I’m hiring for a few roles on my team, and have had several discussions with recruiters this week.  One of them commented that last year Product Marketing was the role in the highest demand – that it was very competitive because everyone seemed to be hiring for it.

I should mention that she mostly works with high-growth startups in the Boston area.

I’ve been thinking about why this might be for the past few days.  Here’s what i’ve come up with.

1. She’s lying in an effort to inflate her value and increase my salary range.

Verdict: unlikely.  She’s came highly recommended from a trusted source.

2. There’s some weird perfect storm in Boston that is causing a surge in demand for this role.

Verdict: unlikely.  Most of the tech startups in Boston sell to a national or international audience.

3. All the interest in “content marketing” (driven by buyer’s access to information outside of relationships with vendors and VARs) is actually interest in what we used to call “product marketing.”

Verdict: Now we’re getting somewhere.

This idea is really interesting to me because it’s happening in my field right now.  Here’s the basics: Corporate Executive Board (and many others) suggest that buyers are 60% of the way through the buying cycle by the time they reach out directly to the vendor.

The natural takeaway to that is that if vendors want to influence these buyers, we have to get in front of them where they are looking – and that might be third-party sites, organic and paid web searches, conferences, and communities.  They aren’t simply reading an article about us, then typing our URL into their browser to learn more.

So there is a new industry of people who know how to find these buyers, and who run these communities, and conferences, and who will syndicate your content to channels where these buyers are looking, sometimes in what seems like a vendor-neutral perspective.

And it’s not to trivialize or minimize these people’s jobs, because I’ve met many of them and this is a real thing, but at the heart of it, it’s the people who understand both the technology and the buyer, and who know how to communicate it, who have to create the content.  And that’s product marketing.

Put another way, the industry is shifting from a model where buyers turn to vendor sales teams to usher them through the process to a model where buyers do more of their own research and only contact vendors later in the process.  This means vendors need to shift the makeup of sales and marketing to have fewer people in traditional sales roles.  Then there is more pressure to hire people who can create and deliver the content buyers are looking for early in the process, and participate in technical communities.

Enter product marketing.

(Psst, if you live in Boston, work in tech, and find either of these roles interesting, let me know!)

As a welcome to 2015, Boston has been gifted … winter.  It is cold out there!  So this morning on my way in I stopped at Starbucks for a grande non-fat extra-hot decaf caramel latte. You know, just a cup of coffee.

I had to say my order three times – once to a barista who was filling in at a cash register, once to a manager who shooed her back to the bar and rang me up, and then again to another cashier who finally charged for my order because the first cash register was out of service.

And that is a mouthful – grande non-fat extra-hot decaf caramel latte.  (Nevermind the stress of saying it in the right order and the shame of accidentally calling it a “medium”)  So by the time I got to the guy who was ringing me up, I just said “grande caramel latte” because those were the items that impacted what they were going to charge me.

I got to thinking – who at Starbucks actually need to know what parts of that order?  How much value is there in their business systems knowing that particular combination is important to me?

I’ve had the same thought at the supermarket, when I’ve bought, say, two pints of ice cream (don’t judge!) and they are different flavors, but the cashier rings them up as two of the same flavor.  I mean, with all the computing power and analytics behind Big Data, don’t Ben and Jerry or at least Stop & Shop care that the same person who buys Chunky Monkey also buys Chubby Hubby, rather than two pints of Chunky Monkey?

And it seems like there are two issues – one is knowing the customer (she buys those flavors together) and the other is inventory (we have two fewer shots of decaf than we had before this transaction).

Maybe there is enough volume at supermarkets and Starbucks that it just doesn’t matter. Maybe Starbucks knows that decaf is under-reported by 15% and rung up as high-test, so they compensate for that.  Or maybe they track stock based on other indicators, not based on transactions.  Maybe two Chunky Monkeys get rung up as often as two Chubby Hubbys.  

That leaves the customer side of it – knowing what customers want what things. And here’s where I really wonder what’s going on.  Something like “extra hot” probably isn’t rung up on the cash register.  (Even if I’m a more fairly compensated Starbucks barista, when it gets busy at the store, I’m going to focus on getting the drinks out, not ringing up all the adjectives).

But wouldn’t Starbucks want to know if everyone who orders decaf also orders extra-hot?  Even selfishly? (Maybe there’s something chemical that’s causing the coffee to come out colder. Or maybe the people who order decaf want it to warm their hands.)  What about a sudden increase in extra-hot requests without a change in weather?  (Maybe there’s something wrong with the machines at that store.)

And milk preference – what if people who order caramel lattes almost always order them with whole milk?  Maybe that means that skim caramel lattes don’t taste as good, so if someone orders that (~$.50 upsell on the caramel) they should be offered whole milk to try to gain them as a syrup-adding customer.  Or maybe it means that people who order whole milk lattes are prone to being open to syrup combinations, so they should be offered a “hazelnut caramel” whatever-a-ccino with an extra syrup upsell.

The truth is, Starbucks is doing pretty well without my crack team analysis.  I just spend so much time reading and learning about Big Data from the technology side that the mechanics of implementing it in retail are a fascinating thought experiment for me.

Spoiler alert: “Yet”

It’s been a crazy few weeks as we get ready for 2015 at work.  Lots of meetings, lots of planning, and lots of change.  Some days I’m in a complete panic, but mostly I am optimistic that this work will pay off with a smooth plan for how we execute in 2015.

I’ve noticed that as I am working on progressively bigger projects with broader scope, I’m not comfortable saying “I don’t know.”  Several times each day, I’m in fast-paced meetings where we’re making big decisions, and not knowing just doesn’t cut it.

So I’ve started to answer questions differently. Subtly, I’ve made the shift from:

“I don’t know”
to
“I don’t know yet”

It’s a sign to whoever’s asking that I’m engaged, and I want them to ask me that kind of thing again in the future.  It’s a reminder to myself that this topic or type of question is something I need to be better prepared to address if I want to work at this level.

“I don’t know” means more than “I don’t know”; it means “I don’t know and also I don’t know how to form an opinion for next time you ask.”

“I don’t know yet” means “I don’t know because I don’t have all the information I need or the framework to have an opinion, but I’m going to figure that stuff out so keep me in the game.”

Sheryl, do you think your hiring plan is appropriate for our growth?
Sheryl, do you think we can achieve those goals on the screen?
Sheryl, should those be internal or external resources?

I don’t know…yet.

Last week, I attended the Massachusetts Conference for Women. I had gone last year, and was

The women from Infinio enjoying the conference lunch keynote.

very excited to attend again.  It’s a huge event – upwards of 10,000 women attend.

My Uber driver was an immigrant from Ethiopia whose daughter recently finished her degree in Ethiopia in….Gender Inequality!  So he was really interested to hear about both the conference and whether I thought his daughter had any job prospects here.

The conference itself was amazing.  Riding down the huge escalators in the morning, I saw the expo floor already teeming with women, eager and excited.  There was palpable energy in the air, and it was immediately apparent upon arriving in the ballroom.  The highlight of the morning keynotes were definitely Tory Burch (fashion designer) and John Jacobs (co-founder of Life is Good.)  Tory’s story was very understated of how she’s become a top lifestyle brand, and John was just full of life and enthusiasm.

The morning sessions I went to were pretty good.  In particular, I enjoyed the panel discussion on work/life balance.  That seems to be code these days for “tips to get your kids picked up from daycare” but that was fine with me.  It was a very practical discussion of what models work for several women in different industries.  For the first time, I felt like I was equivalent to one of the women on the panel, not just learning from an expert.

Lunch had several impressive keynotes, most notably Lupita Nyong’o and Hillary Clinton. Nyong’o talked about how she got from Kenya to the Academy Awards; her talk was really one about following your dreams because nothing else will feel right.  Secretary Clinton was, of course, in a class of her own.  She began by speaking about the deaths in Ferguson and New York, then spoke more generally about leadership and her experiences.  We all got a chuckle out of the moderator asking her what would the right qualities be for a “First Gentleman.”

In the afternoon, I attended a session on feedback that was okay – the thesis was that we practice and get a lot of training on how to give feedback, but don’t focus enough on receiving it.  I liked that idea but found the actual content a little basic.  I’ve thought about reading the speaker’s book, because maybe it is more in-depth and more relevant to me.

On my way to the coatroom, I was stopped by someone running the coaching area, and offered a free 10-minute coaching session that I couldn’t turn down.  I had a really interesting and helpful talk with Laurie McAnaugh, who was masterful at getting to the crux of the issue I had brought up.

My takeaways this year were vastly different than those of last year.  Perhaps a little less star-struck and a little more interested in practical advice, I ended the day feeling and thinking the following:

1. The theme of needing to bring one’s personal “self” into work and align values was louder than I had heard it in the past.  I don’t know if it’s the next iteration of work/life balance, or if I was just listening for something different this year.

2. There was practically no content for non-traditional families – speakers used “husband” pretty liberally, only sometimes remembering to also offer “partner” and nearly never recognizing that there were likely many single women and single moms in the audience.  While I’m married to a man, I think talking to a more diverse audience helps everyone better understand options, challenges, and sensitivity.  Would have liked to see more of that.

3. The feedback session stayed in my head; not because I learned a lot from it, but more because I thought a lot of its content was rooted in having a lack of confidence.  In fact, a lot of the content throughout the day was about building confidence, and not suffering from impostor syndrome, and I struggled with that – because I don’t relate to it.  The issues and challenges I have with getting to the next level aren’t ones of confidence.   Good news/bad news I guess.

What most surprised me was that I felt different coming out of this year’s conference than I had last year’s.  Less elation, more introspection.  But another good year nonetheless.

Working in IT, I’ve been talking about unstructured data for years.  We know it’s growing faster than data in databases, we know much of it is machine-generated, and we know there are several emerging technologies to help manage it.

But one of my Achilles’ heels at work is having never been on the customer side of the table in enterprise IT.  I’ve been talking with customers for 15+ years about storage and data management, but I have never been the person actually responsible for it.

In the past few weeks, however, I’ve realized that I have a major unstructured data management problem in my own life – and it’s giving me a taste of what IT management struggles with on a massive scale.

Let’s just consider two important types of files in my life: my music, and my photos.  For a few years, I’ve been syncing every song and every photo to the cloud (for music, first iTunes, now I’ve moved to Amazon; for photos, Google).  So I don’t have a storage space problem, and I don’t have a portability problem – everything is accessible from each of my devices.

The music is organized by artist and by album.  And the photos are organized by date (and sometimes by trip).  This works ok when I know what I’m looking for and it’s aligned to these structures.  For example, these types of things are easy to find:

• Pictures from our trip to Prague and Budapest
• The Tori Amos Little Earthquakes album
• The photo I took of Curt Schilling at the Red Sox Parade in 2004
• Let me Clear my Throat by DJ Kool

But there are times I want other kinds of things, and these are nearly impossible to find:

• The best 5 photos of my daughter since she was born
• All the photos of my dog
• 30 songs I like from different artists that I haven’t listened to lately
• A playlist-style playlist of good songs to work out to.

For music, I do have a few other options – I have Amazon Prime, so there are a lot of playlists of music I may or may not otherwise have in my library that i have access to.  So, I recently chose to listen to a playlist called “90’s Alternative Rock” and it was like being transported back to college.  It was exactly what I wanted.  But that was a kind of lucky hit.  And what about something as effective like that, but with my existing library that I have acquired and culled over the years?

I can see why people hone Pandora stations and stop buying individual songs or albums.  But even if that worked for me (and I’m not ready to give up my music library just yet) I can’t do that with my photos.  Google’s been doing a nice job with “highlights” and with making animated GIFs and collages from my photos, but even those aren’t as focused as what I can get from music.

I could tag every photo (and song, I suppose, or at least put songs on playlists) to help with this. But I don’t always know when I take a photo (or tag a photo) the ways in which I might want to look for it.  I could tag all the people in photos, but how would I know that I would have wanted to tag something as “outside” or “old apartment” until I want to retrieve it that way.

I would love any suggestions you readers have about solving either of these problems, but mostly I’m enjoying the parallels between this and enterprise IT.

Last week I was fortunate enough to work remotely – from my parents’ house in Florida, to be

View from my remote office last week – note the reflection of the blinds in the glass – I really was working inside!

exact.  Work is much more palatable with palm trees.

I had a few meetings scheduled back in our Cambridge office during the time I was in Florida, so I did some by phone and some by video chat.  I use Facetime pretty often so my daughter can talk with her grandparents, but it had been a while since I used them for professional meetings.

Here’s what I learned.

1. Video calls have come a looooooong way.  There still may be a little turbulence in logging in and getting set up but they’re nothing like the choppy and garbled experiences I remember.  (We used Google Hangout)

2. I liked video chat far more than I liked voice calls.  One day I had two meetings with the same group of people, and did one in each format.  So much more effective to be “in” the room – I could see responses better, which is the obvious benefit everyone mentions, but I could also better understand when was the socially appropriate time to contribute my thoughts.

3. It’s silly to join a video chat and then not appear via video.

4. There’s no sense in joining a video chat and then making it a screen share so you don’t see any video.  Get the person or team to send you the presentation and then have both windows open (the preso and the live video stream of the room)

I was pleasantly surprised at how effective video calls were – a technology I’ll definitely rely on again in the future.

A few weeks ago I wrote about why I shouldn’t work at a startup – the tl;dr version is that I’m risk-averse, skeptical, and I like firm answers to things.

Of course there are good reasons for me to be here, and one of them crept up last week.

We’ve been having a series of sales and marketing leadership meetings to formulate our FY2015 strategy.  One of the hardest parts of this exercise has been examining our FY2014 activities and analyzing what went right and what went wrong.  Sure, it’s easy to sit through your colleagues’ presentations of their years’ worth of work and critique, but it is not so easy to present one’s own year, and acknowledge the shortcomings.

One of the things that has surfaced is some gaps between functions.  Nothing fatal, but just some places where someone could have noticed that “oops, nobody’s doing that and we should” or “huh, how will this process work?”

And this is where I am valuable – but I can also get myself into trouble.  I immediate look at all those instances and think “should I have been the one to do that?” and “I know how to do that, maybe I was supposed to have thought of that.”

And that, dear reader, can make a person nuts.

So I need to have a gauge, something that helps me calibrate whether that was within my universe or not.  Which is tricky – I never want to have a “that’s not my job” response, but I also don’t want to take on everything (or feel like I’ve failed when I don’t.)

At Dell, it was easier – I would just take a step back to think, “is this something that belongs in classic product marketing?”  and then figure that as an overachiever I would do 20% more.

But this is #startuplife.  It’s not my job to just do 20% more than the “classic” role.  It’s my job to be part of building this company and its story and its processes.  So that calibration is harder. It’s more like “is this something that belongs in classic product marketing?  or does it belong to a function that doesn’t yet exist here?  or am I the best person here to do this right now?”

It makes for a job that right now is pretty big.

When our Keurig coffee maker breaks (which I think will be in the next week) mrDiva and I will probably buy a new one. I know it’s about to break because it’s displaying the same symptoms our previous four Keurigs had before they broke irreparably. Yup, this is going to be our fifth Keurig in ten years. While a few of those were warranty replacements, we paid for most of them.

Why do we keep buying a product that is clearly low quality? It’s not because we think of it as disposable. Actually, when I pay $75-$100 for an appliance, I expect it to last more than 2 years. My parents had a cheap coffeemaker that lasted what seemed like my entire childhood.

So why, oh why, do we keep buying replacements? Because it is otherwise a perfect product for us.  Here’s why:

• It requires zero cleaning.
• It makes one cup of coffee at a time, which means I can have decaf and mrDiva can have regular.
• It requires very little maintenance.

Plus, as another incentive, I have about $100 of k-cups in my pantry right now (some because we’re nuts about trying weird flavors and some because I needed a 5^th Subscribe and Save item a few months ago on Amazon) – this stuff is sticky!

Mark Zuckerberg said, “if you’re building a product that people love, you can make a lot of mistakes,” and I think that’s a great insight. I used to think of it in the context of a startup – as you are finding product/market fit and iterating past your MVP, you can mess up as you learn things.

But this is a more interesting case – I’m totally willing to settle for a product that isn’t meeting one of my basic requirements (coffee uptime!) because it is otherwise so compelling. And the cost of switching (the investment in k-cups and the time to research) just isn’t worth it.

So, here we go again. Another year, another new coffee maker.