Hi everyone,
After an embarrassingly LONG time away, We’re back.
I had to take a break to settle into my new role but that excuse still doesn’t cut it so I’m left to bury my head in shame.
In my time away, this blog hit a couple of important milestones, including 100+ subscribers and a feature as one of Marketer Milk’s “10 best product marketing blogs you need to read in 2023.”
I’d like to say thank you to everyone that has hit the subscribe button..I’m happy I get to write again :)
My first project at Curacel.co was to create a new company website. This project was part of a 4-week trial period after which I’d be employed as a full-time PMM.
The project was basically to lay the groundwork for the designer and the engineer. It was a bit daunting as this was my first product marketing role. As I’d learnt from watching so many webinars and reading so many articles, product marketing at a new organisation is best started with some positioning work. This was the ideal scenario but I had just 4 weeks to do this- there wasn’t enough time.
This post details the steps I took to get the most results in the shortest time possible.
RESEARCH
The first step here was research. Being new to the company and product, it was important for me to understand these as thoroughly as I could and there was no better way to do this than to speak to the team and review the previous work that had been done.
Speaking to team members
I scheduled calls with team members to understand the products we offered and how they worked. These calls were recorded using Fireflies so I could make my notes afterwards.
Reviewing old copy and docs
I reviewed old versions of the website to gain some perspective on how the company spoke about the products in the past, as well as what was valuable enough to carry over to the new website.
Other product docs including sales decks, surveys and other research docs were valuable.
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
Next, I did a bit of research on our competitors and how their websites were structured. I created a spreadsheet to track our most important competitors and the features and messaging for key website pages. Here’s what it looked like:
PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Checklist
After this, I created a checklist for the most essential features that we’d need to implement based on the information gathered so far and also to properly manage the project. This helped the designer get a good sense of where we were going and for members of the team to properly assess what was left to be done. The checklist looked like this:
Weekly check-in calls
I had bi-weekly 15-minute check-in calls with the designer and the CEO to ensure we were on track and headed in the right direction. These helped us pivot fast when we needed to change course.
MESSAGING
Then came the messaging which was guided mainly by the research and competitive analysis work I’d done so far. The designer came up with page mock-ups based on the checklist we created and then I used a Google Slides doc to create the messaging side by side for each page, like this:
At the end of the 4 weeks, we were able to have a clear path for the designer to work with and pass on to the engineer. As I mentioned, this was my first project and also a trial period to determine if I was going to join the team. I’m still at Curacel almost a year later and we still worked to improve the website after the 4 weeks- up to this very moment.
If you have any questions about this process, please send me a message on my LinkedIn.