Figma’s Sheila Joglekar Vashee & Peak XV’s Harshjit Sethi on Product vs Brand Marketing, and AI as a Marketing Tool

SHOW NOTES

• Differentiate between product & brand marketing [05:05] 
• Mastering positioning: Target, solve, differentiate [08:39] 
• The essential elements for product-led growth [12:32] 
• Balancing brand, performance, and product [18:57] 
• AI can give your marketing team a head start [21:16] 
• Audience Q&A excerpts [23:53]

TRANSCRIPT

Harshjit Sethi: Sheila [Joglekar Vashee] is the Chief Marketing Officer at  Figma, overseeing the GTM (go-to-market) and product support teams. Prior to joining Figma, Sheila served as CMO of Ethos which is a life insurance company. She was the VP of marketing and growth at Opendoor, and was the second marketing hire at Dropbox, which is where we worked together. Sheila is also an advisor at Basis Set Ventures, an early stage investing firm. She started her career as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and a BA (Bachelors in Arts) from Stanford Economics. 

So Sheila, let’s start with the journey at Dropbox. When you joined the team, you were the second marketing hire, we were largely a consumer company looking to make a pivot into selling to the enterprise. And obviously massive change in DNA, massive change in how the product is perceived you need to think about different stakeholders. So maybe just talk a little bit about what the challenges were? How did you approach building or positioning the company in the enterprise space? 

Customer-driven product roadmaps: The enterprise way [01:04]

Sheila Joglekar Vashee: So we started off as one of the kinds of premier consumer-led growth companies and ushered in this wave of the consumerization of IT that we saw because people were, the reason that Dropbox moved from consumer to enterprise is because people were asking for it. What we found were people within organizations who were using Dropbox for personal use wanted to bring it to work. And so they were asking their IT admin to allow them to use Dropbox at work. And so we actually, we were pulled into enterprise and in some cases pulled on unwillingly in the beginning until we realized how much money was to be made there and then it got a little bit more interesting. 

You were spot on. There was an internal shift we had to make and there was an external shift we had to make. So I’ll start with the external shift and then can talk a little bit to the internal shift. So on the external side, large organizations saw Dropbox as a consumer company. And I think actually, so I sat with a lot of customers in those conversations, I had heads of it say to me, “Dropbox is a toy product. You don’t have any security features. You don’t have any admin controls. How can I roll this out for my company?” And so we had to make a very large statement around our commitment to enterprise and to business for people to believe us. And that statement had to exist on the product side. So we had to have a really strong roadmap of features, both on the security side and on the admin kind of management side, where we were going to deliver what people were asking of us. And that roadmap was largely determined by our customers, that people who wanted to pay for us for enterprise use, they said, “Look, you got to have these 10 things. Either you have these 10 things and I buy you or you don’t.” And so that was how we developed that early roadmap. Of course, after that, it developed in other ways. And then, so that was on the product side. 

On the marketing and growth and sales side, we had to make a really big statement that we were much more than just a consumer company. And so, that took a coordinated effort across marketing, brand, communications, and press, our analyst community. We had to establish what the magic quadrant looked like with Gartner. 

And we started to really go deep with the sales team on how do we actually start driving demand generation? And we started to do events that we drove and we started participating in third-party events. And we made a big statement on the brand side as well. Came out with a big brand campaign targeted towards enterprise customers, and I gotta tell you, some of these pitches, so we had a lot of agencies pitch us on how we actually executed on that brand campaign. So that was what we did on the external side. We had a coordinated effort across marketing, sales, and product to really show our commitment to larger customers. 

We also had to go through a bit of an internal shift and surprisingly, that was harder in some ways than the external shift because the DNA of a consumer company is a little bit different than the DNA of an enterprise company. And that was a shift that I don’t think we were really prepared for. And it stems from some of the things that I mentioned. Your product development road map at an enterprise company is determined by your customers. If you have Nike and Disney saying, “I’m gonna pay you millions of dollars. I want to pay you millions of dollars. Just build these three things.” You’re going to put those three things on the road map, or, have to face the music, right? And so that’s just a totally different method of building a product than a consumer company, where you can be like, “This is where I think the market is going. This is where I think we should build. Here’s how we’re, basing this off of data and support tickets”. So it’s a totally different model. And that internal shift was a little bit harder, I think, than we anticipated. 

Differentiate between product & brand marketing [05:05]

Harshjit: Quite a transition, and thanks to you and several others, we executed really well, and Dropbox is now $2 billion in ARR (annual recurring revenue), and all largely in enterprise. 

Sheila: It was a big growth driver for the business over time. 

Harshjit: Absolutely. And Sheila, one of the things I remember that you helped build at Dropbox was product marketing. If I look, we’ve been investing in SaaS in India and Southeast Asia for a long time now. And I’d say one function that I’ve always found to be weak in our region actually is product marketing. And I always reference some of the stuff you did at Dropbox in the early days to help establish that, any lessons or learnings for this group on how to approach product marketing. It is different. Brand, people get it. They see it all around, but product marketing is a different skill set. 

Sheila: I think it is said that outside of the US, people maybe don’t think about product marketing in the same way, or even really know how to think about it. And what I’ll say is that even within US companies, understanding of what product marketing can do varies across the board.

So Dropbox product marketing was probably the strongest marketing function. I was at Opendoor, which was a consumer company focused on real estate. Basically building the CarMax for real estate is probably the most succinct way to put it. Product marketing barely existed as a function. No one cared. They were like, “Look, either you’re driving growth or you’re doing a bunch of pretty brand stuff. And we don’t know what’s in the middle and we don’t care. And you don’t get any headcount for that!” And so it actually differs quite a bit on what the go-to-market motion for your company looks like. 

I would argue in a longer kind of life cycle sale, so one where you have to convince customers of the value of your product, you have to be really careful about who you’re targeting and what you tell them, you have to be really thoughtful about the needs of your customers. Tends to be more enterprise businesses? Not always. There are plenty of consumer companies that have that as well, product marketing is more important. The reason for that is product marketing can be the strategic engine of your marketing team. The product marketing team can do the research on who your target customers are. Is the TAM (total addressable market) big enough? Should you even care? What is it that they want? What’s the feature list? And they can work really closely with the product to identify where we should be investing and product marketing can leave the go to market function and strategy. So once you know who your target customers are, where do they exist? Like how can you meet them? Where they are, what are the channels and the tactics and the places that you need to be and coordinate the teams that are actually running those programs. So that’s the role product marketing can play, but it has to make sense for your business, it doesn’t make sense for all businesses, and I’ve been part of both.

When I was at Opendoor and Ethos Life, [which were] more consumer-driven businesses, it was all performance marketing, and performance marketing teams operate like a trading desk. You’re like, “I’m going to give you a dollar. You find me the best place to put that dollar. I don’t care where it is. It could be in direct mail. It could be in search. It could be in social [media]. It could be on billboards. As long as you show me ROI (return on interest) on that dollar, I don’t care where you put it.” That’s performance marketing. And brand marketing is, “I’m going to make a bunch of pretty sh*t. Like, I don’t even know if it’s going to perform, maybe videos, pretty pictures….” That was what was important for consumer business, at least the ones that I was a part of. 

So you know, if you have a business with a longer sales cycle where sales needs support, they need enablement, they need materials, they need pitch decks and you need to understand who you’re targeting, product marketing can be important.

Mastering positioning: Target, solve, differentiate [08:39]

Harshjit: And then I guess extracting out a little bit, one of the challenges that many of our companies face today is that of generally positioning in a current market. There’s been an explosion in the SaaS [industry] over the last several years. And while there are nuances in the product and [how you] approach it, in marketing, everybody sounds the same. Everybody tells the buyer the exact same stuff, right? So how have you approached those challenges as you’ve seen both the consumer as well as the SaaS side. 

Sheila: I had been at Dropbox for at least two or three years before we made the CEO, Drew [Houston], sit down and say, “What is the positioning statement for our company? So that’s, who are you targeting? What is it that you’re giving them that solves their needs? What do they care about? Why are you better than everyone else? And be really clear on that. Like, why should I care if I’m your customer, why should I care about what you’re building? And then how do you deliver that message in a really simple, clear way? If you can nail that positioning statement, you can do good marketing. I would argue most companies don’t. Most companies think that a good product sells itself. Raise your hand. If you’ve heard that, “You don’t need marketing, good products sell themselves!” There you go. Very frustrating and not true. You have to be really clear on who you’re targeting. Why the hell should they care about what you’re building and how you can deliver a message in a way that’s really differentiated. And most companies do that, but if you think about the companies that do, and the ones that do it really well, you remember. Like, you remember what they said. Do you remember Salesforce and their initial message of ‘no software’? That was so compelling and it gave you something to focus on, something to position against, right? 

And so when you’re thinking about positioning, you don’t want to be a vitamin. You want to be a painkiller. [Not] a vitamin, nobody takes vitamins. Do you remember when you take your vitamins? I never remember taking my vitamins. It’s like the last thing on my mind. But Tylenol, if I have a headache, I’m taking some Tylenol, I always have it on hand. I’m never gonna travel without it because if I have a problem, I want to solve it. So when you’re thinking about your product, you’re thinking about good marketing, be a painkiller. Don’t be a vitamin. 

Harshjit: That’s a good takeaway. By the way, do you remember what the positioning statement of Dropbox was? I know, I am asking for… 

Sheila: So well, it went through many iterations. There was the storage phase where it was, ‘better storage’, a way to have what you need everywhere on every device. And that was like arguably the clearest and most simplest position statement. It was like, “Your stuff everywhere, any device that you needed.”

Storage then became commoditized. So then that wasn’t interesting to bring people anymore because the substitutes were free or very easy to access. Then from there, we tried to shift to, “Bringing content and collaboration closer and together.” That was really hard to nail, to be totally honest. Does that sound compelling to you? What if I told you I could bring content and collaboration together for you? Would you buy that? No. You don’t know what it means. Yeah. See, that was our struggle. 

Harshjit: Yeah. I remember that. 

Sheila: So, we started with something really clear and then we faltered a little bit.

Harshjit: That’s true. I remember, “Home for all your stuff.” That’s what I remember. And also, it just…

Sheila: Yes! Home for all your stuff. It just works. Because it [the positioning] didn’t work for a long time. For a lot of companies, it just didn’t work and that was really frustrating. And we were able to differentiate with that statement. I think the early ones were super crisp and clear. And those are the days where growth was just like through the roof. And then it got a little muddy with like content, collaboration, and no one understood what that meant. So, don’t do that.

The essential elements for product-led growth [12:32]

Harshjit: Great lesson. And then, you know, let’s talk about category creation. You were at Opendoor a different way to buy and sell homes, a new way for people to do something that people have been doing for a long time. Like, how did you approach the category creation challenge?

Sheila: Yeah. So particularly for Opendoor, it was a challenge. And that’s because first you have to tie it back to it. So I said, “Start with who you’re speaking to. And why do they care?” So we did a segmentation of the market of people who move and people who buy and sell homes. And we found something interesting. We split the market into three categories. One was the convenience buyer. So these are people who might have kids, they might have older parents living in their home. And they’re like, “Look, I don’t want to deal with showings. I don’t want to have people walking through my house with their muddy shoes. I have babies. I have cats. Just sell my home. Just sell it for me. I want to be able to move and then not have to deal with the hassle”. That was a great market for Opendoor convenience buyers. 

Second market, the contingent buyer or seller. These are people who are like, “I’ve got a job. I live in San Francisco, but I got a job in Idaho and I’m starting that job in two weeks. I don’t have time to deal with the process of selling my home. I just want to hand it over to you, and then I want to buy my new home, and if that can be one single transaction, like selling a car, even better!” Great market for Opendoor. Then there was the majority of the market, which was the price maximizer. Sh*tty market for Opendoor. These are people who are like, “Look, my home is my number one asset. All of my net worth is tied up in my home. I want to maximize the value I can get from selling that home”. And, Opendoor could not deliver on that promise in a way that people believed because we were just buying their home, oftentimes, looking at it just once and people didn’t believe that we would get the maximum value. 

So we had to be really targeted. Convenience buyer, contingency buyer – those are the two markets for whom Opendoor had something that people wanted. So then within that, we said, “Great, let’s create a category and help people understand that moving is a painful process!” It was like number two of the top three things that people hated most in life or people feared most in life. I think number one was death, number two might have been like public speaking, and then moving was the third one. So I was like, “Okay, this is like a process that really is painful and is horrible for people. And we can…” Again, not a vitamin, [we] want to be a painkiller, we can solve that process for these audiences and say, “This is going to be so much better!”. And so, that was how we did category creation. We said, “There’s a new way to move”, and we had all kinds of taglines, “Your move simplified”, it was all kinds of things. And we were like, “This is built for you, so you don’t have to go through this painful process that you don’t have time for and you don’t want to deal with”. And we went hard. We did brand marketing, we did performance marketing, and we grew like gangbusters in the beginning.

Harshjit: I like how it all ties back to the thing you mentioned, which is, “Be clear on who you’re selling to, what you’re selling, and what your proposition is”. Makes sense. And then maybe let’s transition to your current role at Figma. In some way [it is] reminiscent of Dropbox. Figma and Dropbox are probably amongst the greatest PLG (product-led growth) companies of all time. And how have you seen PLG evolve? Like, what have these companies done well? Many companies here would like to do PLG, of course, but it’s really hard.

Sheila: Yeah it’s interesting. PLG is hard to add on later. It is like a fundamental way that you built the product. You have onboarding paths that are typically free or very cheap so people can try the product and you have network effects built into the product. For Dropbox, it was sharing and for Figma also, it was actually sharing. Because Figma is like an inherently collaborative product. So if you’re a designer, you’re going to bring your PM (product manager) and your developer into Figma to look at your designs with you. And so that’s like network effects built into the product, and then to be able to access features, you have to pay for a seat. And so that was the mechanics of the PLG motion there. But it’s hard to build later. It has to be built into the way that your product works. 

The other element that is often overlooked because I’ve talked to so many companies that are adding in a PLG motion, but there has to be a stickiness. Otherwise, when people hit a paywall, they’re going to bounce off to the next cheapest thing. Dropbox found that with a carousel. Dropbox tried to launch a photos product. This was like, do you remember, it was 2015 or something. 

Harshjit: Yeah, of course, I do.  

Sheila: Two issues there. Number one, it wasn’t sticky. Number two, there were free substitutes. Google Photos, Apple photos. So many actually. So many free substitutes, right? But the stickiness wasn’t there. Sure, Dropbox might have had your photos. But if you had an alternative that was free, it was actually so easy to suck your photos up off your phone and just have them stored in Google Photos. And so that’s the third element of a PLG mezze. There has to be stickiness for Figma. If your product designs are, and not only in Figma, but you have annotations and notes and all the flows documented in the interactions between the flows no one is going to… [they will be like], “Move that stuff. It’s a huge pain.” 

Same thing for Dropbox in the original days if you had like your files and then their sharing relationships were all built in, and different teams at the company or agencies you’re working with had to share it in certain folders. It’s way too hard to move it. So that’s the other critical element of a PLG business. You gotta have the stickiness there. That’s like, when people have to pay, because people are always p*ssed off when they have to pay, “But I thought Dropbox was going to be free forever!” This is a business, it’s not a non-profit. Why did you think it was going to be free forever? People are p*ssed. So when people hit the paywall, there has to be stickiness to keep them in the product, and no good substitutes.

Harshjit: So for PLG, it’s gotta be baked in from the start, [and it] has to be sticky.

Sheila: And, then network effects.

Harshjit: Yes, network effects. Three things. Makes a lot of sense. 

Balancing brand, performance, and product [18:57]

Harshjit: One of the other things that I think many of our founders today face and, I’m curious, as you’ve led marketing for so many years, the different elements of marketing. You spoke a little bit about brand and performance and product marketing and all of these elements need to speak together. And, it’s a little bit overwhelming if you’re a founder and CEO. It’s all new to you. How much do you allocate to this, to that? Like, how do you think about all of these elements coming together? How do you see that for an early-stage company? And, what advice do you have for our founders here?

Sheila: Yeah. And most people don’t understand the value of a brand. I’ll just put this out there. Nobody understands the value of a brand. I’ll tell you how to understand it, but most people don’t understand. I’ll give you the secret. Most people don’t understand brands. Most people don’t know why product marketing matters. Everybody gets performance marketing, right? Because you’re looking at inputs and outputs. You’re putting a dollar in here. It’s driving this outcome. People generally get performance marketing. Those are like the three biggest teams are a bunch of teams underneath that. You have PR and comms, you have analyst relations, you have the design team that’s tied to the brand that does the work around the brand, you have an events team. If that’s what matters for your business, like there are a million like sub teams you can have under this go to market umbrella. But it’s all determined by what the rhythm of your business is and you don’t have to build it all on day one. So start with what are the growth-like funnels? What are the growth funnels for your business? Is it a PLG motion? Is it a top down, like a sales driven business? Is it something else? And start building your marketing team from there. 

And so if it’s a PLG motion or more of a consumer direct business, then you probably want to start with performance marketing and you probably want to think about brands so you can start, providing a halo for those teams to actually drive demand. 

If it’s a sales enterprise, tops down business, you probably need to invest in product marketing and sales enablement. So you can enable your sales team to actually deliver on the driving pipeline. And you probably also need to do some type of awareness, but it may not be brand marketing. It might be events. And you gotta figure out a little bit of what the growth funnels are for your business and start there. And then you can start to build the other stuff. And, half that sh*t doesn’t matter anyway. So you gotta figure out like, what is it that’s gonna drive your business and invest there. 

AI can give your marketing team a head start [21:16]

Harshjit: Marketing has been a playground for a lot of the AI companies, and that’s one of the first few applications that we’ve seen. What are you seeing in terms of trends in marketing? What’s your view of AI and marketing? How do you see that evolving?

Sheila: I’m bullish on the AI market, I’ll say. And I think there are a few kinds of clear applications and places where companies are already getting a lot of traction. I think first, the kind of copy generation space. There are like a bunch of companies in that space, Jasper, there’s Writer, there’s Copy.ai, there are a bunch [of them]. I’m bullish. If you can help me generate more content faster, absolutely. I probably still need to have a human in the loop still, but if that can allow me to move faster, I’ll do it. Image generation, same thing. DALL-E…there are a million [sites for image generation]. If you can give my design team a head start, I’ll take it. But the majority of the innovation, at least that I’ve seen so far, is around execution and optimization. It’s not around creation and strategy. 

So the way that I’ve been thinking about it is, the strategic part of marketing, we still need to own. Even when you think about brand, even when you think about writing, like someone has to determine the strategy, AI can help with efficiency and execution. Now, as AI, possibly becomes sentient, maybe that will change. I haven’t seen a change yet, though.

Harshjit: People come and probably pitch you marketing products all the time. And I’m guessing now with the explosion in tools that are leveraging AI, there’s probably even more. How do you think [about these] as a buyer? What do you think, what’s important to you? How do you figure out if you should take a bet on a young company, a young startup and use that at Figma? What’s the framework you [will] use to evaluate?

Sheila: Yeah. It just comes down to two things. What am I being held to by our board? Am I driving revenue or am I reducing cost through efficiency? If you can help me do one of those two things, I’ll consider your product. If you can do it in an incredible way, where we’re not introducing risk into our platform, into our tech stack. If I can show and prove the results, but if you’re helping me drive revenue, or you’re helping me cut costs. I will look at your product. And, you need all the things. I want to know what other companies are using it to go to their reliability aspect, etc. But at the end of the day, it just comes down to those two things.

Harshjit: It ties back to your painkiller argument. 

Sheila: Be a painkiller. My painkiller: driving revenue and saving cost, solves one of my problems.

Harshjit: Makes a lot of sense. We’ll open it up to the group, I’m sure folks have a bunch of questions.

Audience Q&A excerpts [23:53] 

Raven Gao: I am Raven, the CEO of Pix.ai. We’re making a text-to-image generator for anime-style character generation. So I’m just curious, I personally have a very limited understanding of what product marketing does and what you just shared is really very helpful. So I’m just curious, based on what you just described, so a person who does product marketing seems to have a lot of overlap with what we’re traditionally known as a strategy and user research. So for example, for a company that already has a position in strategy and a position in user research. If we were to hire, say, a new person who is going to do product marketing, how should this person differentiate herself from the strategy guy and the user research guy in what she does in her daily work?

Sheila: Yeah. Great question. And you’re right. Those are two really big elements of the role of product marketing. The way that I think about product marketing is they are your point person for the go-to-market team. So let’s say that the user research and the strategy person, and is there a product person in there as well?

Raven: Oh yeah, sure. 

Sheila: So let’s say that there are some great ideas on the target audience and how you want to ship a product. The product marketing person can come and say, “Okay great, I understand this target market.” Let’s say it’s a designer. I’ll tell you, designers want to do these three things. That means that we need to have this type of marketing message. That means that we need to activate these channels. We know social [media] really matters. We know that search really matters because intent is really high. And we know that being a part of these communities is really important. I’m going to orchestrate all of our go-to-market teams to make sure that we’re nailing those three things with this message so we can make this launch a success.” That’s one way that they could fit in. 

Raven: Thank you.

Audience: So I have two questions. Like, in prosumer (professional plus consumer) SaaS, how do you think about brand marketing? What should be the budget allocation? When should you enter? How do you think about brand marketing? And the same question about PR. Like when and how should one think about that? 

Sheila: So prosumer SaaS generally operates more like a consumer business, right? There’s a pro element because people might be using it at work, but the kind of demand levers operate more like a consumer business. Consumer marketing is an equation. Like, how are you driving demand? What’s the ROI you’re getting from demand channels? And then how can broader brand marketing accelerate that ROI? And that’s how you should approach it. 

So here’s an example. At Opendoor it was probably 99% performance marketing when I joined. And that was literally like, we’d put a dollar in and we’d expect this return. So we could then drive this click to the website so we could have people sign up and sell their home. We took three markets and we did a match market test. And we had three markets that operated very similarly. And in those three markets, I said, “We’re going to go hard on brand. We’re going to do, out of home, we’re going to do TV, we’re going to do press because press is just a channel for your external narrative, right? So I consider that, kind of a part of the same bucket of things. And we went hard for three months. In those three months, we doubled market share. Doubled the market share in those three markets because the brand marketing made all of our performance marketing twice as ROI efficient. It increased the LTV (life-time value) significantly of those channels. And so the case was made for me. I didn’t have to make a case for a brand because I just proved it right there. And so then we were able to roll it out. And the allocation is generally, it depends on your business, it’s generally 80, 20, 80% performance, 20% brand. But it depends on the kind of makeup of your business. 

Audience: Hi Sheila, I’m Daniel (Kimber), the co-founder of Brainfish. I’m curious that a lot of organizations generally have distinct marketing and sales functions and the communication style between those functions can often be quite different. I’m curious at how you look at keeping the communication and messaging to customers consistent across the marketing strategy and the sales strategy and how you’ve seen that work really well and also where you’ve seen it not work well.

Sheila: Yeah, it’s a really good point. And I think consistency of message is something that, when you’re moving really fast, it gets pushed to the wayside. But it can impact the trust people have with you, because if they see something in a marketing message and then a sales person is emailing me like probably every day, at least once, just saying not in a bad way. Then, if those messages are incongruent, it can be a problem. 

I think about external narrative and marketing. There are three levels to it. One level is the one to millions. That’s your mass market message. That’s like what you put in a commercial. That’s what you have, in your press message. Maybe that’s what you say to analysts. Okay, that has to say one thing, and it’s generally at the broadest level. The second level is like one to many. That’s your website. That’s your, maybe, event that you’re doing. That’s, if you were to do something like podcasts, where you’re reaching a certain segment of people. Then you have the third level, which is one to one. That’s your sales team, that’s your support team, that’s custom lifecycle campaigns, if you have it. And you have to say the same thing across those three layers, but you might say it in a different way, right?

The inherent value prop of what you’re saying should be consistent, otherwise people will be confused. But in the one to one communication, you can be much more personal, like, “Hey, Sheila, I see that you need this at Figma. Here’s how we can help you”. Versus the broad channels might be, “Here’s how you drive revenue and why”. So that’s how I would be consistent, but also slightly different focus, based on what layer you’re targeting.

Audience: Yes. Can you talk about retention or the activation of the product? 

Sheila: Yeah. So great question. Usually that has got to be a really strong partnership with the product there. Because what you have to think about is like, what are the actions you want users to take? So I think at Dropbox we found it was like, within the first seven days, if there are three actions that people took within the first seven days, they’re much more likely to retain, you know, because they saw the value of Dropbox earlier. Exactly the same thing in Figma. If people shared a file, if they… I need to get better at this! There were two or three things where if people do them right away, they’re much more likely to retain, and they’re much more likely to convert to a paid plan.

Product and marketing, and this is typically product marketing, if you have this in your organization, should be laser focused on getting users to do those three actions. There should be in product notifications, there should be lifecycle emails, there should be nudges within the product should be encouraging that, there should be onboarding focused on those actions, so you can get people to stay, and they’re seeing the value early. So that’s how I typically focus on people. And then churn is an outcome of that. So that’s activation. Churn is an outcome. If you’re setting that up correctly in the beginning, then you’re not scrambling to keep people later. But there are things that you can do to reduce churn later, right? That’s ongoing education. And then like when they’re in the final stages, really understanding why it is that they’re not getting value? Are you targeting the wrong people? Are you not explaining to them early enough how they can get value from your product? Like, is there a way that you can save them at the end? And then winning is like another thing. Very hard. Very hard to win back. People have decided something about your product already. It’s really hard to change their mind. So I would focus earlier in the funnel. Convince people and show them value early, so your work later is much easier.

Harshjit: Maybe we can take one last question. We are just about out of time.

Audience: Yeah. Super insightful to hear about product marketing from you, but my question is there have been traditionally companies which have a product and product marketing function as separate. But now there’s a wave of companies led by Airbnb, which say that product building should be more like design-centric approach and product marketing should be one function focusing on a sales-led approach to building product, etc. What is your take on this change that is happening?

Sheila: I was wondering if someone was going to ask me that question. Otherwise, I was going to address it. We actually had Brian Chesky [speaking] at Config which is Figma’s yearly event, where he gave that talk, and it was basically, “Products shouldn’t exist. It’s just product marketing”. Obviously, I was thrilled. Who’s not going to be thrilled? I also worked at Apple briefly. You left that out of my bio, so I’ll work that in. I’ll work that out with you later. I worked at Apple in product marketing and at Apple there’s no product manager. It is product marketing. So look, those roles can have a lot of overlap and it depends a little bit on, again, going back to the growth funnels for your business. If you need product marketing to own the channel distribution and the go-to-market side, then that can be a natural split with the product. Product focuses on working closely with engineering, managing the roadmap and how you deliver, and the timelines, etc., on the product side, and product marketing does the same thing on the go to market side. That could be one natural split. But you might not need both of those, in which case you can combine, and Airbnb has done that really effectively.

Harshjit: Thank you for doing this. I know you had a busy morning. So, thank you. 

Sheila: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the discussion.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.