Product Experience Marketing

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Seven years of enterprise product marketing experience for servers, storage, and networking technology products.

ROLES

Product Experience Manager

Go-To-Market Manager – Strategy & Planning

Interactive/Web Marketing Manager

RESPONSIBILITIES

Event design & strategy

Project management

Product positioning

Metrics & analytics

Background

As a Product Experience Manager on the Go-to-Market team, my I was responsible for creating the full end-to-end customer experiences at trade shows. I identified value, presented information, and positioned complex technology products, in a simple and compelling way. I led a team of over 200 product managers, engineers, and designers to develop event design and strategy at Tier-1 events and tradeshows, pivoting the product experience away from a feature-first to a value-first marketing approach.

Previously, I led the marketing department in developing an effective executive KPI reporting strategy that spanned seven departments with over 65 new KPIs.

Outcome

By setting up the product demonstrations on the floor in a fluid and logical way and by increasing the level of interaction among the products, we were able to set a record breaking number of visitors. Each attendee was engaged at their level, and everyone walked away with the information they needed to understand having spoken with the right member of the team.

As an example, at HPE Discover 2016, of 11,000 overall visitors 63% of stopped by one of our demos, marking a 170% YoY increase in booth attendance.

Designing the customer journey

To accomplish this, I led a team of over 200 product managers, engineers, and designers to position product across 3 business units, 7 verticals, and 5 partners.

I used techniques of customer interviews, gaining engineering and management team buy-in, analysis of engagement metrics and web/social media analytics for data gathering and decision making.

• Designed the overall customer journey through the product story.

• Wrote engaging titles and descriptions for product demos.

• Partnered with creative agencies to design interactive experiences that translated value to different customer personas.

• Created a floor plan that moved customers fluidly around the floor space while clearly showcasing our products and partners

• Brought together and managed a huge cross functional team that constructed, coded, designed, built, and staffed these demos
  

I created a customer experience that segmented and differentiated over 160 different products that were represented at the trade shows, so their value could stand out individually.

Lead with value, not features

Many technologies are becoming a stats and price race, focusing on which company can deliver the highest performance for the cheapest price. However, I upleveled the conversation at every opportunity with services, cloud initiatives, partners, product combinations, and interoperability at events such as VMWorld, OracleWorld, and HPE Discover.

Instead of just showcasing hardware and features, we put the spotlight on customer use cases and industry scenarios to show the specifics of how our product is being successfully deployed.

Tiered system of information hierarchy

Technical customers, like IT engineers. are interested in deep conversation about the technology can experience live demos with real data, and can speak directly with HPE engineers and product managers. They can sit in on mini-sessions held at the booth and walk away with digital collateral for further research.

C-level execs are the decision makers and are more interested in the long term vision and big picture management of their data centers. They can sit down for in-depth meetings with product management about future products and business scenarios.
 

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