Product Marketing at JetBrains

JetBrains Product Marketing School

• July 28—August 5, 2015
• 20 participants
• 14 talks by 8 speakers
• 5 home assignments & more

Your Expectations to Know

• Something about product marketing
• Product marketeer responsibilities
• What JetBrains does in marketing that SKB Kontur doesn't
• Promotion & research ideas
• Customer lifecycle management
• Product pricing & market positioning
• Best acquisition channels: outbound sales, ads, email

Your Expectations to Know :)

• If JetBrains is as good as it seems
• Project Manager vs. Product Manager vs. Product Marketing Manager

Agenda

1. Product marketing managers at JetBrains
2. Strategic product management
3. Operational product management
4. Contemporary case study

Q & A sessions, coffee breaks, and a home assignment

JetBrains

• Since 2000
• $ 110kk in revenue in 2014
• Privately owned, never raised funds
• Offices in Czech Republic, Russia, Germany, USA

JetBrains Products

JetBrains Products

• IntelliJ IDEA: 33 % of Java IDE market
• ReSharper: 600k downloads in MS VS Gallery
• PhpStorm: the best PHP IDE of 2014
• Android Studio: the official IDE for Android, based on IntelliJ IDEA

People at JetBrains

• 500+ in 2015
• Communications in Russian and English
• Almost anyone write code, including both CEOs

People at JetBrains

1. CEOs, VPs, founders, fellows
2. Team leads
3. Team members

JetBrains Culture

• No managers & KPIs
• Dogfooding
• Openness
  • Pubic roadmaps
  • No BS policy

Removing barriers by Hadi Hariri

Teams at JetBrains

• 20+ product teams
• 15+ functional teams

Self-organized and self-sufficient.

Product Team Roles at JetBrains

• Team lead
• Software developer
• QA engineer
• UX specialist
• Support engineer
• Technical writer
• Product marketing manager

Product Marketing Areas

1. Product management
2. Communications
   • Outbound
   • Inbound
   • Internal

Outbound Communications

• Community management
  • User groups
  • Opinion leaders
  • Open source projects
  • Educational institutions

Outbound Communications

• Participation in conferences & events
  • Sponsorships, talks, booths, gifts
  • Visits to user groups
  • Visits to corporate customers

Outbound Communications

• Content production
  • Blog posts
  • Tutorials
  • Webinars
  • Screencasts
  • Newsletters
  • Website content
  • Context ads

Outbound Communications

Inbound Communications

• Customer feedback
• Customer activity analysis
• Market trends & forecasts

Internal Communications

PMM as a hub:
• to other product teams
• to Sales team
  • pricing & discounts
  • regional markets

Strategic Product Management

• Product planning
• Release management
• Pricing strategy
• Business development
  • Partnerships
  • Co-marketing
  • Integration & technology support

Operational Product Management

• Promotion
• Customer lifecycle optimization (w/ internet marketing)
• Lead nurturing (w/ email marketing)
• Marketing automation

Communications with Functional Teams

Development Lifecycle

• Problem + team = product
• Early access program, release candidate, public preview
• Major & minor releases
• Feedback from market = new roadmap

Heavily influenced by distribution model.

Roadmaps

• At least for every major release (6–9 months)
• Estimated time available
• Major (driver) features
• No fear to overpromise
• Public
• Live updates

Outcomes of Public Roadmaps

• Early customer feedback
• Commitment as a by-product

~70 % of planned features are delivered.
Some unplanned too.

Marketing Mix

• Product → Consumer
• Price → Cost
• Promotion → Communication
• Place → Channel

Pricing Strategy Matrix

Take the product lifecycle stage into account.

Pricing Models

Product ↔ Cost ↔ Price ↔ Value ↔ Customer

• Value-based
• Cost-based
  • Fixed & variable costs
  • Break-even point

Price Levers

• Quantity of money
• Quantity of goods & services
• Quality of goods & services
• Place and time for payment
• Acceptable form of payment

Discounts Motivation

• Improving cash-flow
• Solving problems
• Getting rid of excess products
• Breaking into markets
• Driving volume
• Dealing with competitors

Discount Types

• Prompt payment
• Seasonal
• Targeted
• Cumulative quantity
• Coupons

Pricing Strategy Metrics

• Price elasticity
• Revenue growth
• Customer lifetime value
• Average revenue per user
• Churn rate
• Retention rate

Communications with Customers

• Standard marketing messaging is harmful
• Developers like to talk to developers, not to marketeers

Why?
• Developers are the new kingmakers
• B2C approach to B2B/B2C market

Community Development

• Developers at corporations
• Individual developers
• User groups
• Open source projects
• Students, classrooms & campus ambassadors
• Associations, for- & non-profits
• Plugin developers

Community Development Cases

• PhpStorm & Drupal: framework support
• PhpStorm & Wordpress: tailored open-source program
• CLion: „C/C++ facts“ research
• Android Studio: switch from Eclipse to the IntelliJ platform

Customer Lifecycle Models

• AIDA: awareness, interest, desire, action
• AIDAS: awareness, interest, desire, action, satisfaction
• AIDALSlove: attention, interest, search, action, like, share, love

Pirate metrics:
• AARRR: acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, referral

Funnel Optimization Levers

• Acquisition: internet marketing, pricing & discounts
• Activation: email marketing, beginner experience
• Revenue: upselling, cross-selling
• Retention: new features, subscription model
• Referral: mission for customers, emotional relationship

Marketing Channels

• Organic
• Paid

Organic Channels

SEO 101

• Make your website indexable
  • Site architecture
  • Code quality & server settings
  • Trust factors: speed, age
  • Content duplication issues
  • Relevant search engines
• Collect traffic

More Impressions, Better CTR

SEO Process

1. Choose keywords for pages
   • Navigational
   • Transactional
   • Informational
2. Optimize pages
3. Promote them
4. Analyze results & repeat

Keywords Data Sources

• Google AdWords keywords planner
• Websites of competitors
• Search engine autosuggest
• Historical data (e.g., logs)

Long Tail Keywords

• 10 % of queries for 90 % of sessions
• 20 % of queries never used before

SMM 101

• Use structured data markup
• Use rich content: images, videos, etc.
• Use string CTA

Direct Traffic Hygiene

• Human-readable URLs
• Short and descriptive titles
• Redirect outdated pages, no 404s
• 404 page with navigational links

Paid Channels

1. Paid search
2. Media ads
3. RTB & ad networks
4. Social media ads
5. Review sites
6. Sponsorships
7. External email campaigns
8. Offline advertising (internet marketing, huh?)

• Limited costs (organic ≠ free) & unlimited potential income
• No direct control
• Long term results

Paid Traffic Pricing Models

It's always CPM.

Paid Campaigns 101

Channel Attribution Models

• First interaction
• Last interaction
• Last paid search click
• Last non-direct click
• Linear
• Time decay
• Position based

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate = completed goals ÷ total visitors

Types of Decision Makers

CRO 101

1. Define a goal & success metrics
2. Find weaknesses in existing flow
3. Create a hypothesis
4. Carry A/B or multivariate tests

Don't forget to share the results.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing Cases

Types of Knowledge

• Things we know
• Things we know we don't know
• Things we don't know but have some idea about
• Things we don't know that we don't know

Feel confident enough?

Knowledge Sources

• Authority
• Intuition
• Personal preferences
• Politics
• Common sense
• Facts

Fact Extraction Process

1. Observation
2. Hypothesis
3. Experiment
4. Data analysis

Let's apply it.

Research Methods

Research & Analytics Cases

• Usage of specific programming languages in the world
• Data aggregation: Stack Overflow, ITJobsWatch, Google Trends, Wikipedia
• Regional markets survey analysis

Part 1: September 3, 2015

Introducing JetBrains Toolbox by Eugene Toporov

Reactions:
• Hacker News, Reddit & Habrahabr
• Dwayne Charrington, Jeffrey Haskovec & Dmitry Leskov

Part 2: September 4, 2015

We are listening by Eugene Toporov

Part 3: September 18, 2015

Final update on the JetBrains Toolbox announcement by Maxim Shafirov

Reactions:
• Hacker News, Reddit & Habrahabr
• Clara van Staden & Maryna Cherniavska

Let's Apply

1. Choose a product of SKB Kontur
2. Imagine you are a PMM of this product
3. Propose one strategic and one operational change to its marketing
4. Make hypotheses about the effect of each change
5. Find ways to prove them with facts

Result Submission

1. Put your solution into a Google Docs document
2. Share a link with Igor Lukanin via email
3. Get his feedback & a secret gift :)

Submission deadline is 23:59 YEKT on October 18, 2015

Afterword

Thanks for your time.
Thanks to the amazing team at JetBrains

Follow me on Twitter: @igorlukanin
Contact me via email: mail@igor.lukanin.name
Fork this talk on GitHub