Unlocking the Secrets of Product Marketing: A Conversation with Arun Lal
Arun Lal, VP of Product Marketing at Rippling, brings over 20 years of experience in product marketing, product management, and entrepreneurship to the table. With a background that includes leadership roles at VMware and Microsoft, as well as co-founding Contiq, Arun shares his insights on creating messaging for complex products and driving customer adoption.
From Product Management to Product Marketing
Arun’s journey began as a product manager at Microsoft, where he discovered his passion for building innovative products. However, he soon realized the importance of understanding how to take a product to market and generate revenue. This led him to transition into product marketing, where he could collaborate with various functions to drive business growth.
Rippling: A Compound Startup
Rippling, a late-stage startup, builds HR, finance, and IT software for small and mid-market companies. What sets Rippling apart is its Employee Graph, a comprehensive organizational framework that aggregates employee data from multiple silos and apps. This foundation enables the creation of common patterns for workflow automation, permissioning, policies, reporting, and analytics.
Surprised by the Pace of Execution
Arun was impressed by Rippling’s rapid pace of execution, launching one or two complex products each quarter. His current project involves developing a messaging and positioning framework for Rippling, which requires influencing multiple personas, including heads of HR, IT, and finance.
Crafting Umbrella Messaging
Arun’s approach to messaging involves creating cross-cutting umbrella messages that appeal to various segments and product lines. He likens this to being a politician, needing to craft messages that resonate with different buyer personas while maintaining consistency.
Driving Customer Adoption
To improve product adoption, Arun emphasizes the importance of understanding happy customers and their value drivers. He uses case studies to illustrate how companies are using specific features to generate value and create amazing outcomes. This approach has led to significant uplift in both adoption and sales.
Measuring Product Marketing Impact
Arun stresses the importance of establishing leading and lagging indicators to measure product marketing impact. He shares an example from his previous role at Productiv, where they created an adoption metric based on messaging and tracked deal progression to measure the impact of their pitch decks and marketing collateral.
Customer Feedback: The Key to Success
Arun believes that direct customer interviews are invaluable in gathering high-quality feedback. He recently hosted a roundtable in New York, where he was able to gather insights from 10 customers and identify patterns and themes. By segmenting feedback by persona and customer segment, Arun can contextualize the data and make informed decisions.
The Appeal of Startups
Arun is drawn to startups because of their fast pace, opportunities for impact, and fewer stakeholders. He enjoys feeling like an owner in the business and taking personal pride in making the product successful. The quick feedback cycle at startups is energizing, allowing him to see the impact of his work rapidly.