Tackling Tech Products as a Product Marketer

You’re tasked with a big job: managing a complex technical product.

There’s just one problem — you’re not a developer. 😱

Where do you even begin! It can be tricky, but you don’t need to be a software engineer to understand your product’s benefits and strengths. With the right strategy in place and some hard work, marketing for tech products can be tackled, bit-by-bit.

To help get you started, here is a map of the approach I take when tackling a new technical product.

People and Problems, then Product.

🧠 Wrap Your Brain Around the Problem: Even if you’re not a developer, and even if you can’t yet use the tool, you can do one thing — empathize. Your biggest asset when it comes to successfully marketing tech products is having thorough knowledge of the people who will use your product and the problems that you’re trying to solve for them.

This will help you better understand the why behind your job, better communicate more effectively with internal and external audiences, and begin to formulate better plan of action.

💻 Understand Developer Experience: Once you understand your audience and their problems, next it’s time to focus on making their lives easier. The best way to market your product is to care about the Developer Experience, or DX. This is a little like the customer experience (CX) but tailored to developers.

It's all about providing an easy, smooth and intuitive way for developers to get education, use your product or service, and enable them to get the job done quickly with as little frustration as possible.

📈 Keep Up with Your Target Audience: But how do you empathize with and ensure better Developer Experience as a product marketer? Be where they are. Get to know them! The tech industry moves fast, so it’s important for devs to stay on top of emerging trends and changes. So you have to, as well.

Live a day in their shoes: interview them, research, read newsletters, join forums, and attend conferences to help connect you to your customers and see their problems first-hand.

🤝 If You Can’t Beat ‘em…: Now this is empathy in action. Now that you’ve got a better sense of your target audience, their problems, and their lives, it’s time to actually get into the tool. Start with documentation and asking questions — your product and engineering peers will be able to help here.

Remember: the most successful tech products are those that make life easier for customers, not more complicated. So you should be able to figure it out, and if you can’t there might be a UX problem!

📊 Leverage Data: Your gut and empathy can only take you so far. Of course, analytics and data should be used to inform every decision you make when marketing a tech product. Use data to track customer behavior, identify areas of improvement, measure marketing ROI and refine strategies accordingly.

Marketing technical products isn’t always easy, especially if you’re a first-timer. But give the people-problem-product route a try and let me know if it helps!