Product Marketing Manager
📣

Product Marketing Manager

Workstream
Marketing
Job Description (link)

We’re very excited you’re considering a role at Visor on our marketing team. This guide will provide information to make your candidate experience seamless.

image

More about this team: marketing

Our strategy: product-led growth (PLG)

We’re all-in on PLG. We believe it provides a superior experience for customers. To guide our strategy, we have developed a unique set of principles, outlined below:

10 Commandments of Visor's PLG Strategy (Public)

NameDescription

We should think holistically about every self-service touchpoint a user has with Visor as part of the product. That means our product includes our knowledge base, our social posts, our automated emails, our blog posts, and, of course, the core Visor application. We need to balance our efforts to expand the power of the entire product, not just the software application.

Users should not be required to make any major decisions, commitments, or changes to get value from Visor. Everything about the experience should be broken into small, rewarding chunks of progress. Like a long, sloping incline vs. a sudden cliff. There should be a magical, magnetic draw that pulls users in with gradual bits of reward and satisfaction. We should seek to get those gradual commitments at every opportunity to pull the user in deeper.

Trials suggest the user has to make a decision at the end, but there doesn't need to be the pressure of a decision. Rather than a decision, the users have varying levels of commitment. The more time and money they invest, the more committed they are. We want the excitement of solving their problems to quickly draw them in until they are so invested that they are hooked. Even paying should not be treated as a final decision. It's just another investment in using Visor to continue achieving their goals.

Encourage free exploration. The whole experience of using Visor should be low-commitment, low-risk to start. Even billing should avoid pushing too hard for commitment with annual plans. We are okay with gradual commitments that expand over time. As users get more invested, the upgrade to an annual plan or expansion to additional users should be a part of the natural experience.

We don't want users to just kick the tires because they're afraid of a paywall or losing access to their work. We want users to start with real data and real use cases. Users should not be made to fear the limits of the free plan or some future expiration of free benefits. While we don't want to make it hard for them to discover the paid plans or understand their usage if they have questions, we don't want to bring their attention to them unnecessarily before they've paid. We want them to run right through their limit like a marathoner through the finish line.

We want to charge users for using the product, not discovering it. Since the free plan is our main way of “selling”, we want it to be as strong as possible. That means that we shouldn't hide valuable features behind paid tiers. The free plan should be as fully-featured as reasonable.

People pay to avoid pain. It's harder to get people to pay for some future benefit. The payment decision should not come at an arbitrary point in time — it should come right in the middle of receiving value, when Visor has become sticky enough to warrant payment. That's why we believe that usage-based triggers, not time-based triggers, are right for our business.

People overvalue their money and undervalue their time. Replace upfront commitment of money with a "less costly" commitment of time. Instead of asking users to upgrade, ask users to spend more time with Visor. Ask them to take in-product actions that deepen their investment in Visor and help them get value. Ask them to provide reviews for us online. Ask them to follow us on social media. But don't outright ask for money unless they have something to lose by not paying. The more time they spend with Visor, the more likely they are to want to leverage that investment.

Nobody on the team should ask users to upgrade or make a decision. The goal of our team is to guide users to deeper investment so that they will get prompted to upgrade automatically by the product. In sales-led companies, the product is there to help the people make the sale. In product-led growth companies, the people are just there to help the product make the sale.

We can learn from every interaction with users. No question or request is too small to be valuable for our learning. Our goal is to take the friction points that require human intervention and find ways to automate them so future users don't have similar frictions. We can reduce future friction through knowledge base articles, revised product design, guidance prompts, and automated emails. We want to build a money-making machine that requires very little human intervention.

The decision-free sales process

We believe that the most user-friendly products are the ones that don’t require a huge decision. Instead, they’re the products that are easy to adopt and investment is gradual according to your value. To learn more about our philosophy, check out this blog post:

Our market

Visor operates in a highly-competitive, very crowded market. Here are some of the other companies in our market.

  • Google Sheets
  • Microsoft Excel
  • Airtable
  • Rows
  • Team Gantt
  • Asana
  • Smartsheet
  • ClickUp
  • Product Board
  • Actiondesk

Our differentiation

While many of the products in our class offer similar-looking products, we built Visor with a unique formula to match the unmet demand we saw in the market: people looking to collaborate more easily with data locked in their SaaS apps.

Here are the three main reasons Visor’s better:

It's more flexible

Our users are frustrated that the tools they use are rigid and limited, forcing them to do their work elsewhere. Visor can grow with its users as their use cases change and expand. Visor adapts to how they want to work; it doesn't force them to adapt to Visor.

It's more trustworthy

Many products that promise integrations don't deliver reliably on that promise. Visor offers a refreshingly seamless and trustworthy integration experience. It makes it easier to work with integrated data, it improves the likelihood things will sync, and it provides helpful guidance when things are done.

It's more shareable

Nobody operates in a vacuum — everything done in Visor is likely meant to be shared. Visor helps users share their information and create rich collaboration experiences around it so that they can keep people informed and draw upon the feedback of their entire brain trust.

About Visor’s marketing stack

Visor’s marketing stack consists of a combination of custom-built solutions and off-the-shelf products. You’ll likely find that Visor’s marketing stack is skewed more heavily to custom-built or tightly-integrated products, since we have engineering resources dedicated entirely to growth & marketing projects.

CRM & marketing automation

We use Salesforce as our main CRM with HubSpot primarily for marketing automation. They sync bidirectionally.

In Salesforce, we track all of our users, including special engagement data. For any given user, there are Salesforce fields to determine whether they’ve taken certain actions we care about, such as integrating Visor with another app or inviting a colleague. We also use advanced formulas to score users and keep track of their health over time.

This information syncs to HubSpot, where we maintain a number of workflow automation campaigns to guide user activity. Our email automation runs on different tracks, depending on whether users have reached certain milestones. For example, the new user email sequence will send different emails based on if the customer has integrated Visor with another app, sent invites, or reached certain health scores. We also run automation to boost activation & retention.

To learn more about our marketing automation, check out this blog post:

Analytics and telemetry

We use a number of tools to understand how customers are using our product. They range from a custom-built analytics system (which stores millions of records per day in our data warehouse) to off-the-shelf products like FullStory, GA, and Heap.

Web publishing

We currently use Webflow for our website, Ghost for our blog, and Super.so + Notion for some other properties (like our support page).

Our ecosystem

We consider the following to be core parts of the Visor marketing ecosystem:

We’re also planning to add the following components to our ecosystem in the future:

  • A public template database for Visor
  • A user forum & community where users can help each other
  • An events portal for coordinating our webinars and other events
  • An online academy for training on Visor and getting certified
  • An account management portal where customers can track their feature requests, support tickets, and status within the Visor Visionaries customer council
  • A developer center for helping engineers integrate their product with Visor

You + Visor: A Perfect Fit?

The following outlines Visor’s initial screening process for candidates.

Overview

  1. Call with our Community & Talent Associate

      2. The phone screening portion an interview usually begins with a brief conversation with our community & talent associate. You can expect to chat about your interest in this role, motivation for looking for new role, and your search timeline. The goal is to confirm a high-level fit. Please be ready to:

    1. Confirm that you are legally authorized to work in the United States (without requiring Visa sponsorship)
    2. Discuss your timing and where you are in the process of finding your next opportunity
    3. Share any salary expectations you have and confirm that you understand the salary range posted for your role
    4. Discuss the specific skills and talents you have related to this role

      5. If our Community & Talent Associate decides to proceed, we’ll schedule the next conversation with the hiring manager.

      icon

      Not sure what questions to ask our community & talent associate? Here’s a few to get you started:

      • What qualities are you looking for in the person you hire for this job?
      • What are the location expectations for this role?
      • How would you describe the company culture?
  2. Call with the Hiring Manager

    3. This section of the interview process allows you to ask more specific questions to learn about Visor, the role and the responsibilities. The hiring manager typically asks you to open the meeting by asking your own questions. Then, they will ask you some introductory questions about your career goals, motivation for taking the meeting, and expectations about a new role. Please be ready to chat about about your career ambitions for the next few years and what types of company cultures you thrive in.

    icon
    Not sure what questions to ask the Hiring Manager? Here’s a few to get you started:
    • What’s your company’s unique value proposition?
    • What marketing channel is Visor most focused on for user acquisition?
    • What does success look like in this role and how will I be measured?
    • What are the high-level team structures? How do teams collaborate?

What success looks like

These calls are helpful for information gathering. We’re looking for your honesty and want to ensure that you’ll happy with the role, and that we’ll feel that you may be a good fit for it based on your interest and experience.

Role-specific topics for Product Marketing Candidates

On these screening calls, please be ready to talk about your level of familiarity with product marketing, positioning, copywriting, content creation, Go-to-Marketing strategies, and competitive analysis. Together we’ll determine on this call whether the role aligns with your experience and ambitions.

Marketing interviews at Visor

Overview

In this part of our interview process, we’re looking to understand how well your capabilities match our needs for the position. We’re looking for marketers who can:

  • Learn effectively You should be a fast learner who can develop your own skills and adapt to new information.
  • Think quickly To thrive at Visor, you need to be a fast thinker who can process a lot of information and make good decisions.
  • Communicate clearly You’ll need excellent communication skills to draft marketing content and communicate with team members.
  • Organize consistently With a constant stream of metrics and campaigns, you need to be good at organizing yourself and your work.
  • Execute diligently We’re looking for teammates that can roll up their sleeves, focus, and execute.

Our interviews will feature questions about your past accomplishments and career experiences. Please come ready to talk about specific examples from your past. We’ll also ask you to role play in certain business scenarios. And in certain cases, we may conduct a basic skills assessment live on the call.

We don’t expect any one candidate to be perfect. Rather, each person has a unique set of strengths and areas to be developed further. Our goal is to determine your unique combination and see how well that fits the role we have.

Please bring your authentic self to the meeting; be the “self” you plan to bring to work every day. We’re looking to learn about you in a personal capacity, too. What are your passions and interests? What drives you? Show us how Visor can be the right place to further your career.

How we conduct the interview

We’ll conduct the interview over Zoom. To facilitate a free and flowing conversation, we’ll ask that you be situated somewhere in a quiet room, by yourself, with a strong internet connection so that we can both take the meeting with our cameras on and remain unmuted. For parts of our interview process where skills are being assessed, it’s important that we maintain the integrity of this being an individual assessment. We will record the call for review by additional Visor team members.

Interview (60 minutes) with Hiring Manager: Background, skills, and hands-on exercises

We have decided to combine both the Round 1 and Round 2 interview into one 60-minute interview with the hiring manager.

The interview focuses on what you’ve accomplished and what you already know. During this interview, your interviewer will ask you to describe times from your past professional experiences. We’ll also ask you questions to confirm your understanding of certain marketing skills and tactics.

Furthermore, this interview will be oriented around how well your unique perspective will contribute to Visor. Be prepared to problem-solve some scenarios with us regarding SEO and content on the call. We’ll ask you about how you’d approach certain challenges and projects we have ahead of us. You may expect to do work in a spreadsheet.

How you should prepare

Have a computer with a webcam and microphone
Ensure you have a strong internet to keep your camera on at all times
Be in a quiet location by yourself where you can focus and keep your microphone unmuted
Re-review your resume and past career accomplishments; consider which specific scenarios demonstrate information about who you are
Ensure you’re refreshed on some of the key principles of acquisition marketing

How you’ll be evaluated

  1. How well we communicate together during the interviews
  2. How well you can think and learn
  3. How well you understand general design principles
  4. How developed your skills are in the areas necessary to carry out your responsibilities (see the “What you’ll be doing” section of the job description for your role)
  5. How aligned we are on the best marketing design strategy for Visor
  6. How well can you analytically break down complex problems

Take-home project

Overview

We believe the most effective way to determine how well we’d work together is to actually try it. That’s why we’ve included a collaborative take-home project as part of our interview process for all positions.

Compensation

We value your time and have built in a compensation component to all our projects to show you that we mean it. All take-home projects are structured as consulting projects with a $175 flat-rate compensation attached to them. In order to be eligible for this compensation, you’ll be asked to sign Visor’s standard consulting agreement before you begin work. The general time estimate for Visor take-home projects ranges from 5 to 10 hours.

The general schedule

The take-home project consists of two meetings: a 30-minute kickoff and a 30-minute presentation (followed by a Q&A). You’ll do your work on the project between these two meetings. Typically we like to give all candidates about one calendar week to work on the project, but we can be flexible based on your schedule — planning on less or more time.

Kickoff meeting

During the kickoff meeting, you will receive a set of instructions about a project that is specific to your role. You’ll review these instructions live on a video call with your interviewer. In the most productive of these kickoff calls, the candidates begin some planning work together with the interviewer. Please use this as an opportunity to ask questions you need to help you complete the project (you are also encouraged to follow up with additional questions during the course of your project work). At the end of this kickoff, we’ll schedule the presentation meeting.

Completing the project

The principle behind the take-home project is to see how well we work together. As such, you are expected to check in about your progress during the time between the kickoff and the presentation. Candidates who succeed during these projects are typically the ones that engage in the most conversation with the Visor team during their work.

Presenting your work

During the presentation, be prepared to walk through your work and how you met the expectations of the assignment. Your interviewer will ask you follow-up questions to explain your work. Please deliver your project in a way that can be shared after this meeting with other members of the Visor team.

What success looks like

The take-home project is helpful in determining your ability to execute in a real-world scenario akin to those we experience at Visor. We will gauge how well you understand the core requirements of the problem statement, assumptions you make in the process, and your ability to explain how the deliverable may fit into the larger product strategy.

icon
Please note that although we structure our projects as consulting agreements, we do not plan to use anything you complete as part of your project in the Visor product.

Role-specific notes for the Product Marketing Manager position

The project for the Product Marketing Manager position is focused mainly on product marketing & communication skills. We’ll ask you to prepare a content strategy document and write one piece of content.

Team interview

Overview

Our team will conduct a 90-minute interview with you. Our goal is to get to know how you interact with various team members that you’ll work with cross-functionally. We’ll chat about all facets of the Visor product, ecosystem, organization, and culture.

What success looks like

At the end of the day, we’re a team comprised of very real people who come from different backgrounds with a shared purpose of collaborating together in the hopes of building something of value for lots of people. We all approach each other with honesty, openness, curiosity, and support. We ask that you approach this conversation from a place of honesty and vulnerability. We’re aiming to build a rapport, and to find out how you can become a culture add to our team. We’re looking for signs of your passion, drive, and commitment to our cultural values. You’ll earn bonus points if you demonstrate you’ve read this by mentioning “EPIC Drive,” our cultural values, during the part of the team meeting when everyone is together.

Tips for marketing interview success

Here’s more information about how to ace the Visor marketing interview.

Know your stuff (and don’t be too humble)

We’re looking to hire marketers that raise the marketing IQ of our entire team. Of course you should know the basics and the vocabulary. But we’re really looking for you to show us how you apply that knowledge cleverly. What are the things you know about marketing can’t be learned in a classroom or blog post? Be prepared to demonstrate how smart you are about marketing and how you’d bring that to our team.

Demonstrate your cognitive abilities

Building a company is all about figuring out solutions to hard, new problems. As a result, we’re looking to hire team members who can go way beyond just doing the types of work they already know well. We’re looking for bright and people who think outside the box. Tell us more about your academic achievements that demonstrate your cognitive abilities. Or show us your intelligence by communicating very clearly as you’re solving the problems in our interviews.

Show us that you’re a doer

At this stage of our company, we need to hire people that get things done. It’s not enough to just have the right ideas. Execution is everything. So beyond just knowing the right things to say, we want to know that you know how to roll up your sleeves and get it done. Show us examples of your work. Let your passion for marketing shine through; do you have any side projects you’ve worked on that demonstrate a passion for marketing outside of your day job?

Crunch the numbers

We believe that marketing is equal parts art and science. It can be very hard to tie numbers to something as complicated as a wide-ranging marketing strategy, but that’s the most important thing we can do to understand whether we’re investing in the right things. To excel in our interview, be ready to crunch some numbers and talk about what they mean.

But keep it human

On the other hand, marketing is an intrinsically human-centered endeavor. That’s why we’re looking for marketers who think empathetically about our customers and develop authentic relationships with them at scale. While we want to know that you can crunch the numbers, we’ll also expect you to show us how marketing is fundamentally about helping people.