Kasia Bergilowski Foster, an accomplished product marketing manager at Capsule, joins us on the Message-Market Fit Podcast to dive into the nuances of product marketing in the B2B SaaS world. From her journey transitioning from content creation to mastering strategic marketing roles, Kasia shares invaluable insights into aligning content with customer interest and the challenges of synchronizing messaging across different departments.
Kasia Bargielowski-Foster, an experienced Product Marketing Manager at Capsule, joins us to share her insights and journey in the world of B2B SaaS marketing. With a rich background that spans from running a successful music blog to leading roles in digital and content marketing, Kasia brings a unique perspective on understanding customer needs and crafting effective messaging.
In this episode, Kasia delves into the importance of aligning content with customer interests, the transition from content to digital marketing, and the pivotal role of product marketing in shaping business strategies. She also discusses the challenges of aligning messaging across various departments and offers advice to those aspiring to excel in SaaS product marketing.
Interested in more stories about understanding your audience at a deep level? Don't miss our conversation with Amar Ghose, co-founder at ZenMaid, where we explore how as a leader he keeps in touch with their customers' needs and motivations.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this episode. Share your favorite insights in the comments.
My focus was, obviously, originally, when you're a young content executive, pumping out as much content as possible, writing blogs on the regular, shipping off, like, two or three a week, or however many is demanded of you. But as you become more confident in your role, and as you start to think beyond your day to day, you start to think, like, Okay, I'm writing these blogs, but are these re Blogs actually gonna resonate.
Are they gonna lead to anything from the business? Are they actually what people want to know about? It's what I'm talking about even resonating with my audience. And that's where you start to get into the whole realm of, I need to understand more about who our personas are. I need to understand more about what the value is of our product.
And that's when you start getting into the realm. In essence, go to market. Hey, welcome to the message Market Bit. Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Silvestri, and if you're new here, this is a show where I chat with B2B SaaS folks in marketing, product, growth, and founders about how they join the conversation already happening in their customers minds.
We dive deep into their thinking, their systems, and their playbooks to see how they empathize with their audience and speak to them in a way that resonates. So they're compelled to take action. Join us and learn how you too can shape your messaging strategy and write copy that truly resonates and differentiates you.
I'm super excited about my guest today, Kasia Bergilowski Foster. Kasia is an accomplished product marketing manager at Capsule, a CRM platform. In this episode, we chat about Kasia's journey from running a music blog to mastering the art of product marketing. We dive into the nuances of aligning content with customer interest, the transition from content creation to strategic marketing roles, and the challenges of synchronizing messaging across different departments.
Kasia also shares invaluable advice for those looking to make the mark in SaaS product marketing. Let's dive right in. Thank you so much for being here, Kasia, and welcome to the podcast. How are you? Great. Thank you. How are you? I'm good. Good. Thank you. So we are talking about your job as a product marketing manager at Capsule, but it's not so long ago that you joined Capsule, right?
So I know that you've been Content executive, digital marketing lead, and then product marketing manager. So can you tell me a bit about your background and how you got into B2B SaaS? Yeah, of course. So I always kind of say that. My whole career, I was kind of doing product marketing and disband. When I graduated just over 10 years ago now from university, I, whilst I was at university, the thing that got me into marketing as a career was I run a music blog whilst I was at uni, and I actually know, I actually think I know the name.
Is it, was it called In Love Not Limbo? Yeah, it's a cheesy name, but I actually like it. That was a great exposure for me at the time. You know, what it was like to basically getting introduced to concepts like PR, SEO, um, even influencer marketing before influencer marketing was even ever a thing. It got to the point of where I was about to graduate, I was getting, you know, a few thousand hits to this website a week.
I was getting potential sponsorship opportunities, opportunities to attend festivals and gigs for free. So that was going really well. And then that fortunately sort of coincided with a roundabout the same time that content marketing was really coming into the floor hubspot was really pushing it as a concept and especially in b2b corporate marketing teams were starting to Pick on pick up on that idea and be like, hey We need a bit we need to be doing a bit of this ourselves as well.
So with that experience that I gained just from doing that music blog at university It kind of gave me a natural segue into content marketing, I was kind of like, Hey, people will pay me to do exactly what I was doing in my spare time, exactly the subject matterism. The music that I like, it's somebody else's tech or somebody else's product, whatever it may be.
So that kind of started my journey into marketing, per se. The reason I got into SaaS, I think, I think when, when you're young and you're kind of assessing what direction do you want your career to go in, I think, uh, A lot of people, particularly me and my friends and the people I know around us, were quite methodical in how we picked out the industries that we wanted to go into.
And for me, it was quite simple. I just I just thought that Sass was a thing that was really taking off at the time. I kind of felt like instead of going into a manufacturing company or something along those lines or a B2C company even, I kind of felt that that was a direction that made sense for me because I have like.
A bit of like, like a techie geeky side to me, but also I have the creative, the marketing side to me. And I just felt like that's probably the route I can go down to marry those things together. So yeah, started 10 years ago and I've not looked back since. Yeah, I find it super fascinating out of all the people that do great at this job have both of those like geeky side and a more creative one, more analytical one and creative one.
So that's super interesting. I'm curious when it came to like writing for your blog back then, how do you, how do you think that shaped and influenced the way that you try to understand people? And customers now when you do marketing for b2b it's a great question i feel like i learned a lot at that time when you have an online presence the one thing that you're so focused on.
Is getting the audience to come back, keeping them engaged, making them want more. And to do that, I learned at an early point, you kind of have to understand what your audience wants from me. You have to understand, okay, I want these people to come back, so how am I gonna offer them what they want? A and B, make it a good experience for them.
That's when you, you start to kind of. Really look into, like, how the users behave, like, when they're coming on my blog. You start to even have conversations with, with some people that, that read your blog on a normal basis. Of, you know, I used to get people on Twitter and, and Facebook and things like that.
Said the new comments like oh, I I really like your blog because it's not trying to be anything too fancy It's it's literally just the feeders. Here's some great music that you might like and that's it So I i'd say like it's a small simple thing, but having Matt audience focused approach and that what in B2B is custom centric approach is kind of what I was exposed to at that initial stage.
It's like, at the end of the day, I wouldn't be having all of these hits if I wasn't catering to what they wanted to read, how they wanted to read about it, and yeah. Yeah, it's kind of a Social listening in a way like being aware of what everyone's talking about and kind of shaping your message according exactly yeah yeah awesome yeah i wish i wish i would have known about this i probably would have pitched you an article i used to have a band like now since i moved to the UK it's like five six years ago but yeah that would have been great but.
I've missed the opportunity. I'm curious when it comes to your career. So from content executive to digital marketing leads product marketing, how do you see these three different roles? And yeah, how, how have you evolved throughout these different roles in general? Yeah, that's a good question. I think the way that I, I've been lucky enough to work in startups and scale ups my whole career, which gave me the advantage of being able to shape those roles in the way that I wanted.
And the one key thing that links them all together was coming back to essentially product marketing. So that's, although I didn't know it at the time, those were the elements that I was carrying through every single role. Except when I was in the content team in content marketing, um, my focus was obviously originally when you're a young content executive, pumping out as much content as possible and writing blogs on the regular, shipping off like two or three a week or however many is demanded of you.
But as you become more confident in, in your role, and as you start to think beyond your day to day, you start to think like, Okay, I'm writing these blogs, but are these blogs actually going to resonate? Are they going to lead to anything for the business? Are they actually what people want to, want to know about?
It's what I'm talking about even resonating with, with my audience. And that's when you start to get into the whole realm of, I need to understand more about Who our personas are. I need to understand more about what the value is of our product. And I need to be able to turn that into a narrative that sells our product without selling it.
And that's when you start getting into the realms of that, in essence, go to market. So how can I actually make the content that I'm creating not only serve my company to help them generate more leads, generate traffic to the website, which hopefully in turn generates more revenue, but also how can I Essentially answer the public or answer my customer get into what my customer wants to know about What they want to be talking about what they want to hear about what they need advice about And I feel as soon as you switched that customer mindset That's when I felt like I'd started to really not excel because I don't want to big myself up But that's when I started like, okay, I really start to get this content marketing thing and how it fits into The, the business strategy, the wider marketing strategy, how it contributes to the funnel long term.
Yeah. Uh, I understand how, how this role of content marketing, um, fits and what purpose I'm serving, essentially. Mm-Hmm. Um, and then I ended up, um, going into digital marketing by accident really. It was, I was, I was doing a concept role at a FinTech company. The pandemic had just hit, therefore, there were a lot of layoffs, of the company.
And we went from a team of about, I think about eight, 10 people to just me, . Wow. So, um, yeah, I, I, I, not for long, it was only a couple of months, but there was a period in time where. I essentially had to wear many hats. Yeah, thrown in the water with the sharks. Exactly. Um, but I officially got moved into a digital marketing role.
And the only reason that that really happened. Was, again, to do with that whole, you know, analytical slash, I guess, creative side of my brain coming out that I've been able to, I guess, prove on projects previously, I guess, the people that were in charge at that point kind of felt like we can trust you to do this digital market and stuff because you know what it sounds like, you know what you're talking about to some extent, um, So I transitioned into digital marketing, um, and did that for a couple of years.
And for me, the way I interpreted that role was all around, okay, I've got this budget, so I'd spend to manage, I've got this website that I need to manage. The two things, what's the linking those together? It's, it's your messaging, it's your value proposition, it's, it's your go to market, basically. If we're putting out adverts and website pages with messaging that doesn't resonate in the slightest, then I'm not going to be able to improve my, my pipeline contribution number that, that we had over our heads essentially in the marketing team at that time.
And that was one thing that I've found super interesting in the transition from content marketing to digital marketing. I think it's something that really helped me now as A PMM, is that transition from top of funnel to that demand gen piece where you are, you essentially have that, those conversations with, with leadership teams and the business of where are the lead, what are we doing this week to today, to drive more demand, get more inbound.
And that's when you really start to kind of, I guess, hone in on, okay, I know what the product is that we're selling. I know roughly, like, uh, what types of customers we're doing business with. But I really want to nail down now, what is it that's making people buy? Why are people buying the product that we're offering?
Because I need to guarantee. That that's coming across properly in the digital channel. Yeah, I'm male managing. And I'd say that was, that was the kind of common thread that carried through from content marketing into that. But it was like that next level down of, okay, I really need to understand now what makes buyers tick, like what makes them buy?
And at what point are they ready to buy? Yeah. Yeah. Because you've got unique perspective and role where you see. Both ends and you try to put everything together, right? And yeah, exactly. And I think there's one thing that a lot of companies don't really value that alignment between there's the typically there's the three areas like they see content, there's product, I mean, marketing product and then sales and they're typically just siloed and very misaligned.
What do you think are the biggest barriers or challenges for companies? That try to align these three areas on messaging and why they find it so hard i think that's a really good question i think from personal experience i would say one thing is process now i've never been a process driven person. I I'm, I'm in fact the opposite of process driven.
I'm naturally quite a chaotic person, but from it, from experience and learning from marketing lead CMOs that I've worked for, I think a massive impact is had on basically the processes that are enforced in that market and seeing the level of collaboration that's sort of embedded in the structures that they bring about.
I think that's super important. So I'd say that's, that's one thing. I'd say the other, the other things as well are, I think from my perspective, I feel like priorities can differ a lot between roles, so especially when you're an organization who focuses heavily on things like KPIs and Um, and things like that.
I think when those don't align, when you've got a content team who's just focused on pumping out content pieces that they're not really too bothered about how relevant they are to the audience, they just want to get those numbers up and versus a Um A digital team that's more focused on reducing the cost of acquisition, et cetera, then you've kind of got this PMM person in the middle that kind of like pull these, these different teams together that are just their KPIs don't match up.
So it can be hard to kind of prioritize, I guess, um, when, when you're just not on the same page about what's important, um, because I think when you're at that. That sort of level within the marketing team, I think you're often focused on what you need to get done the day to day, but sometimes you need to look at it through the objective of, okay, but what, what, what are the general business goals?
And some leaders are really open to sharing the pressures from the broad, the pressures from. The, the, the, the leadership group with the marketing team and making sure those objectives are embedded within KPIs. Whereas I think other marketing leaders, maybe not so much, are a bit more withdrawn, keep that to themselves a bit more.
And I think that's at the point where you have that misalignment, those. Objectives and priorities and what's important and I think the third point as well is just I feel like the pmm's main job is to communicate and Be that driver of collaboration Basically, and I feel like from my experience you can't rely on anyone else to do that You have you have to be the person as a pmm to bring everyone together so if you've got a kind of a vision for I don't know product release or You want to, you need to change up the personas or whatever it may be, you have to bring everyone on that journey with you.
Otherwise you're always going to end up in those silos because people, like I said, have got their own priorities. And they're kind of just doing what they need to do. So it's the job of the PMM to bring everyone else along with you. Yeah, and to make them understand how messaging impacts their customers, but also user experience, conversion, optimization, all that stuff, the big picture, right?
Exactly. I find that you're always having to almost play the role of a sales person. And almost like every single project, every single initiative you try and introduce, it's likely that it's something that no one has ever done. Did that then before, but you always have to be pitching and kind of batting off objections and things like that.
Where do you think your team members are on the awareness spectrum? Are they unaware, problem aware, solution aware?
I'm going to keep that on quiet now. I'm joking. Fortunately enough at Capture I've moved to a company where I think. Everyone is kind of super aligned and I'm lucky enough to have a lot of people on the team who've been in my shoes doing product marketing roles in some capacity, whether it's leading previously on on positioning projects or doing project launches, they appreciate.
That's sort of what a PMM has to do and they have that sort of awareness of, you know, how, how things, how things sit and we do, it's, I do want to bring in a big change and they're quite open to it because yeah, I'm quite fortunate in that way. All right. Speaking of capsule, how long has it been since you're there?
Two months, one or two months? Yeah, so I've only been here two months, yeah, two months, so far. Yeah, I was interested in asking, like, whenever you have one of these changes, especially such an important role, how do you adapt? How do you get up to speed? What are the first couple of things that you try to understand when you get into the role in the company?
It's a good question. So for me, I think, obviously, understanding the way the teams around you are working. It's super important. So how do does the commercial function interact with the technical function of the business, the development team, product team? How good is the communication already there? How do they work in their own silos?
So how do the development team approach things? How do the product team approach their own projects? And we're saying with the marketing team, I would say the other team. Yeah. Major thing as well is obviously trying to build up the idea of who are we as a company? What do we do and where do we fit in the market?
And I think the easiest way to do that to start is obviously speaking to people internally, you know, people in customer success. They all support a product. They all have their own ideas and opinions and super valid ones because A. They've either worked in the company for a really long time or B. They have that.
That day to day customer relationships, they speak to customers every single day. But I'd say the third one is, you have to, I think, try and get in on as many, you kind of have to hear that for yourself, that voice of the customer as much as you can. Whether it's sitting in on demo calls, interviewing customers yourself, which is usually the hardest thing to organize, but it's definitely worth it.
Listening to sales calls, reading support queries that come through, anything that you can piece together that's giving you as much information as you can get about the customer, what are their common, what common things do they enjoy about the product. Things commonly annoy them, what problems are they looking to solve by implementing the product in the first place.
So yeah, that's always my go to. Yeah, so interesting. Why would you say customer interviews are difficult to organize and plan? That's just, uh, just the past experience. They're probably just from past experience. Sometimes it's, it's, it's because I, I think when you frame it. Wrong, which I've definitely been guilty of in the past.
People can ignore you if you ask to, you ask to do an interview with someone. A lot of the time people like get nervous. They think you wanted to do like a customer testimonial or something with them. Yeah. But I've found more recently in the last couple of years. If you just, people are really open to, if you ask someone for help, it's likely that they give it.
So if you approach those conversations more along the lines of, Hey, like, I'm just trying to understand this, I think you'd be a really good person to help me do that, basically. I found that they're a lot more receptive when, whereas when I first started out, it was a lot more like, I'm too busy to do this because I was just approaching it the wrong way, asking for the wrong thing, basically.
I'd say on on the other end of it as well. Sometimes I think like Internal politics can contribute as well. I've been at places where, you know, like a customer success teams and managers and sales managers, not sales managers, but sales people. They can, you know, sometimes get a bit, a bit funny if you try and like.
They'll be like, no, you need to go, you need to go through me and then I'll do it, but it's going to take me six weeks to do it. So, yeah, I'd, I'd say sometimes in some places that can be, that can be a little bit of a sticking point as well. Not everywhere, like I've not experienced that capsule at all, but definitely in previous places.
Yeah what i find is that there's like the main barrier sometimes are getting that buy in especially like for any type of research sometimes you have to get the budget approved. But also especially for b2b b2c maybe a bit less just because you can offer incentives to people but. For b2b when you're working and you have to interview your customers and they are i don't know sales people cfo's business people it's kinda hard right to get them on interviews so what are some things that you, do you do to get them on these interviews what maybe offer incentives or i don't know how for discounts what do you do i think like using the people around you, it's it's often really really exciting people may, Be unwilling to do something for me because they don't own me but It's it's if you have a good relationship with someone else in the company or we have a mutual connection You know with someone then sometimes it's good ideas just to ask the middle person to help you out, get someone else involved.
I feel like that, that's often like a good way of approaching things. Towards the end of last year, I was looking at some work around personas and ICP at my last company. And it just turned out that the, uh, the commercial services director at my company had a lot of friends who were in fact, you know, ideal personas and they weren't customers of the products, but instead of like, Hey, like, would you mind asking your neighbor or your, your mate from school if they'd happened to.
Have like a 30 minute chat with us, and you know, admittedly that, that is luck a lot of the times, but I feel like if you do have that luck of someone who can introduce you to someone, then I think you should 100 percent capitalize on that. I think as well, in terms of sort of other Other ways, I think, obviously, incentives can be good, but I feel like, I think the incentive thing kind of depends who it is that your target audience is, because I've worked in companies in the past where your target audience is finance people, a CFO, so Any sort of incentives that you start to talk about, if it's like, you know, these, these ones that people love doing these days, where it's like, have a coffee on me or here's a Amazon voucher, that's like shut down.
No, straight away, but they're a lot more open to incentives that are maybe contractual in the contractual front. So, Hey, if you are open to meeting with our marketing team, then we'll give you a. A reduced rate for the first quarter of bit year or whatever it may be. You can have a little discount then.
So that works quite well too. Yeah. Awesome. All right, so speaking capsule again, so this is a question that I typically ask clients just to understand as to gauge their level of understanding of their personas. And like in your own words, who would you say capsule helps and how? This is a good question because this is actually something that we're having conversations with at the moment.
One of the, one of the things that I wanted to do when I came into capsule was revalidate. Our ICP concern is who they are and. What I'm positioning is basically, because the reason for that is they were kind of saying, Hey, we want to revisit our, our, our messaging at some point this year, relatively soon.
And in my mind, I'm kind of looking at that thinking before we revisit this, we need to revisit this and this. We need to revisit. We need to revisit. Are we actually speaking to the right people? Are we kind of tuning into. The problems that we want to solve so i haven't got that far yet on the trajectory to do so awesome why why did you decide to revalidate these personas what what told you what made you think that you needed to do it i just feel like if you are the sole.
P. M. M. coming into any new role where they. Not really had someone dedicated in that function before then it's always a good idea to sort of fact check Yeah, what's been done in the past because it's very likely been done in a different style for best practice, not always, but most of the time. So yeah, I think that was just me coming into a new role and kind of just being like, instead of just going along with this and going into a messaging project with no idea if any work that's been done before is right, I'm going to stick my hand up and just be like, Hey, are we sure this is all correct?
Yeah, laying the groundwork. I think for me, I feel like messaging becomes a hell of a lot more simple when you spend that time, particularly on your position. And I feel like the value is kind of, you know, it's, it's what it is, but I feel like it's okay. Strategically, how are we going to position ourselves?
That's. What's going to elevate your value prop. That's therefore what's going to elevate your, your messaging and how you, you come across to your audience. So I always feel like if you're going to focus on anything, you need to spend the most time focusing on that. The rest will come. and it's just about testing, optimizing, learning what works well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially because I see capsule as a CRM and serves quite a lot of industries, right? There's professional services, travel and tourism, hotels, accountants, it, legal and way and others. So, yeah. How do you think about like hitting all the pain points for all these different industries and personas?
What's your plan? How are you gonna research and try to understand all of these people it's a good question i my new is that you can kind of approach your messaging from. Like, almost a building block perspective. You can talk to all of these different audiences, but does that necessarily mean that you should?
Is there a clear, compelling narrative for every single one of those? But I feel like a lot of companies will make these plays, uh, you know, to have an impact on ethno and search volume and If we put out 20 different pages, it's going to increase our domain presence. But I feel like it's super important to kind of start from the data that you have about your own customers.
And kind of reverse, not reverse engineer, but yeah, I guess reverse engineer from that really. What is our actual customer data? They can tell us and then we're going to use that to pick out. Okay. What are the segments or the target audiences key industries? Whatever it may be that we're going to go after And then build out from there.
So I think it all comes back to your data, whether that's the day you have a new CRN or your, your power BI, whatever it may be, your data that you have in your product tools, like Panday or app keys or whatever it may be. I feel like that's where it all starts from. That's where you pick out your buckets of customers that you should be building out a specific value perhaps for.
I think of this in terms rather than thinking, as you've said. All the different industries and different roles the fundamentals are always in the jobs to be done so what are the jobs that. The product helps these people progress with and then after you have that map, then you can basically map them out on all the different industries personas.
Are you first need the foundation you mentioned testing how do you usually go about testing copy messaging what do you do about that that's an interesting one so i feel like in terms of messaging that the main thing there are tools that you can use obviously installed by winter that are available.
Drms and marketing automation tools have these cool smart content features that you can play around with now So you can essentially say i'm gonna serve this headline on my home page To this segment my target audience base and things like that often Um, well not often, but sometimes you don't have that level of technology available to you and you have to kind of say I'd say kind of, take a bit of a, a bit of a, a more, I'm trying to think of the right word, um, a bit of a softer approach, like a bit less of a data driven approach, is what I'm trying to say.
And I feel like, a great way to do that is always By the speakers in the customer. This might either be through like interviews. You might just be like, hey, like, could you do me a favor? We're working on this at the moment. You're kind of like the ideal profile of person that we're trying to talk to with this page.
Let us know what you think and simply just. Um, for your customer's feedback, like I said, it may be through interviews, it may be through email, it may be in app even, whatever it may be, but I feel like that's probably like the most obvious place to start, and like I said, like, if you are lucky enough to have that Text stack in place where you can start experimenting around with things like smart content, different landing pages, etc.
That's the way to go as well. I'm curious, have you ever tried using sales to test messaging? Like using sales pitch? If you ever do, like, maybe demo driven sales calls? Yeah, but it's not easy, at least in my experience, anyways, it's not easy, and I feel salespeople are often, not all the time, but often reluctant to change.
I can say that because I live with a salesperson, and, but I, yeah. Whenever, um, we've kind of gone to, um, sales team in the past with new pitch deck, like, you know, we've got this amazing strategic narrative that we're going to want to try out. It's going to change the way that we, that we, Pitch our product is going to change the messaging on our website, etc They're just they are the least receptive out of everybody and I don't blame them because They're you know, they they speak to customers every day.
They have a a pretty good idea in their mind of The flow what it is to say, yeah They don't need someone from marketing coming into saying don't look you you don't you've been doing this wrong the whole time This is this is what you should be saying and so I I kind of feel like I've had the most success with sales teams in terms of launching new messaging with them when it's a bit more proven out, when we can prove, hey, we're having some success through marketing with this, we're generating leads, we're getting traffic coming through because people are resonating with what we're saying.
We've tested this with customers. I feel like it's always a great place to start with customers and people that know your brand really well and sort of go through any messaging changes, sort of from that customer market and new business sales, I feel like they are going to be more receptive if they can see that the proof is in the pudding.
If that makes sense, if they see it's working, then they're open to. Yeah, also that you have some skin in the game. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. They want to be able to say, Oh, X, Y, Z in account management or Christmas success is just close to 50, 000 grand deal. Yeah, because they've because I changed the way that big picture product and they've been able to sell.
More services because they've put this across and it's great, but yeah, I feel that you have to be able to prove it to them to be able to do it successfully. Otherwise, everyone's going to be a bit suspicious and they end up dropping it for what they know already. Yeah, it's a lot of work. Nobody wants to disrupt other roles.
Awesome. Last couple of questions. Do you have any advice for other B2B SaaS people or product marketing or people getting into product marketing specifically, what would you? My biggest piece of advice, I think, is never settle for doing things by consensus. I feel like when you're in a TMN role, and you're looking at all of these things that essentially have a view of changing the way that the business is perceived, It changes almost the commercial strategy, in some sense, the work that you're doing as a PMN.
And a lot of people are going to have opinions about that, and I think, absolutely, you have to listen to those people's opinions, because they're coming from a place of experience, often, and they're coming from a good place, but I don't think that's the only thing that you can listen to. You have to be able to, again, validate, back up research through other means, to check, you know.
Is what they're saying to me. Does that make sense? Is that what the customer thinks? Is that what our data is saying? So yeah, I think that's a mistake that I made quite early on in my career is just, you know, having a sit down with the CEO or the sales director and whoever it may be, and just letting them tell me like, okay, what's going on here?
What do we need to do? Who's our persona? What should our messaging be? Yeah, I've kind of feel like you have to take those opinions on board, but must be also coming from other sources, validated elsewhere, use everything you've got around you rather than just the internal opinions of people. What's your strategy for learning?
Where do you go to learn about your work? A lot of places I'm trying to find it hard to whittle, whittle down. I would say, I think, so, Product Marketing Alliance. It's kind of often my go to, just because that's where I got my PMM certified training done through them. They have loads of great resources for PMMs that you can just access online.
Got introduced to a great coach through that course as well. And yeah, I find them to be a super useful channel. Where else? I would say the few interlinks that I follow. On LinkedIn, a lot of people who kind of are in that PMM space and one of them is, all their names escape me now. No worries. And, but yeah, product marketing influencers, there are plenty of them out there.
On LinkedIn. On LinkedIn, just have a little look and you'll find them. But yeah, loads of voices on LinkedIn, they've got great advice. Do you typically use Slack communities as well? Yeah, so I am in a few Slack communities. I am in the PMN Slack community, which is the Product Marketing Alliance one. I'm also in the Pendo community, which is really interesting one because it has a mix of PMNs and product managers.
Obviously a lot of this subject matter is very Pendo related, but it's really interesting to be in most communities where you have. Those two groups of people who are similar but different coming together. Yeah. The dynamics. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. That's been really good. I have just one last question, which is, do you ever plan on going back to writing your music blog?
I have thought about it. Yeah. I've definitely thought about it. It'd be, I feel like it'd be a nice hobby. I feel like I need to pick a hobby back up again. I feel like as I've got older, the hobbies have tailed off a little bit. So it might be something nice to pick back up in the future. A nice side hustle.
I feel like I might have to get better at creating video content to succeed in the blog world these days. I don't think the whole blog spot route that I did in 2012 would quite fly anymore. Yeah, you need to update. Yeah. Awesome. very much, Kasia. This has been really good. Where can people find you? People can find me on LinkedIn.
My LinkedIn is Kasia Foster. I'm happy to connect with anyone. Once the chat product marketing in general, yeah, looking to grow my network out there PMM. So it'd be great. It's okay. Awesome. Yeah, I will link to all the resources in the description and thank you and have a great day. Amazing. Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening to the pod. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you did, the best thing you could do to support the show and help me as a small business owner would be to leave a review. Head over to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and let me know what you think. If you don't want to miss future episodes, subscribe and if you have any feedback, questions or suggestions for future episodes, just hit me up on LinkedIn at Christopher Silvestri or Twitter at Silvestri Crisp.
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