When marketing and product don’t talk, your customers suffer.  

When Google first launched Google Glass.  

It was marketed as the next big thing.  A new personal device that will change the way you live your life.  However, the product was clunky, hard to use, and had limited functionality.  

How do you think it made users feel?  

Disappointed, of course.

And Google Glass is not alone.  The same can be said for New Coke, McDonald’s ArchDeluxe, Segway, and Microsoft Windows 8.  For each of these products, the marketing team set certain expectations.  But the product delivered a completely different experience.  

As a result, customers felt jaded.  Like a social contract had been broken.  The product tanked, and the brand took a hit.   

So how do you fix it?  To help us figure out how to make product and marketing work together, I interviewed Chris Williams.

Chris Williams, was most recently, General Manager and Chief Product Officer for iHeartMedia.  Where he was responsible for building digital products that complemented the radio listening experience.  

He is most passionate about bridging the divide between marketing and product, has a healthy disdain for the way things have “always been done”,  and is a big fan of combining data and technology to innovate.  He has over 20 years of experience in identifying and translating market opportunities into actionable product and marketing strategies.

What follows below is a condensed and lightly edited version of our interview.

Chris, thank you for being here.  I am looking forward to our talk.  Lots of people talk about product and engineering, but few talk about product and marketing.  Let’s start with your view on how product and marketing fit together.

Chris Williams:  Mustafa thanks for having me.  I am looking forward to this as well.  

Let’s start with the obligatory “controversial” hot take. For me, product IS marketing. I think the separation of the two teams is artificial and detrimental to your brand and the user experience.  

To define a product as something we ship and that marketing is about customer acquisition, just does not make sense to me. Your community/consumer doesn’t differentiate between the story your marketing is trying to tell and the continuation of that story across your product. It’s all one continuous narrative.  

When product and marketing teams are aligned, that story isn’t only told externally during acquisition, but continues and is reinforced on every surface. Everything is reinforcing your brand promises and expectations, that’s why product IS marketing. Your navigation, copy, your algorithms, etc… it is all part of communicating how you are delivering on promises and expectations.

I love that vision.  Because you are right, for the customer it is just one conversation, they don’t separate the two.  And if that is the case, why is it that in most companies it is treated as two separate entities?

CW:  Great question. Some of this we do to ourselves, we can create forced errors if you will.  But for me, the divide comes down to three things.

First, it can be as simple as history and semantics. Because both of these disciplines have a different history, with product being a newer discipline than marketing. The two teams have different vocabularies. And that causes confusion.

Second, is organization structure. A CEO or President needed a logical way to arrange an org chart and creating boxes for each function seems logical or symmetrical. So we ended up with two different silos arbitrarily.  

Third, is data. Both teams use data and many times it is different data sets. I’ve seen Product and UXD hyperfocused on qualitative, while marketing only considers quant data. Or if it is the same data set, then they cut it differently.  

What all of this means is that both teams look at the world quite differently.  

For example, the marketing team thinks they know the customer best because they are upfront in the customer journey.  The product team believes the same because they know how the customer is using their product.  

But in reality, they are both looking at the same customer through a different lens.  

So is that how the dysfunction between the two teams manifests itself?  When marketing and product don’t work as one?

CW:  Yes…from the customer perspective it shows up as a broken brand promise.

Let me use an analogy.  Let’s say you are planning a dinner party. You send out an invite, letting people know that you are going to have amazing hors d’oeuvres, live entertainment, and interesting people. That is basically traditional marketing, making the invite, and acquisition.

But when the guests get there, what they find is pizza, a clown show, and a kid’s birthday party. In this analogy, that’s the product that shipped. What you built and delivered.  

Marketing is pumped because people responded to the invite. Product is proud because it was the best kid’s birthday party ever thrown. Neither understands why the guests headed for the exit early and didn’t come back for the next event.

And that can happen in the converse, product ships a feature that solves a major user pain point, delivers on a brand promise but marketing never tells the story so the consumer never knows Product delivered on solving a problem. Our users are still disillusioned because they weren’t aware of the progress we made to improve their experience. 

What we have really done in these situations is erode trust and devalued our brand. Do that often enough, it becomes very hard to come back from it. 

Love the analogy.  So if that is what bad looks like, what about what good looks like?

CW:  Well in the simplest terms, it is the opposite.  

You promise amazing hors d’oeuvres, live entertainment, and interesting people.  And you get amazing hors d’oeuvres, live entertainment, and interesting people. 

The same thing happens when the two work together.  Marketing communicates your brand promises, the product delivers on those brand promises and then marketing communicates that our products kept their promise. A virtuous cycle. 

Got it.  So the big question is how?  How did you bring these two teams together at iHeartRadio?

CW:  A few things, tactical and strategic.

First, creating a common understanding. This is important – I’m not trying to change the marketing pov to product or Product team to marketing. For me, it is helping the two disciplines understand the value the other brings and that each owns an important piece of the picture. If I can get them to respect the other team’s expertise, we can operate with a complete picture of the customer and what they want, as opposed to a partial view.

And the way I manifested this over time, again and again, was by making sure that the two teams had a common objective.  Marketing did not have a separate goal and product.  They had the same vision, the same goals, and are working from the same data tools, and that helped tremendously.

Second, was team composition.  For the two teams to influence each other, work on an outcome together, and work better.  I made sure that we embedded a marketing SME in the product team.  And a product SME in the marketing team.  

They would brainstorm together, plan together, work off the same product roadmap and calendar.  This way they were able to not just collaborate deeply but also create that common language I was referring to earlier. 

Third, was structure.  Here I was a bit lucky.  I had both marketing and product report up to me.  This way, I could influence both teams to think larger and beyond their individual functions. This made things a lot easier and allowed me the space to experiment.  As long as I continued to deliver on my promises to the business.

Fourth, was culture.  Part of this was to get rid of people who were territorial. I think everyone is familiar with teams that have the “no a**hole rule,” but I’m a little more specific. I have a “no territorial people” rule on my teams, especially leadership. So we ended up hiring differently.  I used to hire for skill first, but as I began the transformation….I realized that culture and attitude were a lot more important. So I changed my job spec for recruiters, I would identify the cultural need first and then hard skills. And the same goes for promotions. I would only promote individuals who displayed certain behaviors and contributed to our cultural values.  

Can I double down on the people piece?  When you were building your team, what are the specific traits or attributes that you were looking for? 

CW:  Great question.  And you are right, this was one of the hardest piece of the puzzle.  

For our new hires, we started to pay more attention to soft skills.  Specifically, we would interview for collaboration skills.  Can this person get along with the team?  How good are they at communicating?  Will they work well in ambiguous situations?  

It’s a lot similar to what Google does with their culture fit interview.  We are always looking for someone who has the right value system first.  

And we also made a conscious decision to make sure we don’t hire folks who are territorial, who hold information/data close as a means to power and control over the team, or who are looking to build their own kingdoms. And you whiff on some hires and have to be willing to make uncomfortable decisions to part ways when bad candidates slip through your best efforts to screen for culture fit.

Oh and one last thing, we also wanted folks who could make decisions in ambiguous situations.  I was always looking for someone who could walk the tightrope between collaboration and consensus.  I want people who are receptive to collaboration, but then strong enough to make the decision on their own. That is always a hard skill to find.

I agree.  Too often companies end up making diluted decisions in the name of collaboration and consensus.

One last question.  Any advice for product leaders who are looking to bridge the gap between product and marketing?  Any lessons learned?  

CW:  Yeah….three things.  I talked about these earlier but I think they are worth repeating.

First, set the proper context.  Not everyone intrinsically gets it as to why product and marketing need to be better at working together.  So before anyone decides to even begin this journey, they need to set the right context, and answer the question “why”.  Why do we need to kill the silos, what are the benefits, what is at stake, and what are the risks if we don’t do this.  If you cannot connect the dots, any type of transformation is not going to end well.  

Second, is the structure recommendations I talked about.  You may not be able to get both marketing and product to report to one person.  But at a minimum, you should embed the SMEs in each of the teams.  And not just embed in certain meetings, but be part of the product development process all the way from strategy to brainstorming, discovery, and even delivery.  Marketing should be influencing product roadmap and the product should be helping shape the focus of marketing campaigns. This worked wonders for us.  

And the last is culture.  How to hire and part easily with certain employees is such a critical component of building the right culture.  It takes time but it does make a big difference.  

Chris, this has been awesome.  This is such a great topic.  Thanks for being a guest.  And maybe for our next round, we can talk about the other topic we were debating – product debt.  

CW:  Mustafa I very much enjoyed this conversation. Don’t even get me started on product debt.  But yes we should definitely do that next time.  Thanks for having me.