Episode 2: Rebranding to AI

Doug Flora, EDB

Episode 2: Rebranding to AI at EDB with Doug Flora

In this episode of the Launch Gravy podcast, host Larry Weber talks with Doug Flora, Vice President of Product Marketing at EDB. Doug shares insights into his role at EDB, the company's database leadership and investment in PostgreSQL, and their recent brand pivot to artificial intelligence (AI). The conversation delves into the importance of organizational alignment, credibility, and customer understanding in product marketing, as well as the challenges and learning experiences faced during the launch process.

Connect with Doug Online: Doug Flora’s LinkedIn

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Transcript:

• Doug Flora's Role at EDB

  Larry Weber: Hey everybody and welcome to the Launch Gravy podcast. I'm your host Larry Weber. On today's show, I'm going to be speaking with Doug Flora, Vice President of Product Marketing at EDB. Doug has a rich history in data, security, and cloud product marketing leadership across the gamut. From running product marketing at startups like Red Panda, growth businesses like Okta, and stalwart leaders such as AWS and IBM.

  You run product marketing as an executive at EDB. Can you tell the audience a bit more about your role, your responsibility and offer a bit of detail, a little bit more on EDB and what is EDB and what do you do?

  Doug: That sounds great. Yeah. Where to start? I'll start with EDB. So EDB. Enterprise DB is a Boston based database company all about PostgreSQL. So PostgreSQL.  is, for those who are not database nerds, probably the majority of the audience are not. PostgreSQL.  is the most popular open source. For a long time, it was a little bit more niche, a little bit more academics oriented.

  But in the last, I would say five to 10 years, it's really skyrocketed to be not just the most popular open-source database, but the most popular database in particular for developers, for new applications for a variety of reasons. And I can touch a little bit more on that later. But. EDB is actually the leader in PostgreSQL..

  EDB is a heavy committer, actually the leading committer in terms of code contributions to the open-source project. But we also offer software and services that kind of extend the value of PostgreSQL. And we actually recently had a big brand launch. Launch as well as product launch. And it kind of gets us into the analytics and AI categories as well.

  This in particular, obviously very top of mind. So, it was big for me coming in, in, in February. To a situation where I needed to rebuild the product marketing program several months out from this major launch. I'll walk through some of those challenges and learnings. But then to my specific role at EDB, I'm VP of product marketing at EnterpriseDB.

• The Importance of Product Marketing

  Product marketing is in the product. Organization. And you know, yourself having held numerous product marketing roles, product marketing can sit in many different places. I've had PMM roles in, in marketing departments, in product orgs. I've even sat in field organizations, obviously such a cross functional role.

  My, my kind of personal take on this is it shouldn't matter where product marketing sits. Because at the end of the day, you're usually spending equal. Times equal amounts of time with product managers, with sales, with marketing. And of course, with customers in this role, I lead the product marketing team, which really handles everything from managing major product launches and feature launches, positioning and messaging, some elements of go to market strategy, even working with the product team on product strategy and roadmap.

  Very closely with our marketing cohorts to execute campaigns, sales enablement, and we are working in a very technical industry with very technical buyer personas, we also do quite a bit of what you might traditionally call technical marketing. So, building technical assets like, benchmarks, competitive intelligence, technical blogs, and things like that to support the, the sales cycle and the customer journey.

  Larry: Oh, wow. This is great. You touched on one thing and I want to stop and ask about a little bit is where marketing sits. You brought it up. It shouldn't matter. True, but I got an opinion on this and that's in the sense, historically, I think product marketing had been, at least from my career, many times in the marketing org.

  And many times, I've seen one of the things we've had to do is reach across the aisle, get into product management, get as close as you can. And in some organizations, I've been in, I've seen that as a challenge. It's like product marketing is like throwing stuff over the fence and they're throwing stuff back.

  No way. No, totally not good.

• Challenges in Product Marketing Alignment

  And I have seen where you're sitting now, but I've seen it as a trend, even probably over the last, I don't know, five years or so where it's “wait a second. You got to be way close.” We agree. We know that product marketing needs to be close with the product. With development with that business and they get to put over there.

  But now, is there that issue where you now find yourself? Throwing back over the fence with corporate marketing and it's, no, that's BS. No, we like, we're, this is the product. This is real. We're close to the customer and you feel like product, I'm sorry. I would say corporate marketing or even demand gen’s putting like that, that fresh coat of paint on, right.

  On many things and not close to the details. Now, is that your experience or are you, are you finding it a good place to be?

  Doug: So this is my second time working in a product management org. I think any way you cut it organizationally, it's going to have its inherent challenges. As you pointed out, you're always reaching across the aisles, you know, to someone.

  Sure deal. And alignment is hard and over communicating is hard. Obviously, organizational structure can drive, behaviors and sometimes they're not the right behaviors. I, I think this all comes back to taking the right approach to setting goals and just this, and just this idea of over communication of everyone, no one likes to have more meetings, but the reality is you work in a cross functional role like PMM, similar to PMM.

  To PM in many ways that you, in that you are driving outcomes and goals cross functionally, um, you often don't entirely control your own destiny, right? Like you're trying to, you're trying to drive KPIs where you don't actually control all the levers. And that means that earning trust and getting alignment are super critical.

  Now, what might require a little extra effort does often depend where you're sitting organizationally. If you're sitting in the marketing department, there's going to be that inherent alignment with marketing leadership, and you're going to have to reach across the aisle a little bit more to, to the field and product management orgs, likewise, if you sit in product.

  You're going to have a little bit more organic alignment with product leadership, and you're going to have to reach across the aisle a little bit more intentionally and proactively with marketing, but call me an idealist. I don't think it should matter organizationally. I do think there are some advantages to being in product advantages of being in product in particular at a tech company.

  One of the challenges that product marketing can have when it's not sitting in the product org is. That extreme level of visibility into the roadmap, into product development from the earlier stages to really have, kind of a, to use tech jargon, a single pane of glass view across everything that's happening in product R and D deep insight into customer feedback.

  Those things should come naturally to the product marketer, or at least like it's a much smoother process when you don't have to fight quite so hard to. Get visibility into customer feedback to get visibility in a roadmap, to get early access to documentation and even just discussions around what's being built, how things are unfolding on the product and engineering sides.

  Larry: And that's all so easily available. Depending on the organization you're in and the company you come into, if you're like, I don't have your build phases or like mine, but in some I've gone into, it's been, here's launching stuff, willy nilly and just, ah, like marketing jump on board, help us out a little bit here versus I think time at AWS or Amazon, it's like well-oiled machine, right?

  Doug: You're very much in the trenches with what's going on. That's right. Yeah. I think one of the missteps, a common misstep is that product marketing is brought in too late into the launch process. Sure deal. Hey. We're two months out from launch product marketing, come in and clean things up. Put lipstick two months out, two months out.

  Larry: Oh my gosh. That's like glorious, man. Oh, two weeks, two weeks out. End of the week. We're launching this feature. Let's get with the analysts. Oh, what are you talking about? Yeah, no, that's, oh wow. Yeah. So there's all good stuff. And I'm like, it's an exciting process to go build out and build out a function, build out the business and kind of grow.

  Growth is awesome. But before we go any further, we're digging in quick, because ause there's a lot of good stuff to talk about.

• Doug Flora’s Origin Story

  I want to pause for a second and ask you, as we do with all of our guests, what's your origin story? How did you get into this? Because there's going to be people listening out there.

  Doug: That sounds good. It sounds like something I might want to do. And not every path is the same, right? Not every journey is, I think it's always good to learn from others. So. How did you get involved in, uh, tell us a little about yourself in that journey. Yeah, absolutely. It's something interesting about product marketing.

  I find that people get into it from a broad variety of backgrounds and origins, if you will. My wife is actually also in product marketing, her route. Was much more direct. She it's what she actually studied right in business school. I've seen, I've worked with product marketers who started off in archeology or, or actually were software developers and then ended up on the marketing side.

  To some degree it enriches the function. And if you have a team of people that kind of have different backgrounds, I think that can be great. I did come in more from the marketing side of things originally. Although my first job out of undergrad was in government, very different. I was working on some kind of urban renewal program in a postindustrial part of New England, and I quickly pivoted from there to, to the marketing side and, and in particular to tech.

  And so, living in Boston at that time, there was a pretty healthy ecosystem of, of startups tech companies. So, I was working for an agency supporting kind of marketing and communications for all these startups. And like at that time, what was emerging as this ecosystem of cloud and big data and all this exciting stuff.

  And what is the, what is cloud computing? What is that? What is virtualization? What's a hypervisor there? And, and so I just dug in, I did a lot of reading. A lot of self-teaching as I eased into, as I self-taught on the tech. I've always been passionate about technology on a personal level was building like Dreamweaver websites in junior high or whatever, but in the deeper tech and the infrastructure side of things and enterprise software, a lot of self-teaching took some night classes as well.

  But yeah, I'm just dug in, dug into, remember like, taking a weekend to read like the dummy's guide to virtualization and, and cloud computing and that's, you got to get going because people move fast in, in the industry. That's true. So that was how I got into cloud and data and tech, but then product marketing in particular.

  So, I came over to IBM. You know this story well; you were there at the time. I came over to IBM to work in an organization that was built around an acquisition of a startup in the cloud database space. And I initially came in in a content function and I could content strategy role. But from there, just quickly pivoted to product.

  I think that's just been the trend is I've always been curious about the tech, wanting to get closer to, to, I just, I love to learn. I like to challenge myself. I was curious, like what's going on the other side there? Like, how can I get closer to. Closer to the details and the goodness. Yeah. I think within a year or so at IBM, I had switched over to, to the PMM side, worked on a variety of kind of cool emerging tech at IBM from cloud to blockchain, things like that.

  Then from there went to AWS. So that wanted to talk about like the vortex of all this stuff that was happening in the industry at the time. AWS was obviously central to a lot of those transformations. Spent a good amount of time at AWS. Again, supporting. A range of products, mostly in the database space.

• Transitioning from Large Enterprises to Startups

  But from there I decided, “Hey, I've been working at some of the biggest companies in the world. Wouldn't it be cool to go to more of a growth stage company or midsize company?” That's initially I went to Okta, which had recently IPOed and then actually went even smaller, went to a series B. Red Panda helped them get to series C and could double in, in size.

  And then yeah, recently came to EDB where back to this database space. I even, some of the folks I'm working with now are folks that I worked with 10 years ago at IBM. Circle, small world, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, that's super good. One of the things that just to touch on early on, when you're talking about your growth journey and you're getting involved in the things.

  And I think of myself even as a manager when I'm trying to build a team out, right? Specifically, when you're talking tech marketing is I try to keep half of the team really around, okay, you're domain experts, you know this stuff cold, but you really want to get closer to the customer, to the value, to like, you want to convert from being a DBA.

  And all of a sudden be like, why does the database matter? I would like to go further. And then the other half of the team, really those people that can write. Those people that can talk communicators that are core, but maybe someone like yourself, where you're like, you're coming in. You're like, I'm hungry.

  I've got a thirst for this. I want to go try out new technologies. I'm going to read the dummies guide to virtualization. It was fast, but Oh, my God. Vector database. I don't know. But and then you come together and then I don't know. I felt that was always a happy, like back of the envelope place to start.

  Larry: Right. You need both of those areas to feed upon one another. But yeah, I know. Look, you have an awesome background and I think it's very interesting to lately is going from the big enterprises, getting some of that small startup experience now going back into. A little bit larger, a little bit more mature, but like you could pick from both different areas of expertise.

  Super cool.

• Launch at EDB

  So, look, we could probably dive in further on this stuff, but I want to get to the big behemoth here, and that is, you talked about it earlier, like, you just went through a massive launch, right? And you're new to an organization. Totally changing lots of stuff, right? If you go back into the way back machine, you can probably look at old EDB versus now and it's like, good God, what just happened?

  So talk us through this launch and what was the reason for, what was the catalyst and take us through that? Like why?

  Doug: Yeah, definitely.

• The Evolution of PostgreSQL and EDB’s Strategy

  A number of kind of forces that play. One is I mentioned, and I know the audience is not all necessarily in tech or even in particular in like cloud infrastructure, databases or anything like that.

  So I'll try to keep things at a pretty high level, but the technology that EDB focuses on, which is PostgreSQL, again, an open source database technology. It's been around for a good while, right? Since the nineties, but has really skyrocketed in particular in the last five or so years. It's come to be like the favorite database of developers, even more than that, because it's a very extensible technology.

  It's a very, there are a lot of like kind of utilities and modifications out there that can be used to extend the functionality to support different types of data, different use cases. One of those, which is called PG vector, turns PostgreSQL from a standard database into a vector database that can support AI workloads and applications, essentially like storing data in a way that it can be used to train AI models, large language models in particular.

  So because of this kind of extensibility of the technology, there's a lot that's been developed out there in the developer community. But again, EDB kind of being a leader in this space has a good ability to organically build on that open source and launch commercial features and products that take that value and extend it even further for customers.

  And another thing that's happened is on the inorganic side has been some strategic acquisitions that EDB has made in the last number of years. And one in particular last year of a company called Split Graph. EDB acquired a technology that allows PostgreSQL to become a data warehouse, to become an analytics engine.

  And I won't go super into the details on all that, keep it high level. But just to say that there's been some community-oriented developments. There's been some M&A developments with EDB that have collectively pushed us to not just, not just a multi-product company, but really. Starting to become a platform-oriented company where we have a variety of solutions that kind of need to be integrated in a more holistic way to serve the modern enterprise across these, and particularly these new use cases.

  How do I like AI? What no one was thinking about it a couple of years ago, or at least Outside of a science fiction context. And then all of a sudden everybody's thinking about it, but it's still largely in the phase of not just even proofs of concept, but like in, in some ways, fun and games, right? Like we, we use AI to generate amusing images, songs.

  Obviously, we use it to sanity check ourselves but in terms of like production use cases, and in particular for like highly regulated industries where data accuracy is critical, right? You can't just go out there with stuff that's 50 percent accurate. And a recent study found that ChatGPT is only accurate like 50 percent of the time.

  That's why data infrastructure really becomes critical to getting to the next. The next stage of AI adoption, we need better tools to govern the quality, the accuracy of data so that models are trained to be more accurate, to hallucinate less, and enterprises can get over this hump from funding games with earlier stage generative AI to actually launching AI applications that can transform their business.

  So that's the wave that we are riding. That's really where our customers want us to go. And so that was another big driver in, in the launch. But what that meant for a company that's been around a few decades is me coming in as a new product marketing leader. I have to look across at, “Hey, we've got a decade’s worth of great technology.”

  Existing product lines, solutions, tools, services, and support is a huge piece of our business, professional services. How do you bring all that together and then make it make sense with these recent acquisitions and these new product launches and the overall positioning that we're trying to take in the market of moving from just a kind of a database company to, uh, a data and AI.

  It's, it is, like you said, a very big thing because it's bigger than, it's bigger than just a product launch. It's a re-imagining of our portfolio, how we want to position our portfolio and how we want Emphasize what we want to emphasize and in some cases de-emphasize from our kind of at this point pretty expansive portfolio of tools and extensions and so on to being more of a What people want, what customers in our space want today is they want a platform experience.

  They want to be able to have a one stop shop for all the capabilities that they need versus a kind of large Chinese menu of options. It really seemed like from the outside looking in, it was, it looked like an entire corporate company change, but being led at the core by the platform re envisioning and the product side.

  Sometimes it's like companies will, “Hey, we're going to rebrand and put some new logo and some new colors”, whatever. But. This was really about not only the new focus or that new focus, but like, I would say the, the special focus on AI, but also then the acquisitions, the other stuff, bringing it in, bringing these different disparate pieces that might've been sitting out there, bring it together, build that platform and kind of align as that as a company.

  Yeah, that's right. And yeah, and I don't want to understate the brand aspect of this. As well. Our marketing and comms teams did a tremendous job transforming our brand. Right? Sure. Our look and feel really modernizing our look and feel on our website in many ways. Yeah. And then of course, it, it's, it's an interplay, right?

  Because brand brands should be rooted in messaging but products also have brands, right? And even the product experience, right? You're talking like a modern. Software experience is UX rich, right? And so that branding comes to life in the product itself and the product UI. And it all has to connect, right?

  And so, a few months is not a huge runway to get ramped on everything that's happened. Totally not. And then wrangling it all together and making sure that all these disparate pieces are talking to each other. And there's inevitably stuff that, that gets overlooked, right? And you're making that final push and realizing, “Oh man, this web, we forgot about this webpage.”

  “What about this piece of documentation? Um, what are we going to do with this piece of documents?” And that's where it's, that's where it becomes a bonding experience in the trenches, uh, cross functionally is, uh, all of a sudden your best friend is a guy that works in documentation that you. Never spoken to.

  Larry: Right. If you think about the pre cloud and post cloud. The pre cloud would be as you were still using product with the old name on it. And it was, “I don't want to throw anything under the bus infosphere.” And there were some areas where the name changed like seven different times.

  And at the end of the day, it was like still the old product from 10 years ago when you're using it. So total pet peeve is a marketer that it's not perfect. We've gotten a little bit better where you have the legacy names because customers are used to that too, right? So, you don't always want to throw that out away, but at some point, we need to migrate away from that.

  Doug: Get the new messaging, get the new branding and put it in place. That's right. And I would say I've been fortunate. To, to work with go to market and marketing and product teams that do care deeply about product truth and credibility with our customers, with our users, so that, hey, the stuff that we're saying that we're talking about on the website, there's a direct thread that connects to what your hands on keyboard experience is as a developer, as an admin.

  And I'd say it's another kind of product marketing topic that we could get into or not, but is, yeah, you've always got, you've got aspirational things, you've got forward facing things, you're always trying to find that, that center of gravity where you can communicate value in, in the best way while still staying true to where the product is at today.

  And what the experience of the customer is going to look like on the other side, once they've gone through.

  Larry: Yes. Segue there for a second. I like, I think that's, that's media and that's anyone, and this is a very product management, product marketing focused with, with the rest of marketing around it is how far do you sell the roadmap and how well do you launch products that are to be determined or to come, right?

  I’ve had companies where it was. Hey, it had to happen in the same corner quarter for revenue recognition, or some other companies would be like, it has to be within a year that they were very clear on, and you'd like, you would have like trials and things like that, getting an MVP. But then you have some that are vaporware and never come to market yet.

  Companies are, I keep doing it over and over again, which I know you've been through a number of these things. What's your opinion on this? And what's your opinion on how far to sell the roadmap? Cause that's, I think that's a product marketing, product management. Also, it's a senior executive type thing where you need some tenants as an organization about what is good to go and what isn't.

  Doug: Yeah, that's a great question. It's a million-dollar question. In many ways. Um, um, yeah, I think again, if you think from tenants, what's super important to me is just personally and professionally is credibility, right? As you don't want to lose credibility.

  You don't want to lose credibility as a brand. You also don't want to lose credibility as yourself, right? As. The person who is responsible for taking a product to market or for how that product is positioned on a website in some piece of marketing collateral, et cetera. For me, it's always been really important to, to dig in and keep digging in and keep asking questions and really have as deep of an understanding as I can from where I sit about when it's not just the product available.

  When is, when are these features available? What is What is that going to look like? So, a good way to bring clarity is, one of the things that I engaged our operate, our kind of release management and operations folks on early here was making sure that we had ultra clarity on how we tiered our launches.

  And we came up with four, actually, actually four tiers of product releases.

  The tiers. Okay. So, like a tier one would be a net new product essentially, or a net new major capability. A tier two would be a major new feature. A tier three would be more of a minor feature. Um, and then a tier four would be something that really doesn't need to be communicated practically that can just go into our release notes and documentation.

  So, it'd be like a bug fix. Patch something like that. And yeah, that was interesting. Cause usually I've seen a three-tier system, but we got to where we realized, Hey, we actually have this other category of like stuff we're tracking in the roadmap, but the PR team doesn't necessarily need to know the sales team doesn't necessarily need to know.

  We, we just need to make sure that it's documented and that our like technical field is aware. Good too, for, for accounting in product management, right? Because a lot of times you're spending time on some of those areas and I know you're not going to drive them out to market, but you want to get, you need to get credit for it, right.

  And make sure, “Hey, why is Sally working on this for five months?” And then it goes to where it is going somewhere. Right. And you need to make sure that's has executive view on it as well. That's right. Yeah. It's great for accountability. Yeah. And so through that exercise, when you understand how you tier everything in your roadmap, then you understand what the go to market implications are, what all the downstream.

• Tracking Product Launch Documentation

  Implications are, and you can, you can keep a better center of gravity of truth as well. Right? So, for each of these launches, whether they be tier one, two, three, or four, you can track the associated documentation, right? Where's the product narrative, where's the, the engineering roadmap information, the technical specs, the documentation.

  And then as you develop product marketing assets, you can track those alongside each of those as well. Sweet. It brings a kind of more of a reality to every launch. Hey, this isn't just a collection of bits and bobs that we decided to announce. This is a real thing. We have a real process for releases and for launches.

  And each of those has a set of core assets that kind of starts on the. Product and engineering side and goes through the full life cycle of the product to obviously product marketing. And then ultimately to PR communications, social media teams, other go to market teams as they develop all of their collateral.

  But that's the best, the best way I've found to navigate that is. You keep, you keep your launches and your mess and your associated messaging as close as possible to the actual product roadmap, what's actually being delivered and when it's never going to be a hundred percent perfect process, but there's always going to be pressures and even very good reasons to talk about future facing things or things that are coming down the pipe.

  But another thing I would say is just being clear with customers about where things are at, right? In our recent launch, we announced some GA capabilities, but we also announced a tech preview. For an upcoming AI product. And on our website, it's very clear, “Hey, this is in tech preview.” Here's a registration forum, sign up, engage us to learn more and even, you know, start to, to play around with it.

  Larry: So as you go through that, that tiering. And kind of launch process, what type of launch is it, right? Is it a general availability? Is it a preview? Is it a beta? And then making sure that you communicate that availability status clearly to customers.

• Building Credibility with Customers

  One of the things you brought up earlier too, that I wanted to just touch on that I thought was great was the idea of credibility with customers.

  And if somebody say you earn trust, well, it's also keeping trust, right? And so making sure that customers are front and center as you're thinking through what to say and why to say it. That's super, super smart. And like once any company deviates from that, man, it's, once you lose that credibility, you lose that trust, you're gone and it takes you five X to even try to build it back.

  So, I think that's really smart. That's right. I want to jump on this. Okay. We can talk about this stuff for a long time.

• Insights from the AI Product Launch

  I want to ask you though, specifically around the launch itself. Okay. What did you learn from it? Because you're entering in, and I think it's interesting, as you said, getting an AI space.

  AI is, it's hot. It's right now. People were trying to figure out how do I leverage this? And all of a sudden you see everyone popping out with the same looking image with misspelled words, like the hallucination aspect. And I don't know, marketers were told we're going to lose our jobs. And at the same time, now it's like marketers are laughing at that saying, aha, it's just, it's for ideation, helping us along and moving the needle.

  And who's to say what AI is going to get into next? Specifically writing is one aspect, image is another, music, voice, whole slew of things, right, that like you could jump into. And so that's a level of FUD, I would say, or misinformation that's in the market. And it depends on who you talk to, right, on what AI means.

  And now all of a sudden you're like, we're betting the farm on jumping in with AI. Tell me, right? What, like, how has it been? How has the launch, how has customer feedback been? What are analysts saying? Because you had just recently done this. It's got enough time for people to say, whoa, what's EDB doing? So, I think, tell us a little bit about that and then like maybe some lessons and I don't know, like where you hit it out of the park and maybe some areas where you probably should have done this better and be honest about it.

  Doug: Yeah. A couple of things.

  Navigating the AI Space

  One is look, been working in various kind of marketing roles and in tech for 15 years, almost 15 years and doing product marketing in the kind of data space specifically for a good chunk of that.

  Now AI a bit newer for me. I definitely have had exposure to it from going, even going back to my time at an Amazon. Definitely have been orthogonal to it, right? Like the technologies that I've worked on have been related, have been necessary for, in many ways, AI applications to, to exist, but grabbing the bull by the horns for AI was a bit new for me.

  And it can be intimidating in the sense that. It's so top of mind. It's the analyst buzz is so intense that it's easy to think, man, I don't know what I'm talking about with AI is it that credibility thing, right? Here's something I learned. The space is so nascent, so new. Everybody's learning and it's okay.

  We're all in it together. That's actually something I really like about the space is that we're very, everyone is in learning mode, including them, including the AI models are learning. We're trying to help them to learn faster and better. So it's very cool. I was actually just reading a blog from the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz.

  They invest in a lot of AI companies and tech data and tech companies generally. And this blog was basically making the case that we're now entering phase two of AI. Phase one was all about ideation. And again, going back to the kind of fun and games like, Hey, cool, generative AI, you can make these Hollywood trailers. Yeah. And it's great. It's cool. It's a super impressive, but what it's not necessarily is enterprise grade, right? It's not because again, for the kind of enterprises and public sector organizations that, that we typically serve and our biggest verticals are like financial services, public sector, telecommunications, et cetera.

  Talk about highly regulated compliance driven organizations. You can't. 99 percent accurate isn't good enough, let alone 50 percent accurate. So, no room for hallucinations, no room for wrong inferences and things like that. So, everybody's in the same boat of trying to figure out how do we make this stuff work and how do we make it work for business?

  And going back to that blog, it's, Hey, phase two is all about wrangling this mess and actually, how do we actually get to, um, quality AI functionality? How do we actually get to outputs that are like ready for business, ready for productive use? And part of that, a lot of it is the data. The, a lot of the challenge is, is data because it's like the data, it's not good enough to just go to the public internet and just harvest everything and try and train these models.

  It's, you need domain specific data. You need curated and cleansed data. When well governed data to make these, to make these things work in a way that's going to work for major enterprises.

• The Importance of Educational Content

  But anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying I got comfortable again with learning a new space, right? And a space that can seem a bit intimidating, but I think that was a great growth for me.

  And just realizing that, hey, everyone is in learning mode. We're all teaching each other about this, this new space. And so that's been really great. And, um, Response has been awesome. We've had some press mentions recently that were not proactive on our part. People observe the market, observing that, Hey, EDB is moving into this space as part of a broader trend of data companies, pivoting and optimizing for what's to come here.

  Building on that, a learning actually has been the enthusiasm and the hunger is so strong, both internally from our field and from our, uh, just our internal organization, as well as externally. I, if I had to go back and do it again, I might've doubled down even more on the content on AI and the educational content, because again, you can falsely make the assumption that, Hey, there's a bunch of, there's a wealth of information out there already on this stuff.

  Not the case. Right. And there, and a common complaint among our target persona of engineers is that a lot of the content that is out there is tainted by it's very vendor, it's not neutral content, right? It's like vendors push are pushing their various agendas. So from the kind of pure kind of open source learning content standpoint, I might've even backed some of that in a little bit, we have a great plan around.

  Publishing developer content and the remain remainder really for the remain remainder of the year on these topics, but I might've even just pulled some of that in and really doubled down on it earlier because it's just the hunger for it is, is really hard to believe.

  Larry: Yeah, that's an awesome point because you think about it in the core, like education, especially in new markets, new developments, new technologies is so key.

  And you can't assume is even you bring it up with AI. I got everyone's smarter than me. I don't know enough about this stuff, but you're right. Everyone is learning that not just AI is learning, everyone's learning and they're learning applications. How do we use this? What should we use it for? What should we not use it for?

  And then there's the whole idea of ethics around it. Whatever that what's ethical, what's not right. And how do you pay for it? Things like that. So that's a whole nother world, but I think there's opportunity and specifically from a product marketing perspective, thought leadership. Yeah. And ownership, and that comes with education and that comes with something I always feel very strongly about is that organizational leaders need to talk or the thought leaders in organizations to development as well.

  All the way up could be marketing, could be the CEO, CMO. You got to talk about this and get credit for it in many ways. And that's important. And specifically, as you're jumping into something like AI, I agree with you. It's you need to own that narrative, own that education, and then Because when people search for it, and this gets into the whole thing of marketing and being everywhere and every aspect of a launch touches everything.

  You're going to touch SEO, right? If I'm searching for something, am I getting back to that information that Doug put out there with his team? It's so important. And I don't know, I'd be bold enough to say that companies should even invest more somewhere. It's if you're going to invest a little bit of more money invested less in advertising, some ways first invested in education and the narrative in that.

  That core story or that core, how to get from a to B to C then go advertising, but you need that story. You need that knowledge, need that education first and foremost. I'll get off my pedestal now, but that's, I feel very strongly. I think you hit a great point. Yeah, definitely. And I think that's, that is something that's very strong.

  Doug: And EDB is in its DNA being a kind of an open source software community leader. Always been big on putting a lot of content, not just code, but content out there. On PostgreSQL topics. I think now, again, just brave new world a little bit with the AI topics. Um, but yeah, the education piece is critical. And if you look at some of the really successful companies out there in our space, not just in our space, in all spaces, but in our space, for sure.

  You'll see a pattern there. I'll say MongoDB or AWS have continuously focused on that educational content that kind of. Technical buyers have a great sniff test for BS, right? For vapor, for just buzz and jargony stuff. Putting out authentic learning material. They know it comes from a vendor. You don't have to worry about hiding the fact that In fact, in many ways, you don't want to hide the fact that it's coming from a vendor.

  From a vendor, but that educational tone that, Hey, you're coming bearing gifts, right? If you're going to go knock on somebody's door, if you're going to go knock on a stranger's door, like come bearing gifts. Give them a good reason to listen to what you have to say.

  Larry: Always, always. Yeah. Hey, a couple of things. I want to touch on one or two more topics before we close on this because, man, I think we can go all night and all day on this.

  So as we're talking through some of this, I want to talk specifically on some of the messaging piece of it and how in the database space, or even it could be the launch, it could just be EDB in general.

• Effective Technical Marketing Strategies

  And you touched on some of it with it, with the different launches and the tiers, right? Hey, we have a new product coming out, a new feature coming out, our new, like just a rev, like how do you handle, you personally, feature versus function versus value? And maybe a little bit of your journey there at EDB and how you handle that.

  Cause I think that's hard. We were talking technical marketing, right? Not just, we're not selling lollipops or something. There's a level of grit and a level of, That, that needs to be honorable and honest. And so features and functionality, how to use it, take it away. How do you handle that?

  Doug: I think there's a misconception sometimes that if you are doing technical marketing for technical personas, that means that you need to be at this kind of like feature function level all the time.

  And there's of course an appropriate time to be at that level. In particular, when you're talking like what we just were with the educational hands on tutorial type of content. You're going to have to be at the feature function level a lot of the time. When you're doing messaging exercises, when you're talking positioning and web content and announcements, value orientation is of course critical.

  I think part of the reason it's critical is especially if you work in a space that I don't want to say is crowded, but has a lot of players, a lot of established players, and always a lot of emerging players. What you don't want to be is just competing with everyone on it for everything all the time, right?

  You want to be able to have those wedges. You want to be able to establish your uniqueness. And you do that through demonstrating value, because if you're only talking about the strengths of various features and functions, then you're going to be trapped down in this bake off, this endless bake off against other products.

  So you want to. Help your customers to understand value that they might not even be thinking about. And so it, what it, what it really means is that you have to pull the, your conception of the customer journey, even, even earlier, right. Then when they're actually seeking a solution to their problem, you actually, in many ways, want to preempt their discovery process to actually, [00:42:00] and some of this goes into more of the territory of like thought leadership and marketing and the world of tech, like developer evangelism and things like that.

  You always want to be preceding the market, if you will, right? Getting ahead of when somebody is actually looking for a solution and helping them to understand that they have a problem or lack a certain value that they may not even be aware of.

  Larry: And real quick, I'm going to get my soapbox again. And that's where it's so essential, specifically in product marketing in general, to understand your customers. Understand their pain points. What are their challenges? Otherwise, the stuff you're talking about, no one's going to know. Cause how are you going to get out in front of that? Unless you're close to what their challenges are and understanding, man, what can you bring to the table? Anyway, I'll shut up now. Go ahead.

  Doug: Yeah, no, exactly. That, that it's, I'm glad you brought that up because I think that empathy and under steep understanding of personas is such a critical part of that. And you're never going to. As much as I have worked in this space, I'm never going to be a database administrator or platform engineer or a sysadmin or a data scientist, but I'm never going to fully understand their day to day per se, but, but a buyer can sense.

  If you've put in the time to understand their pains, right? Have you, and there's many different ways to do that, right? There's a myriad of ways, whether it's the traditional focus group or market research, or just sitting on sales calls or going to trade shows and talking to customers directly, endless ways to get that Intel, but you got to put that time.

  And if you don't put that time in, then you're just not, you miss the beating heart, right? And then, and then you, and then that's why we instinctively will go back to the future functionality stuff because. If you don't have a sense for the beating heart of your persona, of your target persona, then you're just going to talk about functionality.

  You're just going to talk about features because you don't know what else to do. Yeah. So, putting in that time is, is absolutely critical. And there's, so we could go on and on about it, but there are some interesting methodical ways of getting to that, right? And in many ways, it's a, there are some interesting Venn diagrams you can think about, it'd be easier if I had a whiteboard here, but you've got.

  You've got what your products or offering can provide for a customer. You've got the customer with their pain points, and then you've got other alternatives out there, whether they be direct competitors or free open-source tools out in the market or kind of bespoke ways that they people do things today.

  And there's an overlap there of those three circles, if you will, where you don't want to be is in that space where they all overlap, because that sameness, what you want to be is and call it the wedge. That, uh, overlap between your customer's pain points and your unique value, uniqueness. That's where you want to be.

  So that to the extent that you can demonstrate unique value without trying to compete as much on a feature function level, on kind of a bake off level with other competitors out there. I think that is the sweet spot. Easier said than done. Probably one of the more challenging aspects of a product marketing or marketing is like getting to that uniqueness.

  But yeah, I think. When you can get that nirvana, it makes all the difference.

  Larry: No, that's great. Lok, I think we're closing at a time here. I have a thousand more questions I can ask you right now. I'd love to dig in even further into persona development and things like that. But I want to pull back a little bit because I do want to get a couple last fun questions here.

• Career Advice for Aspiring Marketers

  Look, we, you talked a little about your career and how you got into becoming head of product marketing at a large enterprise. And yeah, you've had some different avenues, alleyways, really understanding the educational piece and really learning. If there's other folks out there right now that are like, Hey, what would your recommendation be for those that maybe want to do what you do?

  Like, How to get started in this space or what's their first, or even during something else differently, how do they get closer to the world of Doug Flora?

  Doug: A couple of things come to mind and I didn't work at a startup until a bit later in my career. Although earlier in my career, I worked with a lot of startup site in a consulting capacity, engaged with a lot of startups.

  And I did work at a smaller agency. If you can find an opportunity to join a startup in an interesting space, there’s no better place to just be able to wear any number of hats and roll your sleeves up. And usually, startups are open minded about a particularly for entry level jobs, about people who maybe need to learn a little bit on the job or, but if they have the right mentality, if you have the right roll, roll up your sleeves mentality, startups can be a very welcoming environment for that.

  So I think If you can find an interesting startup to work at and look, maybe ultimately it's not product marketing or even marketing, but you'll definitely have opportunities to Try out different things. See what sticks, see what you're passionate about. That's one, one thing that comes to mind. And I think just to be frank, but the current market, those jobs in some ways can be easier to find maybe than the traditional big tech jobs.

  Um, but otherwise I would say, look, if that's not an easy path, initially think about other ways that you can just go out, start creating content. It's never been easier in many ways to be a content creator. And to join interesting conversations. It used to be, you had to be very intentional about it and have like a prerequisite of knowledge or skills to go build your own website.

  Understand how to host a site and maybe know some Dreamweaver. And host a podcast. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Used to be a lot more effortful to, to do things like that. And to get an audience, in many ways, it's never been easier to create content, broadcast it, get an audience, join. If you don't want to even do that stuff, just join existing conversations.

  Whether they be on a social media platform or online communities, etc. Go engage, right? I think don't be afraid Don't have imposter syndrome just go start start at the appropriate level Maybe there's some more learn learner learning oriented or more junior communities out there But just seek and you will find go explore Have fun. Don't take things too seriously and don't be afraid to fail.

  Larry: Oh God. Yeah. Look, you're kicking up some strings here. It hit my heart. You got to fail fast. You got to fail. Otherwise, you're not going to learn being a dad too. It's one of these things where you can't be fear of the imposter syndrome. You got to get on front of this stuff and just be like, just do it.

  And I don't want to pose for Nike here. It's go try it. Go seriously. Go do it. Fail. Learn. And then do it again. Oh, or if you fail, if you don't fail or succeed thumbs up, but beware, someday you're going to fail. And unless you learn how to handle that failure, learn from it and get back on your horse again, it's going to be harder for you.

  So I can't fight anything you said. I think that's all-good stuff. And I agree a hundred percent, like we're at time here, but I'd love to have you on for at some point, another time as well, because there's a lot to dig into.

  But one last thing for you real quick is what are you doing? Like your personal side, do you have any recommendations?

  I don't know, like book, movie, video game, whatever it is. What's Doug Flora into right now? And what do you, what could you share with the audience on something you're like, yeah, you should check this out.

  Doug: I can share some recent reads on both kind of the business side and the fun side, a business book that I read recently that I would highly recommend.

  It was called the Busting Silos and it's by Hilary Carpio and Travis Henry, but it's actually heavily based on the work that the, uh, CMO and CRO of Snowflake did to build out … really they're named account and account based marketing and sales strategy, but it's really about it's in the name busting silos.

  How do you build that cross functional discipline and how do you get away from … Larry, you and I both worked at Amazon where there's a mentality of you never say that's not my job. It's similar Like how do you get how do you get out of the hey, that's not my job or like we hey, no We've got a goal, we've got a thing we've got to go do.

  In their case, it was like, how do we laser target this smaller number of strategic named accounts and just get inside them, talk to the whole kind of complex buying committee, uh, within, within there with very tailored, hyper, hyper targeted messages and so on. So a little bit tactical, but super interesting.

  I would say, particularly if you work in, in technology, marketing or sales. On the personal side, so, I have been getting back into my roots of like, sci fi and stuff, so I have, I recently, um, after the recent Dune films came out, I, Dune was one that I never actually read, so I went back and I've been, I've been reading, I'm about halfway through the original Dune novel, so I'm really excited.

  Um, I'm digging that. I like the kind of, I like those very like detailed science fiction books was always a big Lord of the Rings fan and stuff like that. It's good fun, but I still haven't seen the second Dune film. So probably this weekend, I'll, I think it's on HBO max or something. So I'll check that out.

  Larry: Oh, good. No, super good, Doug. Hey, look, we're going to, we're going to call it here. Uh, it's been a super long, super good conversation. As I said, we can do this much longer too. Uh, so much to dig up so much good learning from you. Uh, If anyone here has any questions for you, right? What's the best way for anyone to find you online?

  Yeah, actually a couple of ways. Um, you can find me on LinkedIn, Douglas Flora. You can find me on X, the artist formerly known as Twitter. My handle is dsflora. I don't post as much on X as I used to. I also have an Instagram account. This goes back to the personal passions. Um, as a former DJ, I have a record collecting.

  Instagram account called LP lounge. Well, you can check that out. You can see what I'm listening to. So I got the The record collection that I've been growing since college years when I was a college radio DJ. But yeah, that's how you can find me online or shoot me in. Hey, look, send me an email. DS flora at iCloud. com.

  Larry: Sounds good. Yeah. I'll put in the show notes as well. People can actually exit link to it. So all good, Doug. Thank you again. And thanks everyone for listening. We'll talk to you soon. Great. Take care.

• Collaborating with Product Management

  Larry: Yeah. How about, we're talking a lot of sales and the outbound side of it. It's quick pivot to, to internal, to the product management side. And how, how do you like maybe some of these many times product marketing, you're going to see the nuggets. You're going to be able to say, Oh, here are the use cases there.

  different that are new. If you're close to the customer or close to the sellers, you're gaining this information, any insider, any, any knowledge around transferring that knowledge back into product management and, or working with product management to, I don't know, build some like new learnings into the product or be aware of that.

  Any, any situations like that you want to share?

  Jeff: Yeah. Well, I, well, I mean, I would say big picture. I mean, obviously. It's important to have a good relationship between product marketing and product management. And I would even add sales to that. Um, but I think it's even more important in emerging products with a, with a established product, oftentimes, hopefully things are running in a machine like way.

  And we know who are, we know who our, uh, personas are. There isn't a lot of [00:34:00] change there with nailed down product market fit. And so everyone knows their lane and they can just go full steam ahead. When it comes to an emerging product. You're just trying to figure, you're still trying to figure out product market fit.

  You know, you're trying to figure out, do we have something here? And so for me, it's really, really important to build those relationships and really create, even though, for example, I report into the marketing organization here at Nutanix, I think of myself as really a member of that cross functional database service team.

  I run marketing. We've got a head of PM. We've got a head of sales, a head of services. Ahead of partnerships for, for our product. And we think of ourselves as a, as a team within a team. And I think it's really important to build relationships there, good communication, because I think you kind of mentioned it earlier.

  You're dealing with your PMs are out there building the product. They're getting feedback from customers. Your salespeople are similarly getting feedback from customers. You need that information as a marketer. To make decisions about how you're going to position your product. And similarly, you might have to get some feedback from the market that you need to communicate to those folks.

  So the [00:35:00] communication has to go both ways, but it's, yeah, I mean, it's really important for those emerging products. I mean, it's important for all products, but for emerging products specifically, because often you don't even know what you have, like you might, you might go to market with a product and think, yeah, we're going to, we're going to, the real value prop is use case a, and you get it out in the market and you realize actually.

  Use case B is just as important, maybe more important or, and I'm trying to think of a good example like Anonymize, an experience I had where we were selling an emerging product to a particular customer and it was a decent sized opportunity focused on what we thought was the main use case. But then when the customer asked, is there, there was a security angle here that we hadn't thought of.

  And all of a sudden now the security team gets involved and that opens up a whole new budget. And so now the sale goes from this big to this big, because you're talking to a different group. Now that kind of information, if I'm not communicating with the sales team and the PM team, you know, a marketer, I might not know [00:36:00] about that.

  So it's important that I know that because now I have to think about, well, is that a repeatable thing? Could that be the case at other customers? And so then you've got to go out and test that. And so you don't get that kind of information unless you have really good communication and good relationship.

  And it's also, you know, I think to get an emerging product off the ground, you have to think like you're a kind of a startup within a larger company. And so I think it's good to kind of have that kind of, you need that camaraderie, you need that kind of team, you know, us against the world kind of thing. I mean, not confrontational with the rest of the org, you feel like you guys are playing You're starting, you're starting small, the odds are stacked against you.

  It's an all for one kind of thing. And so I think if you can build that kind of relationship, that all the better, cause that's where the communication comes in and you can make smarter decisions faster.

  Larry: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I love that idea. It reminds me of like, it's kind of. You against the world with this team and it builds that bond with others that are associated.

  And also it creates an energy. I've been in situations that creates energy that actually goes beyond just your unit. It was, I [00:37:00] think even one back in the IBM days was we did acquisition of a company called Cloudant and Cloudant was did open source. It basically took open source CouchDB and, you know, forked it to Cloudant.

  But it was, it was Cloudant against the world in many ways. And it was, it was a different way of operating that IBM wasn't used to at the time. And that energy, that leadership from that team, the creativity just, you know, like it led that transformation into things like Bluemix and IBM cloud and other areas.

  I loved it. I thought that team was absolutely fantastic. And that's where a situation like, wow, like that's the kind of greatness, even in Amazon, AWS, I think. It's a little databases against the world because you're fighting. You're like, what those back in the day, the cloud databases, I'm not going to move my workloads to the cloud.

  Like what, why not? And it became that, that kind of energy is the best way I can say it. And that moves across different teams.

  Jeff: Yeah. You know, as we talked about earlier, you've got to get the sales team bought in. They need to be excited. And if the team that's doing it. Putting [00:38:00] together the product and bringing it to market isn't excited.

  How are you going to get the sales team excited? You can build that camaraderie, build that excitement. And as you said, kind of make its way through the organization, kind of create a buzz internally. That's great. And sometimes the other thing is, depending on your situation at Nutanix, for example, we've got a handful of emerging products.

  So I'm competing with our core product. For, for, you know, marketing attention, sales attention, but I'm also competing competing with our other emerging products as well. So, you know, it can get very complex. So if you can build that excitement, that's great. That's a way to get other people on board.

  Larry: How about, and then I'll get out of the politics area here or the organizational one, but how do you stand out now?

  We talked, okay. Sales great. Now you've got the product side of it. How about other areas of marketing like demand gen? I don't know if content marketing is run under your team or not, but sometimes the situations, you got a big organization, you got different folks. I only have budget to write these five eBooks or these campaigns are going to go to the [00:39:00] legacy product.

  They're not going to cover you. You're like, gosh, darn it. How do I, so how, how is that working with you? And is there any insight you have?

  Jeff: Yes. I do have some thoughts

  Larry: Can of worms opened up, man.

  Jeff: Yes, absolutely. That's a great point.

• Coordinating Marketing Functions

  So, the challenge that I've, that I had in a couple of roles, marketing emerging products is as a product marketer, you know, I'm, you know, I'm in my product marketing lane.

  And as you mentioned, there's digital marketing, there's campaigns. Demand gen, different kind of marketing functions that in a, with a core product, that's more established, they can run in their own lanes. They don't have to be quite as tightly coordinated. I think it's really different for a merging product where the GM of the business wants to know what is our, what is our strategic marketing plan for this product, not just, I don't, you know, they don't want to just hear from the product marketing team and then from the field marketing team and the digital.

  Like how are these all working together? And if I think it's important for an emerging product to have a point person, [00:40:00] single threaded marketing leader that runs marketing for that product. Now, oftentimes in my case here at Nutanix, you know, field marketing doesn't report to me. Digital doesn't report to me, but my job is to kind of be like a quarterback and try to coordinate those different functions.

  So I've, what we've tried here is to kind of create a virtual marketing team for Our database product. And so, you know, we created a tiger team, if you will, we're product marketing. I've got my field marketing person. I've got a digital marketing person. We get together every two weeks. Work. We think of ourselves as a, as a, as a cross functional marketing team for the database service.

  And we all work together to make sure that we're not missing anything. And we're thinking strategically. It's because if you do things in isolation as a product marketer, you create content. And if you don't. Have a plan to get that content out into the market, whether it's through digital spend or organic means, whatever it might be.

  It's not going to be effective. We've [00:41:00] come up with this concept here, which we call the virtual CMO where I'm a virtual CMO for my product. Sure. So my job is to bring all these different marketing functions together into a cohesive whole. So each year I'm going through this process now where we put together an integrated marketing plan.

  For my product that covers all the different functions across marketing, not just product marketing, which is where I focus most of my attention, but also includes the different digital campaigns and other types of other marketing functions. So I think it's important to have that kind of single thread leader.

  And we got, you know, we learned this the hard way. It was challenging when I got here because we didn't have that. And, you know, we learned on the job and we kind of figured out, uh, through trial and error, this kind of approach is showing some dividends because this way, you've got somebody who's really thinking about the product and the Kind of a marketing perspective holistically.

  Okay. And if you don't have that, you can have blind spots, there can be miscommunication and it's just more challenging to put together a more strategic approach. So I think that's really important. Now, as I said, [00:42:00] these folks don't report to me. So it's more, it's a challenge because your, your job is to influence these different groups.

  You know, it's not like, you know, these are your direct reports and you can say, Hey, go do this, go do that. So, you know, it's, it's, it's a different skill. But really important, I think, to have that kind of, that kind of approach, at least in my experience, that's, that has worked.

  Larry: Yeah, no, then it makes a hundred percent sense.

  And I got to remember too, having worked for large enterprises like AWS, IBM, you know, Oracle, like. It's a different way you go to market. And for those situations, you're fighting for share of mind, share of wallet and different teams. And what you brought up, I think is very important. And that is the idea of being quarterback, the CMO of your organization or CEO of your product in many ways, like working with those folks and ensuring then the energy gets brought between those people as well.

  And y'all go in there and fight for, go to battle. And that's awesome. Especially when you have good synergies with other leaders in the organization. Yeah. Versus, and you brought up another thing, the marketing plan, and I'm going to, I'm going to shift now, right now to the small, medium [00:43:00] business, the startups.

  Many times there's not a separate marketing plan. When I've worked with certain smaller companies, marketing plan, what's that? No, you have to get that down. It's not just, we have one or two marketers like roaming and building stuff. Cause. That doesn't work either. And so really aligning around the plan is key on that.

  And the plan is fueling the larger enterprises, but that, that concept that you bring up, that being that the virtual CMO or whatever, or the tiger team lead, that's imperative. That's super important because that's the only way you're going to get folks to do the things they got to do is specifically in a, if you've never worked in a matrix environment.

  Wow. Those are some different skillsets that you need to leverage, but I think that's really important. And I'm happy you guys are doing that there. Look, we're hitting that time here.

• Trends and Learnings in Tech Marketing

  I have one more question I want to ask you specifically a little bit off of this is where you're sitting and what you're doing right now, like any trends or anything that you're seeing, or even a biggest learning from this past year or so, [00:44:00] whether it be, it could be in the database of space, could be in marketing in general, but just anything that you're seeing or like, Hey, man.

  That seems kind of important or that that's, that's a little different than what I've noticed.

  Jeff: Um, yeah, I mean, I would say, let me think about, that's a great question. You know, things obviously are always changing quickly. And I think one thing that maybe this isn't like a brand new lesson, but that's been hammered home to a bit more over the last year or so is tech marketing, we sometimes, we get, especially in enterprise tech, we sometimes get very obviously technical.

  We get very, you know, focused on the. Business and the rational decision making about, you know, how are they going to evaluate our product, et cetera, but it's still marketing. And it's still, you have to evoke a feeling and an emotion in your customers. But that that's more intuitive when you're talking about a consumer product, like your iPhone and obviously Apple's great at that and creating this kind of feeling that you get when you see your iPhone, but I think it's, it plays a role [00:45:00] in all marketing, even if it is a database or a server, something that you don't think of as particularly emotional, you have to, it is important to evoke a feeling.

  Some emotion among your customers that And the way you do that, I think is through empathy and them understanding that you really get their problem and that you're here to solve their problem. You're not here to sell them this widget. You're here to solve this problem for them, that you get this, you understand why this is so hard and that you're, you're, you're a partner in this journey, we're not just, you know, this isn't just a transactional type relationship.

  We did here at Nutanix, kind of a rebrand. We've got a new CMO, not new anymore. She's been here a couple of years. Mandy Dollywall. And she undertook a real rebranding for us. And it's like night and day from, from where we were. And she's really done a great job of creating this kind of emotional connection with our customers around our focuses on helping you run your apps and data anywhere.

  And that, that kind of building that kind of connection, I think is important because ultimately, [00:46:00] again, it's tech products are still products and people buy, not just based on what's the best product, but also on what is the best They buy based on relationships, they buy based on feelings and trust. And so you still have to think about that, even in enterprise tech, it's not, it's not just for consumer products.

  So again, maybe not necessarily a new learning, but something that's been, I've come to appreciate even more of the last couple of years, seeing what we've done here at Nutanix.

  Larry: Yeah, no, it's, it, you bring it back to a customer obsession and really making sure you have that connection, even if it's just some super technical product or feature, uh, like, why do you exist?

  Why does that product exist? Why does that customer need it? And then what is the story? Like, how do you then build that trust, build that awareness and build that desire, uh, for that offering, for that service, for that feature within the customer base, I think that's. That's always important. And, uh, I think what you're bringing up though, is specifically within the tech sector, sometimes software or services, cloud services gets away [00:47:00] from that.

  Specifically, if the more infrastructure like you get, I would say. And, um, rather than, Oh, new gen AI stuff. Oh, what's that it's helping. I'm touching it. I'm feeling it. And for some of those offerings or services that might not be as tangible to the end user sometimes. So I think that's an important thing, but Hey, Jeff, I loved having you on the show today.

  Uh, I'll, I'll, you know, basically best way to get in touch with you would be via LinkedIn.

  Jeff: Absolutely. You can find me on LinkedIn. Um, we'd love to, you know, chat with anybody who's interested in marketing. Um, we could, we could have talked for hours more. Well, so much to cover.

  Larry: Yeah, I know. Well, we'll start doing panel discussions too, as well.

  Well, let's grab a topic and we'll start digging into it here, but no. Awesome. Thank you. I learned a bunch of great talking about emerging products and enterprise emerging products. And yeah, thanks for being on the launch gravy podcast and look forward to talking with you again, Jeff. Awesome. Thanks for having me, Larry.

  Take care. Have a great [00:48:00] one.