures


    The organizers were at their best and adhered to the announced plan. Over the 7 days of school, JetBrains experts managed to give 14 lectures about PMM. The videos were posted here megamozg.ru/company/JetBrains/blog/19882 , and we have slides:

    1. How JetBrains builds the products users love | Eugene Toporov | slides
    2. Intro: the place of marketing and product management in the whole picture | Mikhail Vink | slides
    3. Developer advocacy: teaching, influencing and having a presence in the community | Hadi Hariri | slides
    4. Working with community and business development | Mikhail Vink | slides
    5. Hypothesis-driven decision-making process | Andrey Cheptsov | slides
    6. Organic channels | Vladimir Sitnikov | slides
    7. Customer lifecycle: funnel optimization | Andrey Cheptsov | slides
    8. Paid channels | Vladimir Sitnikov | slides
    9. Website and CRO overview | Vladimir Sitnikov | slides
    10. Product pricing: cost, customer, competitor. Demand, supply and price elasticity | Vasily Korf | slides
    11. Analytics frameworks, tools and tips | Vladimir Sitnikov | slides
    12. Email marketing | Vladislava Prasolova | slides
    13. Product planning | Mikhail Vink | slides
    14. Product analytics and research methods | Anastasia Chumak and Maria Antropova | slides slides


    Product Marketing Management in Action


    The most interesting thing was to apply the knowledge gained at lectures and do homework . All tasks were relative to JetBrains or company products, which made them not only interesting, but exciting:
    • Community and Business Development. We need to develop a strategy for developing the company's relations with the community of users of any technology (for example, Pyramid (Python framework), Laravel (PHP framework), Scala, Swift, ...). Decision.
    • Decision-making process. Choosing a business resource / tool (for example, JetBrains blog, pricing page, ...), it was necessary to offer all kinds of improvements and justify their decisions. Decision.
    • Pricing. Several tasks related to prices, for example, analyze competitors' prices, develop promotional / discounts, calculate purchase parameters. Decision.
    • Email Marketing and Marketing Automation. In this assignment, it was necessary to write a marketing letter to subscribers, as well as develop a nurturing strategy. Decision.
    • Product analytics and research methods Several tasks for analysis and analytics, for example, to evaluate the number of developers in the USA, the number of C # programmers, and also offer a scenario of effective sociological research. Decision.

    It will be interesting to residents of Habr to think for themselves on the topic of assignments, comments and discussions are welcome! I publish my decisions with the proviso that JetBrains assumes no responsibility and has nothing to do with my judgment, and I do not claim to be the ultimate truth.

    In addition to homework, JetBrains experts suggested students solve short quiz on the topic of the lectures of the previous day. I think this is a good practice that helps restore context and scroll through slides / records. If you also want to use quiz in your course, then try to choose creative and not too complicated questions.

    Atmosphere JetBrains


    The guys from JetBrains were able to create an excellent atmosphere for training, creativity and discussion, and legends have been circulating about their office for a long time . If you organize such events, then here is my subjective checklist of what will leave good memories of a course, track or school - call it what you want:
    1. Friendliness and openness. For example, when you come to the company, they give you a notepad, and do not take fingerprints at the reception.
    2. Good preparation. Original slides, rare information and personal experience are the key to an interesting lecture.
    3. Communicating in an informal setting. Mikhail Vink MikhailVink , Andrey Cheptsov andreycheptsov and Anastasia Kazakova anastasiak2512 answered perhaps 1,000,000 questions at the coffee point, for which many thanks to them!
    4. Bonus events. The guys from JetBrains did not spare their Sunday and had a cool day with pies, a round table and access to the lid. It was super!
    5. Feedback. The organizers shared their assessments, as well as an analysis of our school feedback.
    6. Communication. Find the right way to communicate with your group. We used the slack channel , which was convenient enough and new for me.
    7. Honesty. There are always uncomfortable and tricky questions that need to be answered only honestly and openly. It didn’t work out, zafakapili, broke - tell the truth and try to fix it. Only he who does nothing is not mistaken.
    8. Magic. If you approach the matter with a soul, then everything will turn out!


    What was the hardest and easiest?


    For me personally, the most difficult thing at PMM was to write a marketing letter with a promotion. We all hate marketing bulletin and 100,500 in-box spam messages. But when you want to do good to people (read for yourself) and write such letters yourself ... God, what an excellent bulshit it turns out !!! This is just fantastic! I won’t write about my torment for 4 nights, but I suggest you try to advertise an excellent AppCode product yourself so that it does not hurt and offend. The main conclusion I made from this assignment is that if there is no worthwhile informational reason, for example, the release of a new version of a product, an event in a community, conference, anniversary, or anything else, your message is doomed to such terrible words as FREE, WIN-WIN , TRY and so on.

    The easiest was to communicate with experts. Firstly, at JetBrains, ease of communication is protected at the corporate culture level - you can chat with the CEO, ask him how you are doing, and secondly, at JetBrains everyone (absolutely everything), starting from HR and ending with CEO, write the code. Maybe that’s why marketing with JetBrains looks so familiar.

    Instead of parting


    Many thanks to the colleagues from JetBrains for not sparing their personal time and spent the PMM school, especially to the organizers of the school - Mikhail Vink and Andrey Cheptsov . Thanks to the students for their interesting ideas, networking and friendliness. In general, more than 55 people attended the PMM school and it would be difficult to list everyone without forgetting anyone.

    I hope that the community will support the initiative of JetBrains summer schools (not necessarily by PMM) and there will be more such events.

    In addition, I got an interesting selection of books, articles and materials on the topic of PMM (thanks to Ilya Onskul ), which I hasten to share with you,% habrauser%: Spotify Engineering Culture , 54 articles for PdM ,A day in the life of Product Manager , Valve Employee Handbook , Removing Barriers by Hadi Hariri , KLM makes 25 mln on social media , Online media and shaming , Best PHP IDE survey , RCS video with Will Reynold , Autosuggest tool , Branding in Digital Age , Art of Evangelism , Growth by Alex Shultz , How to build products users love , JTBD practices , Netflix culture , Product evolution analytics and A / B tests , Digital Age and attention Span ,Conversion Rate Optimization , Customer Journey to Online Purchase , OpenRefine , The definitive guide to lead nurturing , The definitive guide to marketing automation , The definitive guide to lead generation , The definitive guide to engaging email marketing .

    All the materials mentioned in the article are posted on GitHub github.com/paullarionov/jetbrains_pmm_school .

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