Marketing is the Product

In one of my favorite episodes of Lenny’s podcast, Seth Godin shared a story from his early career as a product manager.

He was assigned to a project and quickly realized that the engineers were in high demand—everyone wanted their time. If he wanted his product to get built, he needed their buy-in.

So he started an internal newsletter. In it, he highlighted their wins and contributions from the engineering team.

Within three months, 40 engineers were working with him because they wanted to—not reporting to him, but choosing to work on his projects.

That’s how he became the de facto product manager.

The lessons there is that marketing is the product. You need to not only sell your product, but you need to sell yourself and build hype within your company.