User Pilot

MAY 30, 2024

Overlapping responsibilities and conflicting priorities are just a couple of the many friction points between product managers and product marketing managers – leading to inefficient workflows and potential product failures. Product marketing managers focus on getting the product in the right hands.

Product Marketing 103

Product Marketing Interviewing Management Scale 103

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Speakers share their playbooks on everything from achieving product-market fit to optimizing CAC:LTV ratios and scaling go-to-market strategies. SaaStr Annual attracts thousands of high-quality SaaS professionals across functions like engineering, product, marketing, sales, and customer success.

Sales Recruiting 195

Sales Recruiting Scale CTO Hire Sales Hiring 195

SaaStr

JULY 14, 2024

Hiring and Interviewing Tips: Jason emphasizes the importance of interviewing at least 30 candidates for a role and consulting with an expert in the field to interview the final candidate. He believes that AI will significantly enhance various aspects of SaaS products, making them more efficient and effective.

Sales Hiring 264

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Scale Interviewing 264

SaaStr

MARCH 28, 2021

But here’s my list of things I don’t think you should do, almost always, in SaaS/B2B: Committing for less than 24 months to get to product-market fit. You’ll run out of money, time, commitment and more, if all the founders don’t commit to 24 months to get to product-market fit. Don’t Forget the 20 Interview Rule.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Interviewing B2B Product Marketing 300

User Pilot

AUGUST 5, 2024

The right product marketing messaging framework can dramatically change your product’s position in the market and your product management outcomes. Let’s explore: What a product messaging framework is. Product marketing manager persona example. Monday’s present messaging.

Product Marketing 105

Product Marketing Marketing Software Review Communication 105

SaaStr

MAY 6, 2021

She decided to take some time off to regroup and thought about what exactly she wanted: a company that’s reached product-market fit but needs to grow, a disruptive technology, and a founder-CEO that would be like a partner. She used her interviews with investors to find out how they really felt about the product and their why.

Sales Hiring 306

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Interviewing Revenue 306

SaaStr

MAY 24, 2024

Many people in marketing and sales cross the line on LinkedIn, which can be detrimental to their personal brand. Jason Lemkin has interviewed some of the best founders on his podcast, SaaStr Annual. He approaches interviews with profound respect for the founders he interviews.

Sales Hiring 300

Sales Hiring Outsourcing Services Technical Review Scale 300

SaaStr

DECEMBER 15, 2020

Do 20 customer interviews (more on that here ). 20 interviews and a just amazing co-founder can be the missing pieces, to show you how to really do your own SaaS start-up. Talkdesk went from $1m to $15m ARR in 15 months, once it hit product-market fit. You can’t pass tests 1, 2 and 3 above. Then take a pause.

Sales Recruiting 363

Sales Recruiting SaaS Interviewing Consulting 363

Kellblog

FEBRUARY 16, 2022

The other day a founder asked me about interviewing because a candidate had described me as “a great interviewer,” and she wanted to know why. I find interviewing and recruiting difficult, have made plenty of mistakes over the years, and the consequences of those mistakes are invariably painful. Check references.

Sales Recruiting 110

Sales Recruiting Interviewing Sales Hiring Finance 110

User Pilot

AUGUST 1, 2024

Product marketing is the process of bringing a product to market, and a well-curated product marketing strategy is key to understanding customer needs and driving adoption. TL;DR A product marketing strategy is a roadmap for how a new product will be positioned, priced, and marketed.

Product Marketing 105

Product Marketing Strategy Marketing Underperforming Technical Team 105

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Q: Should Product Marketing Work for Product or Marketing? Product marketing is a weird art, with many over-indexing. These days, CEOs are looking for too much magic from product marketing. Maybe we expect too much, even up to $10-20M ARR, and expect magic from product marketing.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting AI 291

SaaStr

JANUARY 30, 2023

Deel overcame these challenges by taking care of these four things: Finding a product focus When Deel got accepted by Y Combinator in 2019, everyone loved the idea but hated the product. You may have a one-person representative in each continent who does the job of an SDR, closes deals, takes care of partnerships, marketing, and more.

Sales Hiring 279

Sales Hiring Payment Services SaaS Payments Scale 279

SaaStr

JUNE 27, 2024

Job Stopped Participating in Every Interview Early On Many founders still interview everyone when their company is at 200 or 300 people. Job still does interviews for everyone, director and up, but not for the ICs and managers of ICs, for the most part. How Can You Tell When You Have Product Market Fit?

Scale 264

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 264

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 11, 2020

The engagement may last a few months and involve extensive interviews and online research (yes, lots of Googling!) . Then a central group, which is usually the product marketing team, can curate it.” . One of the most effective ways to attack a market with a SaaS product is to give a tool to someone who is tool-less.”.

Consulting 280

Consulting Interviewing AI Innovation 280

SaaStr

APRIL 13, 2025

” Enter the Compound Startup Conrad’s alternative is what he calls a “compound startup”a company building multiple products in parallel that are deeply integrated and seamlessly interoperable. The advantages are substantial: 1.

Startup 163

Startup Sales Hiring Underperforming Technical Team Cloud 163

SaaStr

JULY 16, 2019

Join Rene Yang Stewart, Co-Head and Principal, Vista Equity Partners, and Monica Enand, Founder and CEO, Zapproved, as they discuss growing a company from product market fit to scale. René Stewart: So, Monica, you have, obviously, taken a company from figuring out product market fit to now a company of scale.

Scale 154

Scale Product Marketing Scaling Marketing 154

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 30, 2023

I’ve spent the last year working to find product-market fit for my startup, Dock. I’ve used our sales process to iterate our way to product market-fit and wanted to share what I’ve learned along the way. Find 10 people, then 100 people, then 1,000 people who love your product.

Sales Recruiting 121

Sales Recruiting Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring 121

SaaStr

MAY 31, 2024

1: How Sales and Marketing Have Shifted Since 2020 Expectations and the types of people working in SaaS have shifted over the past few years, and much more in sales, marketing, and customer success. While different than ‘typical’ interviews Jason notes as leaders, we all need to recalibrate what we expect out of people.

Sales Hiring 307

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Marketing Scale 307

User Pilot

JULY 10, 2024

Businesses invest heavily in product marketing through webinars, blog posts, and video content for a reason – it gets them notable results. If you’re looking to start or improve your SaaS product marketing strategy, this is the article to read. Product management focuses on building the right SaaS products.

Product Marketing 98

Product Marketing Strategy Marketing SaaS 98

User Pilot

JANUARY 22, 2024

A product marketing framework is like a compass that guides you through the complex, fast-paced world of SaaS. From initial launch to ongoing product management , this framework acts as a map towards sustainable growth. In this article, we dive deep into what a product marketing framework is and explore its essential components.

Product Marketing 105

Product Marketing Marketing Social Media Scale 105

SaaStr

AUGUST 26, 2020

This is the trap I find a lot of CEOs with early product-market fit fall into. At least, begin the interviewing process the month you realize new bookings growth isn’t accelerating anymore without a VP of Sales. Are your new bookings still growing ? And are they growing fast enough?

Sales Hiring 329

Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale Sales 329

Intercom, Inc.

JUNE 10, 2020

You therefore control how fast you build Product Judgment by deciding how often you personally observe and talk to your customers. These experiences, whether it is observing someone use your product, or interviewing them about your product, need to be wide ranging. Product Judgment and domain knowledge.

Underperforming Technical Team 291

Underperforming Technical Team Interviewing Communication B2B 291

SaaStr

DECEMBER 14, 2023

With the marketing team, there are a lot of the classic functions — brand marketing, product marketing, and partner marketing. It was interesting because they got to interview a bunch of customers and sales executives.

Cloud 314

Cloud Scale AWS AI 314

SaaStr

AUGUST 2, 2021

Aneesa Sayall (VP of Strategic Operations Customer & Partner Org at ServiceNow) interviews Lara Caimi, the ServiceNow Chief Customer & Partner Officer, about the journey to $15 billion and how building partnerships help propel the business. In ServiceNow’s case, they were a single-product company focused on selling IT.

Outsourcing Services 291

Outsourcing Services Scale Scaling Outsourced Development 291

SaaStr

MARCH 5, 2021

The three things that led to ramping up sales at Flock Safety were: Achieving product-market fit. If your product is selling at such a reliable rate, with consistent growth over multiple quarters, you’re probably at this point. When Garrett interviewed Alex, his challenge was to hire 30 reps within the first 30 days.

Sales Recruiting 261

Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring Scale Sales 261

FastSpring

FEBRUARY 6, 2025

Larger technology companies can pay more, offer more benefits, and provide a more marketable brand on a candidate’s resume. Podcast Full Interview: Audio Listen online or find it on more podcast services. Because everyone in the interview process is going to add their own flair. Closing is before the final interview.

SMB 107

SMB Sales Recruiting Branding Sales Hiring 107

Tom Tunguz

JANUARY 16, 2018

All of these disciplines fall under product marketing. Well run product marketing teams develop these perspectives before product launch. The competitive positioning?

Pricing 240

Pricing Market Research Interviewing Product Marketing 240

SaaStr

MAY 5, 2021

Here’s some advice for other product leaders from our journey at Pendo: $0-5M ARR: All hands on deck. Your primary focus in the earliest days of the company is achieving product-market fit. In most cases, this stage doesn’t require a dedicated product executive. This was the catalyst for product operations.

Strategy 300

Strategy Scale Innovation Interviewing 300

Tom Tunguz

AUGUST 30, 2017

You suspect you have initial product market fit. Sales, marketing, customer success, engineering, product management. The founders confirm product market fit with the first 10-20 sales and then hire an expert to scale the team and polish the process. Your startup is growing.

Sales Hiring 185

Sales Hiring Scale Interviewing Engineering 185

SaaStr

AUGUST 9, 2024

You have to be scrappy at this stage, and Braze was trying to find product market fit with no product, no revenue, and no customers. In the chart above, showing the growth from $2M to $20M, you can see what product market fit looks like. Determine the skills you want and how you’ll discover them in an interview.

Scale 297

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Startup 297

User Pilot

MARCH 9, 2025

For SaaS companies, this “listening” can take many forms to learn how users interact with their product and uncover areas for improvement. It could include conducting user interviews and surveys, analyzing product usage data, and tracking customer feedback , to name a few. The short answer: yes.

SaaS 83

SaaS Social Media Interviewing Scale 83

SaaStr

OCTOBER 10, 2023

The Founder-Led Sales Era When you’re first starting out, and have that initial product-market fit and tight feedback loops with champions and customers, there are many pros to founder-led sales. Early first-hand knowledge leads to rapid fixes to the product, pricing, and packaging.

Scale 284

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales 284

SaaStr

OCTOBER 30, 2021

I sent cold emails and LinkedIn messages and ended up with nine interviews. From those nine interviews, I received four offers. Going into the interviews, I knew what I wanted out of a job– that part was simple. I had also worked in customer service and e-commerce in the past and knew this market was prime for disruption.

Scale 291

Scale Sales Hiring Sales Underperforming Technical Team 291

Intercom, Inc.

SEPTEMBER 10, 2020

Intercom’s Kate O’Hanlon recently caught up with Mark to talk about his approach to scaling, and why it’s a mistake to think that the formula for success is just about getting product-market fit and then adding sales reps. . The framework consists of three elements: product-market fit, go-to-market fit, and growth and moat.

Scale 226

Scale Scaling Sales Recruiting Sales Hiring 226

SaaStr

APRIL 2, 2019

Show it to them in the context of your existing product. Market your new product within your existing product. Show the integration, show the new product with the customer’s data already in it. Alright, strategy number three – Finding product market fit again and again.

Scale 248

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Strategy 248

SaaStock

FEBRUARY 21, 2019

One of them, Janna Bastow, Founder of ProdPad, gave a presentation about Product-Market Fit. The other two, Paul Joyce, Founder of Geckoboard and Duane Jackson, Founder of Supdate and Kashflow then joined her on stage for a panel discussion about the road to product-market fit, which I moderated.

Scale 50

Scale SaaS Interviewing Product Marketing 50

Andreessen Horowitz

OCTOBER 16, 2023

One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. What does this mean for product design and product management? the night before it was to IPO).

Product Marketing 78

Product Marketing Scale Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting 78