I wanted to share the letter I sent to the hundreds of subscribers to my side project, The Product Marketing Summit.
For those who haven’t been around long enough, or forgot, the Summit was a dream that began almost two years ago.
Between the idea itself and initial execution, a whole bunch of life stuff happened (which I’ll write about later, as there were many learnings). But for now, here’s the letter my brain finally got past my internal critic and into your inboxes.
Let me know what you think. I’ll be honest, the note was hard for me to write. Mainly because this project didn’t have the follow through I’m used to. But then i realized that this project didn’t fail, it was just never finished. And in starting over, I can create a better solution that’s more timely than one two years ago.
PS – If you’ve only been getting Justin Topliff emails, head over to ProductMarketingSummit.com and subscribe to those.
Hi there,
I know it’s been a long time since you’ve gotten an email from us. And for that, I’m sorry.
The Summit started as a dream of mine nearly two years ago. I wanted to solve 3 pointed problems for product marketers:
- Lack of knowledge – Product marketing is underserved by existing educational resources, largely because the function is relatively new (plenty on product management; little on product marketing)
- No community – We have much to learn from one another. For the transfer of tribal knowledge to take place, we need a community.
- Confusion around our role – In addition to educating ourselves, we need to educate those around us. If we don’t get everyone on the same page re: what product marketing is and how to work with us, we’re sabotaging ourselves.
I’ve spent the past year building out the product marketing function from scratch at VTS. In doing so, these problems resonate with me more deeply than ever. It’s time we remedy them.
Enter me being embarrassed about the Summit fizzling out. Two things helped me swallow my pride, write this email and hit ‘send’ –
- Words from a mentor – “Don’t be afraid to start over. It’s a brand new opportunity to build what you truly want.”
- Going back to the Summit’s roots – Reminding myself that we all are in need of quality content and a community.
So, to rekindle our relationship, I wanted to invite everyone to learn from the VP of Product Marketing at Zoom this Friday. My friends over at Sharebird organized a live webinar where Janelle Raney will talk about:
- Zoom’s end-to-end sales enablement workflow process
- The software Zoom uses for internal enablement
- Sales enablement Q&A
Don’t miss this, click below to register. Watch your inboxes for more updates. I’m excited we’re back in touch 🙂
Have something you want to tell me? Reply to this email, I love hearing from readers!
Register for webinar
