Our upcoming Product Marketing Festival APAC is just around the corner, where we'll be bringing PMM leaders in APAC from all around the globe together under one (virtual) roof.
Attendees will have the chance to steal tricks of the trade from top cats from the likes of PayPal, TikTok, Microsoft, Lenovo, and more.
Ahead of the main event, we thought we'd tickle your tastebuds by giving a selection of our speakers some quickfire questions so you can get to know 'em a bit better.
Catch up with:
- Anshul Kaushesh, Head of Global Product Marketing, Tata Communications
- Ishara Naotunna, Head of Product Marketing, Vetstoria
- Sarah Sahyoun, Product Marketing Manager, Xero
- Anusuya Kannabiran, Head of Product Marketing, Squadcast
- Johan Casspe, Product Marketing Manager - Performance - SEA, TikTok
Anshul Kaushesh, Head of Global Product Marketing, Tata Communications
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your role?
I have been in marketing for over 20 years now and have worked across most marketing functions- brand and communications, field marketing, digital marketing, and of course product marketing. Currently, I lead product marketing at Tata Communications, which means that I am responsible for creating value propositions and messaging for our portfolio.
My team and I are focused on understanding customer challenges, defining our propositions, zeroing in our differentiation, and then converting all this into messaging that customers can relate to. I see my role as being the voice of the customer inside the organization. I strongly believe that customer centricity drives both marketing effectiveness and business results.
How did you get into product marketing?
In my career, I have always focused on acquiring different experiences and building diverse skills. As marketing is constantly evolving, my intent has been to work in different marketing areas so that I stay relevant and understand how all the functions work together.
As a part of this process, I moved to my first product marketing role when I was working at IBM. I realized that I quite enjoy it because it sits at the intersection of technology, human behavior, and storytelling. It’s a role that blends strategy with creativity and I find that really compelling.
What would you consider to be the most important quality needed to succeed in your role?
I would say that empathy - the ability to understand your customers - is perhaps the most important skill.
What can we expect from your talk at Product Marketing Festival APAC?
I am talking about positioning and will cover areas like how can we identify and articulate the position that we want to occupy in the customers’ minds and perhaps hearts? How can we ensure that we communicate this positioning clearly and consistently in the marketplace? And use it to build brand affinity, emotional connection, and customer advocacy?
Ishara Naotunna, Head of Product Marketing, Vetstoria
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your role?
I explored a lot of careers to figure out what I like doing (advertising, radio, event marketing) and then found a passion for product marketing. I love to read - you'd always find me with a book, love music and dogs. The latter is actually what found me my current stint where I'm the head of product for Vetstoria, an appointment scheduling software for veterinary practices. I get to work on the messaging, sales enablement, releases, and GTM, which I love.
How did you get into product marketing?
When my previous company (WSO2) wanted to put their first product marketing team together, I got the opportunity to try it out. I'm guessing this came from the fact that I helped manage a lot of campaigns for our products. It's not really a position I knew that existed but super grateful.
What would you consider to be the most important quality needed to succeed in your role?
Curiosity. You have to keep asking questions, keep learning. Tech in general keeps evolving, and the more questions you ask, the more clarity you have. Doesn't matter even if they are dumb if it helps you learn. If I could add another - adaptability. As much as I'd like for things to stay the same, being able to adapt to situations, changes helps you go a long way.
What can we expect from your talk at Product Marketing Festival APAC?
How do you get started as a PMM, what should you do and maybe what you shouldn't (I definitely have a long list here), tips around content creation, CI, and sales enablement) and some of the skills that might help to get to the next level.
Sarah Sahyoun, Product Marketing Manager, Xero
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your role?
I'm Sydney-based, currently living in lockdown, a.k.a LockyD (I’ve recently learned this is a thing!). In a pre-Covid world, you'd find me squeezing in as much travel as possible, hiking, and attempting a new water sport. At Xero, my role is focused on developing and driving the CVP from product ideation to GTM execution and continued product lifecycle management.
At its core, I’m challenged with constantly pushing the boundaries of how we can continue differentiating and creating valuable products and services that empower small business owners and their partners around the world.
How did you get into product marketing?
I’ve always been curious and fascinated with how technology enhances and influences human lives. After some soul searching I found my happy place when I discovered product marketing.
I was drawn to the challenge of untangling complex concepts into compelling stories and beautiful products. In a world where features rule, I love helping technology companies understand how to connect with customers and create value that has a real impact on their lives.
There’s nothing like the buzz of nailing a good value proposition and crafting a strategy that gets great commercial results. There’s never a dull moment and always lots to learn!
What would you consider to be the most important quality needed to succeed in your role?
Transforming complex concepts into compelling and digestible stories. Being a product marketer means having one foot in product, the other in customer, and finessing the art of killer communication.
It goes hand in hand with empathy and a sense of never-ending curiosity in understanding customers and their world. Being able to bring those skill sets together means nailing a strong CVP and driving it home within the business and successfully launching it to market.
What can we expect from your talk at the Product Marketing Festival APAC?
Have you ever wondered what it's really like to be a Product Marketer in a global Tech company? Be entertained as you hear candid first-hand intel about what it's like to walk a tightrope between the customer and the business.
I’ll share the challenges, the learnings as well as talk about how customers are the key to differentiating and getting your product to stand out in a crowded, noisy market. Hear how differentiation, when done well, can shift your product from meeting the market to moving the market.
You will leave with a fresh perspective and new ways of tackling your work. I’ll share some useful techniques as well as some tools and templates that you can use to help you hone your craft.
Anusuya Kannabiran, Head of Product Marketing, Squadcast
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your role?
I have been in the SaaS world (mostly B2B) for more than a decade now, and the journey has been strewed with multiple roles across organizations, mostly in Sales and Marketing. It truly has been an exciting journey with opportunities to work internationally while juggling these roles, getting a glimpse into other cultures, and a chance to interact with interesting and highly talented people.
Post my stint as a Regional Sales Director at an Ed-Tech firm, I found my passion for product marketing.
Leading product marketing at hyper-growth companies does come with its own challenges but also can be super fun. The aspects of storytelling, understanding the product, buyer and overall market along with the enormous scope to analyze hundreds of touches and nudges across dozens of channels - collecting data, tracking behavior, segmenting audiences - making sense of all this information in a way that you can successfully carve a space out for your own product in a competitive market - is what truly excites me as a product marketer.
Currently, I am Head of Product Marketing at Squadcast, a developer-centric platform that enables engineers to adopt Site Reliability Best Practices (SRE) to up-level their IT Incident Management. And being a non-techie myself, I love translating technical language to human-understandable content.
Fun fact about me: A huge Quantum Physics Enthusiast. Space/Time continuum discussions are something I crave during my free time. My bet is that I can gel pretty well with anyone whose favorite movie is Interstellar!
How did you get into product marketing?
Coming from a background of working with hyper-growth startups, the challenge of creating and telling the story of products, the foundation of what we typically refer to as positioning has undoubtedly been one of my driving forces to dive deeper into all things Product Marketing. I strongly believe in combining data with the creative aspects of marketing to lead product innovation, demand generation, and creating compelling brand experiences.
With this passion, I have been able to steer product marketing initiatives to success ranging from messaging and competitive positioning, product launches, go-to-market strategy, actionable market research, and brand development. This combined with my enthusiasm for agile marketing initiatives has been the reason behind my successful track record in generating revenue and growth.
What would you consider to be the most important quality needed to succeed in your role?
In my opinion, it's not just one but a mix of these qualities that can help you succeed as a product marketer: Being an excellent storyteller, leadership through influence, not authority, and being data-driven.
At the heart of every positioning statement you can potentially come up with, is a story - which is not just about telling potential buyers what your product is, but also telling them why it matters and creating a story that resonates with prospective customers.
I believe product marketing is one of the most cross-functional roles within an organization. You often will find yourselves working with and leveraging the skills of people who don't directly report to you - be it from Sales, Product, Customer Success, or other teams. Hence it becomes highly crucial to lead through influence and show how you can lead others to an objective, even when they don't formally report to you.
I truly believe in data-driven product marketing. The best product marketers out there are data collectors. In today’s always-on, digital world, there are thousands of touchpoints that can define a customer’s journey in discovering and using your product. The amount of data collected can, in turn, be presented to bolster better product marketing and product fit decisions.
What can we expect from your talk at the Product Marketing Festival APAC?
As you can see from my introduction so far, you can probably say I am a numbers person - and that’s precisely what I will be talking about, based on my experience so far on how to Deploy a Data-Driven GTM Strategy and Accelerate Growth.
Assigning numeric values to the human experience/behavior may sound odd, but it’s proven to be quite doable and effective if you leverage the right data.
I strongly believe that everything we do as marketers must be informed by data, even how we define and package our businesses including product-market fit decisions.
Apart from understanding the industry and defining criteria for your market, you need data that will help you uncover who is buying your products/services, what motivates their decision-making, etc. This is where developing a data-driven GTM comes into the picture and helps to identify your core competencies, develop your market and buyer definitions, your positioning/messaging, and package/price appropriately.
And, the best part of this is, to use this data to enhance creativity and risk-taking. Because, after all, this is a creative job. So, crunch those numbers to your benefit!
Johan Casspe, Product Marketing Manager - Performance - SEA, TikTok
Can you tell us a bit more about yourself and your role?
I'm currently leading the go-to-market strategy of lead generation ads for TikTok in South East Asia, and the way I got here was through several hoops and hurdles. I'm born and raised in Sweden, but have in the past 12 years lived in Beijing, Copenhagen, Kolkata, and Dublin, and I'm now based out of Singapore.
I started my career in ad sales at Google, and have helped over 400 companies all over the world improve their digital marketing - something that has given me a deep insight into how lots of different companies make their money, and how industries work.
How did you get into product marketing?
While relatively new to putting the title PMM on my CV, a diverse set of experiences has led me to the path I'm on today. From having run my own business as a freelance photographer and illustrator, being a radio correspondent for a traveling show, studying a mix of Business, Language, and Culture at university, and working in marketing in a Beijing startup, and geeking down into the product aspects of Google Ads to come up with the best solutions for my customers.
I see myself using different skill sets, acquired at different stages of life in my day-to-day job as a product marketer. With product marketing being such a diverse role in and of itself, I think I got into product marketing long before I was a product marketer.
What would you consider to be the most important quality needed to succeed in your role?
One of the quotes that has stuck with me over time is the first value of Google: "Focus on the user and all else will follow". While often getting bogged down in details of product requests, and day to day operations, I think a truly successful PMM needs to always keep its mind on the user.
In advertising and app monetization, the user is often not the customer, but rather those who are enjoying videos on TikTok, or trying to find a piece of information on Google. That balance act is important in order to achieve a great product that people will love.
What can we expect from your talk at Product Marketing Festival APAC?
I will talk about the dangers of designing products for what we think is the average user and comparing ourselves to our average competitor. Within online advertising, data is abundant, and the overuse of averages can lead to false conclusions and put us on the wrong path of product-market fit.
Instead, I propose a solution of figuring out the extremes of the problem we're solving for, and through a simple matrix be able to find the most valuable segments for launching new products, as well as understanding where we have our product-market fit for existing solutions.
