Episode 4: Developer Initiatives

Natacha Maheshe, Google

Episode 4: Developer Initiatives and Marketing with Natasha Maheshe

In this episode of the Launch Gravy podcast, host Larry Weber interviews Natacha Maheshe, a seasoned professional with experience at Amazon, AWS, and Google Cloud in product management and developer marketing. Natacha discusses her current role as the Developer Marketing Lead at Google Cloud, focusing on integrating AI and cloud technologies to solve developer pain points. The podcast delves into the intricacies of product launches, the importance of customer-focused marketing, and how AI tools like Google Gemini facilitate developer education. Natacha also shares her insights on leveraging community engagement, strategic partnerships, and the critical role of continuous learning in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

Connect with Natacha Online: Natacha’s LinkedIn

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Transcript:

• Natacha Maheshe's Role at Google Cloud

  Larry: And welcome to the launch gravy podcast. I'm your host, Larry Weber. And today's show I'm going to be speaking with Natacha Maheshe over seven years at Amazon and AWS as a product manager for Amazon devices and marketing leadership roles for AWS data and analytics. More recently, Natasha has been at Google cloud, helping lead developer marketing programs.

  But before all this, Natasha worked in nonprofits, helping organizations build sustainable businesses in East Africa and India. So much great experience from product management to product marketing. Natacha, welcome to the Launch Gravy podcast.

  Natacha: Thank you, Larry. I'm super excited to be here.

  Larry: We're super happy to have you.

  And, and so look, let's cut right into it.

  You are the developer marketing lead at Google. Can you tell us a little more about your role, your responsibility, and even a brief overview on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and the Google cloud?

  Natacha: All right. Yeah, sure. I guess I'll start with the overview of GCP, as you know, cloud computing.

  And so, what we do, when we talk about Google cloud today, we talk about the new way to cloud. And by that we mean, we really want to help developers and, Companies and enterprises to adopt cloud in a way that really works for them. I like new trends and stuff like that. And obviously with AI being top mind.

  So, a lot of the things that we do really focus on AI. When it comes specifically to my job, I need messaging and campaigns for developer marketing for all of Google cloud. And specifically, one of my focus this year is really seeing how the whole Google developer ecosystem fits into cloud. So, thinking about.

  Cause Google has always been a developer friendly company, right? We've got products like Android, Kaggle, Firebase, Flutter, Go, TensorFlow. So, there's all of those different developer communities. And my job is to see how do we help them build with cloud GCP as their preferred cloud, when they're building new applications.

  So that involves a lot of understanding developer use cases, understanding pain points and integration points where we have a really good story. So, for example, for mobile app developers who are using Firebase, using Google cloud is a no brainer because when you're trying to store your data, orchestrating GCP has seamless integration with Firebase.

  Part of that is for part of my job is really looking at how do I make that easier for developers who are building new application or existing application?

• Integrating AI into Applications at Google

  And a new focus for me right now is how do you add AI into your existing applications? For example, you could have an app that already exists and you want to add.

  Some type of AI to do maybe forecasting or like fraud detection, because maybe your app is like a banking app, right? How do you do that easily without having to build a whole workflow? Today it's actually really very easy because we have different APIs and pre trained models that are available in Model Garden that people can use to add AI to their existing applications.

  But there's also, “How you can leverage AI to build faster, right?” So, with code completion, debugging, and just how to streamline your whole coding process with Gemini. So that's one of the things that I've been looking at for the last few months. And my goal and my dream are to make sure that every developer who is using a Google product can think of Google Cloud as the best place to build secure and fast applications.

  Larry: Let me pause real quick. How do you keep up with all this stuff? Like, you know, you just rattled off like 500 things. I almost think I need an encyclopedia or like seriously though, you're, you're learning and you need to help out a community that is on the cutting edge and building the latest and the greatest.

  And as Google is developing and building the latest and the greatest, just a quick question. How do you, even someone in the marketing space or an ex-product manager, like how do you stay on top of all this great technology?

  Natacha: The truth?... the truth is Gemini. So, the truth is Gemini, and I do read a lot.

  There's like a lot of articles that I've been reading and there's a lot of great newsletters out there right now about just how to keep up with what's going on in AI. But to be honest, I just type my questions in Gemini and now I'm using the advanced version now at work. And so, for example, one of the campaigns that I'm trying to put together is how to build mobile and web apps with Gemini.

  And obviously I'm not a developer, right? So, trying to learn how the whole building process starts from Android to like for your front end and how do you use built in apps. Cloud for the backend and how AI is kind of ingrained in every single aspect of whatever you're building from front end to backend.

  Right. So I asked Google Gemini and I was like, explain this to me, like you would explain this to a five year old because that's maybe my understanding of the technology and then more questions. So, I honestly, I think for all of the product marketing managers on anyone in marketing today, I think. People say AI is going to take away our jobs.

  I don't think so. I think it's going to enhance the way we learn and the way we do our jobs.

  Larry: Absolutely. And it's something that's even a theme on, as we've kicked off a number of these podcasts. AI is everywhere. And it's in the sense of it's the augmenting the product marketer and allowing the, or, or marketing in general or product management and augmenting and allowing us to, and I think you hit the hit nail on the head a little bit with, you know, education, you're a sponge.

  You've need to digest as much as you can, but back, I don't know, 10 years ago, dating myself, I'd have to go get an O'Reilly book and dig through, where is this content? Or maybe search Google and find this. Now it's “Hey, man. We're going to do it for you.” And that's where a lot of the AI, the Gen AI, a lot of the AI capabilities allow you to digest and incorporate that knowledge quicker and faster.

  So, I think that's brilliant. I think that's smart and I'm doing it myself too, as well. That makes sense. So really quick, I'm going to dig in. I really want to get into a lot of this developer stuff and what you're working on, but I want, I want to first jump into your experience in the past.

• Challenges and Strategies in Product Launches

  With product launches and just, just get it out of the way a little bit.

  Cause I know you've been involved closely with launches. You've launched products in the past and get from your take. Maybe you can walk us through your experiences for learnings for the audience of, I don't know, a launch that maybe, hey, this is the way it should be done, or. I don't know, maybe a launch, which it didn't really hit the, the, the, what you were looking for.

  Natacha: All right. So let me, yeah, there's a few things that I want to talk about when it comes to launches. I think there's the traditional sense that everyone thinks this is how you launch things or new products. Uh, but I think there's also ways to customize the way you launch for yourself. But also given the product that you are launching the industry you're in or even like what you're facing, right?

  So, my last launch was a brand-new product So I've launched features to an existing product, but my last launch, uh, was a brand-new product. So, bringing it to markets and to say it was challenging would be like, it wasn't challenging would be like, it really was challenging, but it was also extremely rewarding.

  Um, so the last launch that I did, I was still at AWS. And, uh, I was bringing, uh, I was bringing a new product to market in a very, um, it was a very anticipated product in the market, I would say. And so, were you ready to launch it? I don't think so, but we had to do it, right? And so, uh, that just means you have to be extremely flexible when you working on the launch, because things might not always work the way you think they would.

  So, you have to be flexible, willing to take feedback. The great thing about launching when I was still at AWS is the way that launches are processed, right? There's a process that you follow that make the whole, um, launch process very streamlined and I'll follow the steps and know that if you do follow the steps.

  And you do the right things, you know that everything will go well. And then you still, even if it's very processed, it still leaves room for creativity, right? Because like as a marketer, you still want to make sure that you're doing something outside of the ordinary because that's why we are marketers, right?

  So, at AWS, we start with a PRFAQ. For people who don't know, it's a document that's, uh, a real PR press release, that we would have wire ready. So, when it's ready, you can actually ship it to a news outlet and they can run it. So, you have to make sure that it's properly written and it's got all the information.

  It's got all the customer stories that you want to highlight. the customer and all of that. Uh, and then there's a set of questions that if this were to be a wired, uh, that we probably want to answer. And those questions would be, what is the product? What does he do? What problem is he solving? How is he solving it?

  How are we pricing it? And then how is it comparing to the competition? Is there anything similar in, in the markets and stuff like that? And yes, Amazon doesn't always care about what the competition is doing, but at least in that sense, we do some type of competitive analysis to see how can we be better than anything in the market.

  So that when you're launching something, we are launching something that's going to be very useful.

  So that's where I decided to get into, to marketing. So, and that was,

  let's see, I want to say that was about 2015. So, you know, despite my, uh, some of my gray hairs, I really only in the marketing industry for about eight or nine years now, but I was able to join a company called Pivotal Software, who was one of my clients.

  At, at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE covering, doing marketing for their data [00:04:00] products. And so that's how I ended up getting into the marketing field. And from there, spent time doing product marketing there for their data products, eventually moved on to a flagship product there, which is called Pivotal Cloud Foundry.

  Which is a developer platform, worked for a little bit at a small startup. And I think a lot of us, we have that experience, go to some small startups. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

  Larry: I know that all too well, man. Yeah.

  Jeff: It's a whole nother conversation we could talk about. Then went from a very small startup to a very large company you might be familiar with called AWS.

  Yep. Where you and I worked together for a few years in the database space. And now I'm over at a company called Nutanix. Again, covering databases, as you say. So. A little bit of a, you know, a different kind of different path, although it's not super uncommon. I definitely, some of my journalism colleagues from back in the day are similarly in different marketing roles today in the tech industry.

  So it's not totally uncommon. And there are a lot of skills that overlap, whether it's research or writing. We're storytellers in both professions. There is a nice kind of overlap there in terms of skills.

  Larry: Yeah, look, I am a, such a big fan [00:05:00] of making sure that folks that know how to tell stories, write narratives, like just anything from reporting and journalism, writing.

  It's so important to marketing. Like many organizations I've been in full disclosure, like IBM loved IBM to death, but it's super technical. And I would say is You had less folks that could actually write and talk back in the day about the content. Like I was in the data warehousing space and it was such a challenge.

  And I found that bringing people in both from agencies or research or I'm talking like analyst research. And bringing them in folks that can write and tell stories and then mixing them with folks who have the technical ability that want to be able to tell stories that want to get into this and it fits a good mix.

  So I love your background. I think it's fantastic. And you're able to have those great conversations.

• Importance of Customer Feedback

  But before you even think about bringing this to market, you have to think about the end customer. Cause when you're talking to engineers, right. An engineer will like, think of a problem that their work, they have, and they'll say, I can fix this because every engineer has this problem.

  But is that really what people are looking for? And so, there's a lot of back and forth with the engineers and the product managers who are building something because there's a product marketing part marketing manager. I feel like you are the quarterback, but you are also the person who is. Representing the customer.

  You really are the voice of the customer in those meetings. And so, when you, what you do is you get the insights that customers are looking for these, these are the pain points. How are we fixing or addressing this pain point for the customer? And it can be very contentious. And it's not just at AWS. I think in my experience, the person who's building the products, look at it as like their child.

  And sometimes you don't want to listen and hear like, well, this might not be what people are looking for. You might need to do a little pivot before you can launch this.

  Larry: One of the, one of my greatest learnings and full disclosure, I worked at AWS, right? And one of the biggest learnings, I almost feel that every product marketer, every product manager should actually do time to get the experience.

  Start with the customer and work backwards is probably one of the most important things. And you can win almost any argument. If you're questioning, “Hey, should we bring this to market?” “Should we work on this?” “Why does the customer care?” If the customer doesn't care, throw, I mean, don't throw it out the window, but like, you need to start with them.

  Otherwise, your product's going to fail. And it's, it's going to be, as you said, we're a feature function and we're going to be like, just focused on some of these areas because they feel good. Or I think they're asking the customer, talk to the customer. And it takes time and effort to do that. But. That I think that's one of the most important learnings I had from that experience.

  I think you're, you're hitting the nail on the head again, right? A lot of the great stuff through that, that is a sense of rigor of building the PRFAQ and defining what it is you want to build ahead of time and then making sure that you follow through on that. What's the drift on that? As it drifts, you're like, “Whoa, this isn't exactly what we built.”

  Or man, we didn't really “This isn't ready yet.” Yeah, time. And that's what you're getting to. And I almost want it. I want to hear a little bit more of Okay. It's not ready for market. Why, what happened? How, and how did you handle that? Um, so, because I think a lot of us have been here before and I definitely have zipped my lips on a couple of them.

  Natacha: I know. And I'm probably going to get in trouble for this. I, it wasn't ready. We did announce it and I think it was the right decision though. In hindsight, it was the right decision.

• Managing Product Launch Expectations

  And I think that happens a lot in the industry where people announce or launch something that's not really yet.

  And I think one of the reasons why is especially when you are customer driven. Uh, you want to, you want something that will delight the customers. And if they don't test it, if they don't try it out, you may not always have the feedback when they are using it. And so, yes, we had an MVP basically. So, we didn't launch the full thing, but we did have an MVP that we could go to market with.

  And the whole idea was to act, to get real feedback with real use cases. Cause we've had like, uh, feedback from, from customers. internal feedback from us testing the product or even some customers who have told us, yes, this is my use case and here's, this is working. But then when you open it up to customers across different industries, different, and I have to abide by different regulations, right?

  Cause if you are in financial services versus healthcare, the regulations are very different or if you're in governments versus entertainments, right? And so, when you open it up to like different industries and different industries, Customer type, whether it's size or industry, it allows you to get feedback in ways that you wouldn't be able to if you're only focusing on a small group of customers when you're launching, right?

  And so, the idea of launching that product, before it was really, it was more about getting the real, the real feedback from what customers want so we can build something in like a couple of months that really addresses that. But then the other thing is, as you're in marketing, we all know like this industry is changing and evolving so much.

  I mean, today with AI, everyone is kind of like pivoting the way they do things. But, uh, before that was before AI was like what it is today. Right. You still have to understand and listen to the trends and what's going on in the industry, because you also don't want to be last, right? You could have a good product, but if you're last market, there's always an advantage to being first.

  And so, you kind of have to listen to all these different signals, whether it's customers or it's the industry that's telling you, it could be you talking to the analyst, right? Telling you, “Hey, here's what we are seeing.” Here's what is going to be the next thing in the next two years in the next 10 years.

  And you really want to get ahead of that. And so, in some cases, you launch something that might not be fully developed, but it's used because one, it gives you the advantage of being first in the markets, first in the industry, but it also allows you to get real feedback from customers.

  Larry: Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the, the digest here, one of the understandings I have is, is for a person listening and I'm like, “Oh my gosh, I have to…”, or maybe they're facing the challenge of, you know, Launching a product that's not ready for primetime My take is that if you are honest with the customer and you illustrate this is coming Or hey, this is MVP only And you, you level set with the customer early on, on what their expectations are, or what the expectation of the product are.

  That's goodness. That's okay. And then getting their feedback to alter or change it. And, or if you, if you prelaunch, at least you're illustrating, we are working on this. I think where the importance drives in. Making sure that you actually follow through. I've been in some of these where I'm not going to say names.

  Natacha: I know what you're talking about.

  Larry: Products have been launched and they don't exist. And they're in an analyst report somewhere. And. You're how do I handle a product that doesn't exist and that's bad. That's not good. And, and I, I think that's the kind of thing, you know, folks, product managers really need to stay away from, but it's okay to have an idea, a goal, as long as you level set with that customer, with the customer base and preferably get them to get hands on as you develop it.

  Natacha: Oh, definitely. And I think that's the whole idea of the preview. Public preview or private preview. Yes, we always don't like them, but I think it's a good way for us to get feedback from customers. And then when you talk about pre announcing or launching something that's not really, you mentioned something about making sure the product ends up existing.

  And I think the onus is on you as the PMM, because I honestly think that the PMM is really the quarterback in this situation. You really have to look at all the different part of the team and make sure everyone comes together. You really have to push for a plan for when this is going to be available.

  So, if it's a private preview, you need to have a date with that engineering timeline. On when we are going on, like, if it's private, when do we go to public review and when do we go to GA, right? And so, if you don't have that plan, obviously you should push for it because then you don't want to go to customers, announce something and then you break their trust.

  So, it's the onus is on you as the marketer to make sure that everyone is doing, is committed to what they say they were going to do.

  Larry: It's totally a consistent theme as we talk about launching products, launching services, launching features is not breaking trust with the customer because it is a slippery slope, specifically as roadmaps change, because, hey, there's a, there's a critical situation and we have to take care of a large customer's issues.

  And so, we're not going to be able to come up with a product. Okay. Just make sure that, you know, this, this goes out mainly to the development team. Make sure you communicate that and communicate it quickly to, to the other folks that are a part of the launch process. Cause it's not just you. But anyway, anyway…

  Natacha: What you're saying is very important, especially now with AI, because I have a feeling that many people were working on different things until AI blew up and they had to put that like, I have to pause and respond to this AI thing that's just like imminent, right?

  I honestly wonder how people manage that because you've got this thing that's imminent and really urgent, but you've also had this community, these other commitments that you still have to deliver on. How do you kind of manage those two? And as you said, I think communication is key here, uh, whether it's internally or with customers.

  Larry: I would just ask Gemini.

  Natacha: I know.

  Larry: All good.

• Developer Engagement at Google Events

  Hey, let's, I want to shift gears a little bit from, from the launch aspect and, and go into specifically what you're working on now. You are, and cause you're bringing up a lot of great things that I would like to dig in a little bit of your, your time with AI also with the developer community, because in many ways, the developers are the customers for many of these offerings and they're so close to the details and their life blood depends on.

  We talk about big launch versus feature launch. Many times, those features are just as important, if not more important than the main launch. Sometimes you're entering, you're doing a main launch. Sometimes it's entering a new market. There are new challenges, new name. That's, there's a lot of weight you have to carry there, but some of those features.

  Could be, wow,  way more impactful for someone who's building a new product And so that's wicked important on how that thing how that gets developed and how that gets communicated So what I’d love to ask you maybe I know you've been involved with A couple of different events at Google when they, when you launch product, you know, Google and IO and others, can you tell me a little bit more about your time around these events and interactions with the developers and how you, I don't know, announce or release, or even get it into the hands of the developer to start giving some of that feedback.

  Natacha: So, before I say anything, I'm just going to say, this is only my opinion and has nothing to do with what Google says or does. It's just my opinion and my experience as I was working through the different events. So, this year we had two great, great events. We had Google Cloud Next in Vegas for the first time, and then we had IO.

  And I was lucky to be able to go to both cause IO is a very select number of customers who, and even a very select number of employees who gets invited. So, I was able to work both events. So, for Next we had a lot of announcements and so the different PMM teams like own and manage those announcements, but from my end on the developer side, so on the expo floor, the way we designed the expo floor for Next, we actually have.

  Two spaces. We have one for everyone where it's like ITDMs and developers, and those are very experiential demos. You really can touch the product. But then we have a different space, which we've always called Innovators Hive, which is dedicated to developers. And so, in that space, what we do is we make sure that we are addressing all of the developer needs, right?

  So, whether it's related to the launch or related to the products. And we do that in a couple of ways. One, we do that by creating demos of either new launches that was just announced or something close enough to that. And some of the demos are hands on where you actually get hands on keyboard, or you physically do something with the product.

  Some of the demos are. Um, on screen. So, it's like a recorded screen that you can kind of see in the console, like how this specific product works. So, one, we did two big demos inside of innovators hive this year that I was really proud of. One of them was what we call Gemini ride. So, we had Gemini ride and Gemini golf.

  And so basically for golf, it was like, we, we built a mini golf, um, in, in the expo floor. And developers can come, you play, it's, you're just playing regular golf. But Gemini is actually doing the announcer. And then, yes, Gemini was announcing. Gemini was capturing the, the, the, the, the, your, your, your play basically, and tell you like how good you are, like, how can you improve and stuff like that.

  The ride one was very interesting because it was a car that had Gemini in it. And so, the car would be driving around a fake city that we built, and it would understand contextually like what's needed. So, you can type and say, I am hungry. Gemini understands if you're hungry, you need to go to the restaurant.

  The car will drive itself to the restaurant. And then are people in these cars? No, it's a fake. It's a small car. There's a lot of these, these, you know, like, you know, the driverless cars. No, it was like a small car that you just control by Gemini. And, uh, so it was using Gemini 1. 5, which we're making GA adapt.

  At that time, right, uh, and so you could say, I am, I need to go to the bank. And then after the bank, I need to go to the store. So, the car understands that if you say you need to go to the bank or that I need money contextually knows you have to go where there's The financial district is it will drive itself or drive you there.

  So, we built it was like a fake little city that we built that was on the ground and it would do image so there was image recognition, right? Because he has to recognize that this is a hospital versus this is a bank versus this is a restaurant and it was a good way for a developer to play with Gemini and see in real time how you can leverage it.

  And the good news is every single demo that we created at Next is available today on GitHub. So, you can actually get the code and go implement it and change it if you want. There's another one that was very, uh, simple where you can sketch out your ideal website. So, you can write, you can sketch it out, or you can take a picture of your ideal website.

  And Gemini would actually create the code and generate the code for you to go build that website. So very simple, right. But it just shows how you can make things very easy for developers, but beyond developers, it kind of also opens up like past, uh, possibilities for people who are not like, Developers in the sense that we all are familiar with to use technology.

  So, the one with like the sketch to web, where you can sketch out your, um, website, usually when you're doing that, you have to work with a web designer. Uh, who's going to build out like your website and stuff like that. But like you being able to just like sketch it out, what it looks like and having the code ready with like the JavaScript, I think is incredible.

  Cause now I feel like even myself; I can build my own websites without having been a web developer.

  Larry: No, that's great. And I think too, is I think making it approachable to people, sometimes folks, I'd say myself included. When I first started getting into early areas of marketing in areas I didn't understand.

  So, if it was for certain development areas where I didn't have a background in, then I always thought, “Oh my gosh…” because dealing with engineers, it was very much speeds and feeds must be technical. You must have stuff that's super like in reality, everyone, people have their areas of expertise, but most people are trying to consume.

  As you said before, even earlier in our conversation, like I might not know everything. And if you come in and jump in and make it so like over the top, throw too many acronyms at me. And I'm like, “Oh Larry, you know…” like you have to come, I don't know, bearing gifts in many ways with the education and keep it, the KISS principle, keep it simple, stupid, but like very much digestible so that anyone can understand this, but have the technical rigor and knowledge behind it.

• Illustrating AI with Real-World Examples

  And I think that's really cool with the way you illustrated the golf. Anyone, not everyone, but like most people know how to play putt, putt, golf. And if my hands, a physical thing in the real world, and you're now tying this back to what AI can do, as well as what's processing in the background.

  How's it learning and how's it interfacing with me, regardless of my developer skills, I now have a new knowledge of, wow, what could I do here? How could I do something differently? How could I implement this? And you capture a wider audience that from anyone from the super technical that like they're going to jump in and start building out the next greatest latest, greatest app to someone who might be at a more senior level, who is like, “Whoa, we should really think about investing or building and growing in this area.” And it, it brings the different sides together. I get a little off topic on this, but I find that very interesting. And I really enjoy. Where you get off of the screen. I love the hands-on keyboard, but if you pull things out of the screen and into the real world, it means a lot more.

  I mean, it's great for recall as well.

• Engaging the Audience with Interactive Demos

  Natacha: Oh, it definitely, you know what I, when I was at IO, I actually was mending one of the booths we had and we had a demo, we did have that demo at next and we brought it back to IO because people really, really loved it. It was how else like the simple, how wheels that you used to play with as a kid, like different cars and stuff like that.

  So, the way we built it, we built it just the regular Hot Wheels. We added sensors so you can collect data in real time. It was just showing a real. Simple IOT example, how you collect data to when you can actually analyze it. They can do analytics, right? And so, people would come to us. Cause like, they'll just see this giant thing of hot wheels.

  Oh, I want to play. I want to race and they will race each other. And you could see the data right on the screen. Like how many races we've had, you can query. And we had Gemini help query. So for people who didn't know SQL, you can type in plain language and say, I want to know which car has won the most.

  And Jim and I will generate the query, right? And you can run it in Big Query and you can see, oh, the blue car won the most races. Right. But it's just, it's a good way and an easy way to show people how the technology that we use every day can also be, um, very, um, accessible by, by, by people. Cause like how wheels are like fun.

  Every kid that I know. It was driving everyone was like, I want to play. I used to play this when I was a child and you'll see people be like, I want to take a picture of me playing this so I can go show it to my kid. But then when you start explaining the whole like data process of like data collection, ingestion to like how it's doing, um, it's streaming the data into a data warehouse and getting ready for analytics without you having to do anything, it's a good way to showcase technology.

  Without having to go deeply technical and explaining it to people who might not either have the time or might not have that specific expertise. They might be a security professional and don't really know a lot about data, or they might be a cloud architect, might not a lot about data, and they get to kind of like familiarize themselves with something else beyond what they know.

  Larry: No, that's, that's great. And, yeah, I want to look for videos.

  Natacha: I'll send you some pictures.

  Larry: If I could put in the show notes, it'd be fantastic. Cause I think that's, that, that stuff, that stuff's so interesting.

• Building and Nurturing Developer Communities

  Getting back to looking at the customer, really the developer, the customer here.

  And we're talking about launch, pre-launch at these events, get hands on. We're going to demonstrate. We're going to show it's just a part of education. And we're illustrating the value and for specifically for someone who might not have seen it before. Can you tell me a little bit about how do you capitalize on that?

  What I mean by this is. Later on, as you go through the products out there in the wild now and “Yay, the launch is done.” Success! Not really, because there's the whole step of after the fact, that's where you make your money. That's where you build your, and I'm going to say the communities. And can you tell me a little bit more about how you approach communities of customers? of developers. And how do you nurture them? How do you make sure that they have the latest and the greatest because not everyone got to go to this event. So, you said it's a select few people, but. The world is out there listening.

  Natacha: Yeah, I think, yeah, we, we always tend to focus on that one time. Like the launch is on February 10th and then that's the date and that that's what we are working, uh, towards, but then there's so much more that has to happen after February 10th. Right. Cause then you have to think about adoption of the product. You need to think about engagement, how many people are actually using the product. They might've bought it or they might have adopted it, but are they really getting what they're needing from it? And then when we launch new features. Cause that's how you create the whole life cycle marketing, right? You want repeats customers, right? And so, for developers that comes in the sense of community in so many ways, right? So, at Google, and we used to do the same thing at AWS, we've had a community of Google developers, right? So, we call them innovators.

  We nurture them in so many ways. We have a newsletter that goes out to them every Thursday. We, we have exclusive benefits, uh, learning benefits and even access to products that, so that they can either access it before or right when it's launching, and that's like a way for people to engage with the product so that it doesn't like, it doesn't sleep their mind.

  But the other thing that we do is leverage the influencers in the community. So, we, we have what we call champions and the way I myself view champions, I see them as an extension of us in the community and they really are the ambassadors of the product. So, if you focus on serverless or you focus on the AI, and you know, all the serverless products that we launch, all the AI products that we launch, we usually give access to the champions, before the product is even available so they can start playing with it.

  They can start giving us feedback and will end up happening most of the time. Is these people end up creating content to either educate other developers on how to use that product, right? So, you will see them building videos and like writing blogs and tutorials and releasing, um Notebooks on GitHub that people can leverage and I think them being in the community and really talking about the product allows the communities want to remain aware of what's going on but also they can get a lot of feedback. We should always bring back to us.

  I know we used to do that. AWS, I know Microsoft does it so many companies. I know Databricks just launched their version of that. So being able to nurture the community of developers, I think it's really, really important for the longevity of the product, because if you don't get feedback from them, you don't allow them to use the product. You don't give them access. You're not going to have a successful product, right? Cause there's one thing is awareness, but the other thing is like being able to have hands on experience with that product. And that's where the product goes, basically.

  Larry: What, what, in your opinion, what, what is, what building this communities and or developers and or influencers, what are they looking for?

  Hey, there's some swag. Here's a T-shirt says Google Cloud. Wonderful, right? Everyone likes the T-shirt, socks. Great. What are they looking for as being an influencer? Is it access to the code? Is it the ability to be a leader? Is it like, can you tell me more about maybe from your interactions to date? What are some of those key things that the communities or influencers are looking for?

  Natacha: So, being able to say, oh, I've actually done, I've completed all the certifications and you give them all the, you know, their badges and stuff, right? So, they can go to the community and showcase like, and brag basically. I am an expert in X and have like the certification to prove it. And the good thing is like all these certifications are, I actually found out they come back in your background check as like part of the education.

  So that's one thing. Some of them are really looking for the swag because they think swag is cool. It might not be physical swag, but like. T shirts and like, you know, like a cool jacket or whatever, which we always end up doing, uh, in some situations, just like creating a, like swag that makes you belong.

  When you look around, you see people who have the same thing and you can walk to them at a conference and see someone's wearing like a T shirt from like an event you went to, or like a swag that they gave you that, oh, you were at this event and then that's how you can strike a conversation. Right.

  It's like an exclusive club. Like that sense of community and there's obviously like the ones who want to have access to products because they feel like influencing the roadmap of a product is really important to them. So being able to do that by allowing them to have access to alphas and betas, uh, is, is one way you can do that.

  And the last thing that I think people get from these communities is they also get to build their own brand, right? I've seen people become now consultants just because they are a Google cloud champion or a Microsoft MVP or an AWS. And because of like how, like it shows expertise in a specific area. And now they can go speak at conferences.

  They can get invited on podcasts. They can write blogs and things like that. They are able to build now their own professional and personal brand that they can take on the road, basically, if they need to.

  Larry: Yeah, those companies or those areas or marketing product management, whatever that have influencers doing the majority of that company's marketing on their behalf, or even the PR for that aspect, like they're doing something right.

  That that's when you have success is when you see those communities, like you're mentioning, because. They're hungry on their own pushing and driving the product. And you're not trying to like fight uphill or anything. Go, go forth and build. And that's where that developer marketing aspect, if you've done correctly is gold and is one of those things in which is so valuable and so important to software companies, to cloud companies, to AI companies, where we're looking at bringing something else to market that's developer focused.

  Natacha: Oh, definitely. And I think one thing I think people forget is yes. People say developers are against marketing, right? Everyone keeps talking about, Oh, developer hates marketing. I think they hate marketing when it's intrusive, but they would like marketing when it's useful. So, if you make your marketing useful to them, they're more likely going to listen and more likely to pay attention to what you're doing.

  So, a good example. Is, uh, if, for, for when I was at the app store, we, uh, we, we knew that developers wanted to monetize, right? If you're building an application, you want to make sure you're making money off of that application. And there's a lot of information out there about how to monetize, but then usually it's not very curated to a specific app store or to a specific system.

  So as a marketer, what can you do? You can write a blog or like and you can make a video on like, these are the steps that you need to take to monetize. And here's how you monetize in Google play. Here's how you monetize in the Amazon app store. Here's how you monetize in the app, the Apple app store, right?

  That is a marketing piece. It's a piece of content. Content marketing is part of our jobs, but that's a very, very useful. Piece of content to a developer. And when you send an email that says, “Hey, I have tips for you about how you can monetize your app.” They're more likely to open the email and listen to you.

  But if you become very intrusive and just start talking about the bells and whistles of a product without really focusing on how this is going to solve a problem for someone, again, it goes back to like thinking about the customer, they're not going to be willing or even open to listen to what you have to do.

  So you really have to make sure your marketing is very, very useful. And that's why we do things like webinars. We do things like tutorials and learning content. Cause I think those are the things that help someone. They learn about your product, but they also learn how to solve a problem that they might be facing in their day to day.

  And that's the kind of marketing that works with developers.

  Larry: Yeah, I, I agree with you. And you know, it always has been an interesting one anytime I've done developer marketing or developer initiatives. And so, you have some that are like marketing, get out of here. And it, it, look, there, there are certain industries and areas where there's been bad developer marketing.

  It's many times when, no offense to my demand gen friends, when you're trying to go get developers signed up on this list and get them to put their email. Whoa. What are you offering to them? And here's an eBook on how to put Java. It's not, they don't need an eBook for, they're not going to register for that.

  There's, that's a bad way of going about it for developers, but to be understanding of this, and this gets back to my own personal opinion about. If I'm going to look at a discipline like product marketing, product marketing's job is number one is education. Exactly. And part of it is you touched on it and maybe become full circle on some of this, we talked about how you were learning yourself about AI and learning about these development technologies.

  Like you don't know where anyone is on that journey, so you need to be able to meet them where they are. And that's where the role of product marketing come into play and, Hey, let's give you what you need at the certain level. That's where AI, Oh, AI is going to kill product marketing. It's not. Not really.

  It's going to help our marketers get better, but it's not there yet. Maybe one day when we have Skynet or something crazy going on, but not today. The one point I did want to make on this though, is really around that educational aspect and making sure help people can help build and help grow. And I want to pivot from a developer perspective and ask your opinion on this because, okay, developers are customers.

  They're going to carry it. They're going to drive in the market. And we can important to keep them educated, meet them where they are, give them the right content. The other force you have, some people have, depending on your organization, how it's set up, you have a sales force. Some people selling the big corporate enterprise. They have to learn, understand marketing or understand the content.

• The Importance of Partner Enablement

  How about partners? You have an opinion on partners on this journey because they're going to carry the torch. Both from a developer lens, as well as a, as well as a seller. And how do they play in, in to, to community building and in your own perspective?

  Natacha: Partners are really, really important.

  And if you, if you are building an organization and you don't think about enabling partners, you really are missing out. Because there's only so much you can do. And there's only so far you can go on your own. What partners do is they allow you to spread your wings and they open up like a set of customers that you might not always get access to.

  And then there's another thing you have to remember is resources are finite. If you have to do a POC with every single customer, you'll never, you'll never really have many customers because in some situations, it takes forever to do a POC, right? But if you have partners that are trained and enabled for specific areas, they will become your voice and they represent you in those situations.

  They represent you in those situations, which means if you had, you can only do 100 POC a week. If your partner can help you, you might be able to do. 200 POCs per week, right? And so that's one way to just spread and utilize partners for resources. The other thing with, with partners that I, I find very interesting is if you are in an industry that, where you are very constrained in terms of, I have these developers in my database and you always reach the same developers.

  If you want to expand, there's so many ways you will try and do paid media and all these buys and stuff like that. Those are not always effective. But if you have a partner who also has a set of existing developers and they know my developers or the developers in this database are interested in like data integration, right?

  Why not leverage that so you can expand basically the population that you get to reach, right? So, I do think opening up your company to partners is really important. And then as a marketer, I think it's really important as you're thinking about enablement and go to market to think about the partner piece.

  Like it's, it's just going to help you. In so many ways, when it comes to your, the metrics that matter to you, whether it's adoption, whether it's engagement or usage of the product, or just the awareness, I think being able to enable partner is really important. So, I would recommend that every PMM who's even building a launch plan, make sure that your enablement plan also enable includes a partner enablement plan.

  It's really important.

  Larry: Yeah. I way too many times I've seen situations where partners are like an afterthought and. The successful companies that I've seen are those that view partners as an extension of their sales force or extension of their company in many ways. I would say sometimes people, and don't, this would be my recommendation.

  Some folks are like, “Whoa, partners, they're going to give it to our competitors, this secret content we have inside…” and well, even if they do, your competitors are going to get it from another customer or you know what? So, you might as well just accept the fact, bite the bullet and make sure you're treating your partners and those, those areas and those business, those extensions of your company, treat them well and empower them to take your, your voice and your market and your content forward.

  So, so, hey, I look at the time here and wow, it just, we burned through some time. I have a lot of things I want to ask you, but I want to close on this because we got to move on here, but I have one last question for you and that's.

• Key Recommendations for New Marketers

  For those people that are new, they just, Hey, they fell upon this podcast.They're like, Hey, what's this stuff they're learning. And maybe they're new to launching. Maybe they're new to the industry or the space, or it could be a young organization that is maybe coming out and, “Hey, we want to bring this to market for the first time, how do we get this done?” What recommendation, do you have anything at the top of your mind that would be like, what would you recommend to those people from your perspective? That would be what was one of the more important things you should be taking consideration of?

  Natacha: There are a few things that I think everyone can kind of do. There are a few sets of questions that are very important for you to answer. Do you have a set of questions that you have to answer? And if you answer, you have the right answer to those questions.

  You can have a really good launch plan because you can say, yeah, I'm launching product a, but what is it really, you really have to be able to define what the product is and what is it solving? Like, why, why are you launching this? It's solving problem B for who you need to know who the customer is. Cause in some situation, and I've seen it where people start building product with one customer in mind, and this is my end customer. And once it's built, it's actually not for that customer. So, you have to make sure you nail down the actual customer for that product. Because if you get that piece wrong, you will launch something and it's not going to be used because it's misaligned with who's supposed to be using it.

  You need to think about what channels you are going to leverage for launching something. Because if you're in a B2B environment and you're in a B2C environment, there's two different ways of bringing a product to market. So, like, and the channels that you are leveraging are going to be different. Like from a B2B perspective, yes, I'll have something on social, but social might not be the only way I can get traction.

  But if you're in a B2C environment, like social is a big part of your strategy. Whereas in the B2B environments, like enabling your sellers, uh, or like analysts, uh, could be a driver to drive awareness and get the right folks on your product, then having something on social. I'm not saying that if you're in the B2B, you shouldn't do social.

  I think being, depending on who the customer is and the industry you're in, it kind of dictates which channels you should leverage. But the most, most important thing when you're launching is you have to always think about from the customer standpoint, you have to always work backward from the customer.

  If you build something and you launch something with the customer in mind, most likely your engineering team is going to build something that's useful and you're going to market it to the people in ways that make it more effective. Uh, worthwhile for it, for them to consider it. So, if you don't think about anything else, think about the customer.

  Larry: It always comes back to, it seems like all these conversations, it always comes back to even before you launch, make sure you're targeting correctly. You are positioning correctly. You have the right personas aligned and you really, really, really understand what the customer needs are. Then, okay, then let's roll in and then pull out social and demand gen, and, you know, like PR.

  And so that's one of the things we're going to be doing here over, I would say, I don't know, weeks and weeks and weeks, we're going to start digging in a little bit more to Let's talk about market intelligence and where it fits. Let's talk into managing. Let's talk about growth marketing and understanding all these different areas of that launch process.

• Conclusion and Final Thoughts

  Natacha, awesome, awesome, talk with you today. Thank you so much for coming on the show and thanks for, for sharing all your wisdom and insight. And, uh, wow, just send me these, some, some images or, I'm all super excited. I want to get off and start checking out what you guys are doing. I'll say I'll send you the pictures and the videos.

  Natacha: But one thing I want to, first of all, I want to say thank you for having me on the podcast. And I honestly think this is going to be very useful because when I got into marketing, there wasn't anything like this where you can just listen to people from different walks of life, different industries, and talk about, you know, how they do marketing.

  And so being able to have this, I wish I had this when I was young in the industry. Uh, but I, I guess I can thank you for creating this now for the people who are now either young in the industry or mature in the industry, but who still want to keep up with the way things are done across industries. Uh, I think this is great.

  And thank you so much for starting this. And thank you so much for having me here.

  Larry: Cool. Thank you very much. And like, it warms my heart. You'll be my first influencer then.

  Natacha: I'll, I'll, I'll do my best. I'll do my best.

  Larry: Awesome. Oh, I got to develop that now too, right? Thanks again. Have a great one. And we'll talk to you soon.

  Natacha: Bye Larry.