For anyone else following along on “The Death of Media”… There are plenty of dire stories about layoffs and newsrooms shutting down, so I like finding stories of innovation (or small steps) in the space that appear to be working. I think 404 Media is doing great work, and their latest addition of a full-text RSS feed for paid subscribers makes me very happy:

Creating this feed was logistically quite complicated. We are thankful to Maxime Valette of FeedPress, who helped us make the feed, and to Ryan Singel of Outpost, who helped us sync the paid feeds with our Ghost member list. We’re also thankful to our paid subscribers, who have made it possible for us to pay for the development work needed to offer this and have also been very patient with us as we’ve worked behind the scenes to develop this feature.

In other actually good news on the media, The Atlantic is (finally) profitable! Mostly because they went hard on subscriptions.

This is about content marketing but Fio’s post What is strategy—explained with a useful puzzle metaphor is very relevant to product people as well:

At its core, that’s what strategy is: taking a problem, discovering what makes it hard, and finding the right way(s) to solve it. The concept is super obvious when applied to a puzzle: you intuitively know that picking random pieces from the pile and expecting them to slot right into place is not a sensible approach…

…and yet, that’s often how content folks expect marketing programmes to work: we bypass the diagnosis and guiding policy phases, jump straight into picking tactics, and expect that all the pieces will automagically fit together in the end.

Another reminder (which I think we need to hear almost every day) not to jump into implementation too quickly. Take time to understand the problem and the opportunity first.

This is such a good point about music discovery and the abundance of choice:

Before Spotify, when presented with a new album, we would ask: why listen to this? After Spotify, we asked: why not?

I also like this sentiment:

On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with.

For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism.

Great post by April Dunford on how marketing teams and sales teams need to tell different stories about a product:

Our goals in marketing are very different from our goals in a sales situation. Often in marketing, we are simply trying to capture an audience’s attention and get their permission to continue marketing to them. […] Sales, on the other hand, is generally dealing with the folks who have already raised their hand in some form and are in a purchase process. Our primary job in sales is to help guide prospects through the purchase process.

However, both approaches to storytelling need to come from the same positioning source:

Sales and marketing should use the same inputs for whatever storytelling structure they choose, and those inputs should come from our positioning. Both marketing and sales communicate the value that the product delivers that no other solutions can. Both have a common definition of what a good-fit prospect looks like. Both teams need to understand the alternative approaches, including the status quo and more direct short-list competitors. Our positioning defines the inputs for marketing and sales content—we ultimately need commonality across marketing and sales because our positioning defines where we win and why.

Why Do Developers (Actually) Hate Marketing? The Heavybit team has some good advice in this post:

• Don’t: Create product-led content that shoves the product into your reader’s face.
• Do: create a transparent guide to what your product can and can’t do. But make sure you don’t over-promise (or even sound like you’re overpromising).
• Don’t: Write thought leadership content that relies on cheesy trend predictions.
• Do: Create thoughtful, technical essays based on experiences from engineers and founders. But make sure your claims are authentic as well as relevant and well-supported as well as novel.
• Don’t: Produce hollow, manicured case studies.
• Do: Create technical case studies that describe, in detail, what a customer’s experience was really like – including the gains, the stresses, and the adoption and integration processes. But make sure the focus remains on the customer’s problem and not on your solution.