Full Transcript
Lightly edited for filler words, false starts, and crosstalk. Speaker language and phrasing preserved.
Intro
Dmitry: Welcome to What's Your Process? Today we're joined by Meghan Keaney Anderson, marketing leader at Watershed, and one of the greatest bosses a human being can ever be lucky enough to have. Meghan, it's good to see you.
Meghan: It's good to see you too. As the employee, I benefited greatly, I learned a ton from you, and I've been looking forward to this for a long time.
Dmitry: So Meghan, what do people need to know about you?
Meghan: I run product marketing and content strategy for a sustainability company called Watershed. We help the world's biggest, most impactful companies (think Walmart, Airbnb, FedEx) track their emissions and decarbonize, through the technology platform we put out there.
I love this dichotomy of owning both product marketing and editorial/content strategy. Those sit at two different ends of the storytelling spectrum, but when you do them together, they connect in a really elegant way. I've architected my career to keep getting into these positions where I own both. I did it at HubSpot when we worked together, I do it today at Watershed, and I advocated for it when I got into the role. Having the ability to zoom out to the brand level and zoom back into the product level makes for better story and better communication.
I think what I've come to learn about myself as a marketer is that I love marketing in times of change. I love the story of progression that comes out of a time of change: how hungry everyone is for information, how they'll stop what they're doing to attend a webinar because they feel over their skis. Sustainability is definitely in one of those moments right now, and I've hit that inflection point at almost every job I've had.
Dmitry: I think brand storytelling and product marketing sitting on opposite sides of a company with no alignment is a dangerous place to be.
Meghan: Yeah. Brand storytelling elevates product marketing out of just being about a piece of technology, and product marketing grounds brand storytelling into something tangible and real. They're codependent. The best product marketing and the best brand storytelling happen when those two things meet. When they're humming side by side, you see it click for people: it feels tangible, but it also makes them feel like they're part of something bigger.
What is one thing you're world class at?
Dmitry: Meghan, here's the big question. What is one thing you're world class at?
Meghan: I've spent most of my career in product marketing, content, and brand strategy, so that's where I'd say I spike. I think the thing I'm world class at, with some humility, is finding angles in seemingly flat things. This week we released calculation customization in our platform, a very technical, very flat-sounding thing. How do you find a way of looking at that that reveals it's more than just that?
You ask the right questions: the thing your seven-year-old does when he just keeps asking "but why, but why, but why." What's different because of this? What could you do that you couldn't do before? I'm like a dog on a bone with it when I talk to product leaders about why they're building what they're building. Sometimes they don't know. Sometimes they built it because it showed up on a customer request board and they're just responding to the need, without asking enough of those whys to get to the real reason.
It's the difference between "now you can customize your calculations" and "now you can build a measurement that actually reflects the way you work as a business. Instead of basing your report on some proxy, you're basing it in the reality of your business, which means you can make decisions that actually reflect it."
We're blessed to work in a time where sales calls and customer calls are recorded and AI tools can synthesize everything, but you can also go back to the original call and listen to the sound of someone's voice when they're talking about that frustration. What's the thing that's guttural: "I'm petrified I'm going to get asked how I calculated that number and I'll have no answer." That's the same fear you had getting called on in class. You have to find the shortest route to that universal feeling: stress, fear, or on the positive side, "I want to do my best work." Then tie every release back to it, even the tiniest improvement.
Get to know your product lead
Dmitry: So before finding the angle, before identifying the story, you've got to do your homework. If your team were launching a new feature next year, how would you get people thinking about it?
Meghan: Right now we're in this hyper-ship mode where every few months there's another announcement, and I'm already gearing up for the next one. Where I'm at right now is I just sat down with the product lead on what's being launched and had an hour-long conversation. Then you start thinking about the rollout. When I come back to it, I shift into operational mode: a weekly meeting leading up to the launch about everything that has to be built to bring the story to life. We do a lot of definition work around the audience: who's the actual list of people we're going after, what do we know about them. We do a lot of work on how to bring the positioning to life creatively with our creative leads, and then the mechanics of what pipeline generation looks like all the way up to launch.
Every launch follows a similar framework in how you approach it, but every single one is different, and you fail, and succeed, in a different way every time. So many of the parameters are distinct: who you're going after, who the product leads are, what's happening in the wider space. That dynamism means you never get comfortable.
Dmitry: So the target audience itself can actually change launch to launch?
Meghan: It'll change in tangible ways: we were going after sustainability managers on one launch, now we're going after the head of finance because it's a compliance tool. Those are the obvious shifts you're ready for. But the stuff you're not ready for is subtler: a new factor on that audience's mind this month versus last month, a regulation rolling back, pressure from a different part of their customer base. If you do customer research back in the summer for a product launching today and just leave that as a closed chapter, you'll miss what's changed about what matters to them.
It also changes which channels and language you use. One of the cool things we did at HubSpot was realize, after about four years, that we had this incredible ecosystem of agency partners reselling HubSpot to their clients, and we should be launching to them first so they're ready to launch with us. That's an entire channel that opens up if you have a product especially useful to a partner group, and it comes from listening to them. You see it now more broadly with B2B influencer marketing and advocates: figuring out who your amplifiers are and building that up is smart, especially as search and ads get harder. I think Zapier does a really good job of this.
Shift into tactics
Dmitry: When it's time to get everyone on the same page, that feels like strategy mode. When do you move into tactics?
Meghan: That's the part where you widen the tent. It would be stupid for me as a product marketer to hand someone their demand gen strategy or tell a creative lead exactly how to bring something to life. You'd have killed me for that back in the day. You want to get all the details into a document so everyone has the same information, but the reason you go back to those universal emotions, the human problem you're solving, is for translation. You give that to each function as a problem statement: "here's the story, here's the human problem, go figure out the channels, come back and tell me what parts of my positioning won't work," or "here's a pretty flat architecture, what pieces are you most interested in playing with creatively?"
That's the shift into tactics: one more strategy beat of hearing everyone's individual approach, then integrating those into one plan. Once we've got the plan, we work backward, "walk it back" from the moment you want to hit, whether that's a conference stage or an event, and figure out what has to happen when. The founder likes the phrase "long pole," the thing that takes longest. For us that's often customer stories, because our customers are big companies whose legal and comms teams take six weeks to clear anything. So we lock that in first, even before we know exactly how we'll use it. People are pretty good at building tactics on a bit of imagination and a gap in information.
Can you lock it?
Dmitry: Is there a point where it's locked, no more feedback, no more shifting, or do you just let it ride?
Meghan: I think you have to let it ride, but the strongest boat to ride through choppy water is a shared understanding of why the thing matters. A perfect example: we had a product at HubSpot where we changed the name a week before launch. It went from Service Hub to Customer Hub. There was a lot of internal debate, and we already had art done, ads done, SEO plans done. That's a disruptive change that late, but we made the pivot because the story hadn't changed. It was a key element of the story, but still just an element.
The most damaging changes are the ones where the company doesn't agree on the underlying problem you're trying to solve, where suddenly people are telling different stories and are unclear on the audience. Things happen: a partner falls out, a competitor launches something with the same name the day before you go live, and you can't be precious about that. You have to be ready to roll with it. But changes that create confusion about the purpose of the thing at all are the ones that actually hurt you.
Dmitry: We were in an advantageous position there because everything was systematized: updating logos and word marks wasn't a huge deal.
Meghan: That's a credit to you guys. Plenty of companies build everything from scratch each time with no design system in place, and those kinds of changes are genuinely disruptive for them.
When to push a launch
Dmitry: In a world where it's not the name but the actual functionality that's changing, is there a world where you'd push the launch?
Meghan: I think there's a world where pushing is the right call, but those decisions are really about the functionality of the product. Maybe you were relying on a data provider for a launch and that provider went away, and you physically don't have a product to give people. That's a good reason to push, so you're not out there spouting falsehoods. There are also strategic reasons: if pushing by a month gets you a feature you couldn't have otherwise incorporated, or lets you hit a launch stage you'd otherwise miss, that's worth it. You never want to push a launch because you simply aren't ready. Plenty of companies launch things that aren't fully ready and call it a beta or a preview, and that's fine, especially with longer sales cycles. But if the functionality changes enough that you have to revisit the positioning, that's exactly why you'd need to push. The two are linked.
The launch plan
Dmitry: Assuming everything's on schedule and everyone's aligned, how do you think about the actual launch plan? Dropping everything at once, or something else?
Meghan: Launch plans always go back to the goals of the launch and who the audience is, usually multiple audiences, each with its own set of tactics. Do you want an MQL target, adoption in the customer base, expansion inquiries, or awareness? What you need for the launch defines the tactics and where you put emphasis. Sometimes media attention matters less than customer adoption; sometimes you need a major story in a region where you're unknown.
The biggest mistake, one I've made myself, is over-romanticizing the launch moment: picking one day, making the biggest noise possible, and failing to plan for Wednesday, the day after. I think about a launch as a 90-day plan: launch plus 90. By the 90-day mark, the product should be self-sufficient, generating its own interest, and folded back into the regular demand strategy. If it still needs special attention after that, something was misjudged, either the market interest or how compelling the product actually is. You still need marketing moments spread across those 90 days, not just on day one.
After launch, you're listening: to sales calls to see how the messaging is landing, to customer calls to see if people are using the product the way you expected. We had a big launch in September we're still learning from. Customers are using it in a way we didn't fully anticipate, which changes how we think about where the product goes next. You get a lot of feedback on price point too, because you can never fully predict it no matter how much data you use going in. There's the micro work of small iterations based on what's resonating, and there's the bigger question of what the launch is telling you about where the story needs to go next: how a product that was about "acceleration" in September becomes a different chapter of that story by December or January.
What's next?
Dmitry: Meghan, where can we see your process next?
Meghan: Watershed is doing pretty big launches a few times a year, so I'll be on that cycle for a while. I think the interesting thing for Watershed right now is that corporate sustainability has gone through phases: first it was good PR, then people saw the greenwashing and PR lost its appeal, then it became compliance-driven. Where we're headed, and where I'm focused for product marketing, is that neither PR nor compliance are good enough motivators long-term. For corporate sustainability to stick around and matter, it has to be good for business, not just a good thing to do.
The exciting part is that sustainability is actually about efficiency and running your business better: clean power is already cheaper than fossil fuels because it's a technology, not a resource. You can make changes that increase resiliency, cut costs, and help the planet at the same time. That's the space I want to play in: sustainability that drives the business forward, not sustainability because it feels good or because someone told you to.
Dmitry: That might be the most badass answer to that question I've heard yet. Thank you so much for this, Meghan.
Meghan: It was a delight, and you got a good review.
Product Stories That Feel Personal with Meghan Keaney Anderson
