Product and marketing: two sides of the same coin

Colin Bentley and Brian Donohue are product managers at Intercom — a product first company. They were interviewed on the company’s podcast about their experiences since they joined the company of 30. Today, there are 300 people working at Intercom and their product services over 100,000 active customers.

As a product first company it was normal for them to think if you built a great product, everything else would follow. People were cynical when Intercom started making their first marketing hires.

Over time, the product folks began to see they weren’t very different than the marketers. They realized they both focus on the needs of their customers. While the product managers build features, the marketers position them to their customer’s so they’re desirable and useful. As an example, Twitter’s tweet button could have been easily labeled submit. Instead, a lot of work went into positioning it as a Tweet button so that Tweeting could become a thing.

Today, Colin and Brian explain how important it is for their team to collaborate. It’s essential for them to fuse both the marketing and product perspectives. This allows them not only to build the most important things for their customers but also gives their product a unique place in the market.

Listen to the full podcast on Intercom’s site.