A Product Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts with Kate Donahue, Pitch

Episode Transcription

Kate Donahue:

Presentations are curated knowledge throughout the company. When you think about the ones that are put in a centrally accessible way, it's where consensus is formed. It's where big strategic decisions are made. Presentations are usually boiled down to the most concise need to know materials. We think about the ways that we can make that information useful, relevant, and actionable.

Meghan Pfeifer:

This is the Future of Work, an original series from Better Product. I'm Meghan here to give you a quick snapshot into our latest installment, but before we jump in, if you want to get connected to other product experts, join our community BetterProduct.Community. Today, we're going to hear from Kate Donahue, head of product marketing at Pitch. Pitch is a new collaborative presentation tool, basically trying to replace Google Slides. What makes pitch different? They think about design from the start, first and foremost, so they have existing tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides that they're competing with, but those competitors don't start with design and that creates a lackluster experience. I know in my experience as a designer, I've gotten really frustrated with PowerPoint and especially Google Slides over the years about the limits they put on what these slides can actually look like. Pitch is changing all of that. Then Pitch is also differentiating themselves by focusing on the holistic journey of making this presentation. From gathering assets at the very beginning, then building inspiration and a story, and finally sharing and collaborating with other team members, getting feedback from clients.

Meghan Pfeifer:

Pitch is breaking the mold and helping shape the future of work by really focusing on that entire presentation journey. They are facing some challenges in this crowded space, as you could expect. PowerPoint is a pretty established player and then Google Slides has now been around for a while as well, so they're fighting for space on computers, they're fighting against these tools that are already built in. There's the factor of inertia. People don't want to learn a new tool or try to get other people to adopt it too if they already have a tool that's working well enough. The place for Pitch at this point is going after people who are forced to use multiple tools today and showing them it's possible to use just one and have all these pieces they need for presentations in one place. If you give them that quick win, it'll keep them coming back.

Kate Donahue:

If you want to collaborate, but you really care about brand consistency, you can't do that today. People are accustomed now to this unbundled new breed of technology. If you're on Notion and you're on Airtable and then you have to go back into the Legacy toolset, it doesn't feel as good. I think that's where we can really start to enter the conversation as the tool that can make people feel empowered and still help them move fast, and helps them feel proud of what they're putting out, whether it's for a customer, whether it's for an internal meeting.

Meghan Pfeifer:

Christian and Kate covered a lot of interesting things in their conversation, but what I especially liked about this interview was how specific Kate got on the role of an early product marketer because this is something that I've experienced a lot. Working at an agency that works with a lot of startups and a lot of early stage companies as a product marketer, I understand some of those pains. The role of a product marketer in a pre-market product is it spans from that research phase when you really have to be the voice of a customer and collaborate on user research, translate what they're saying, prioritize what they're saying all the way through the launch phase. Building buzz, positioning around the features and the value that they care about, planning to grow into the right markets. Then finally, the opportunity to build the marketing program that Kate would have liked to inherit in past roles is something she was really passionate about.

Meghan Pfeifer:

It was also interesting how she talked about when to go after feature parody, so building what competitors have versus when to differentiate. Product marketers are often expected to tell the story of how this big, shiny new feature that nobody else has is something great that our company offers, but sometimes it's interesting how you need to talk about both. You need to prove that you do all the things that they do in addition to these big, shiny new features. When it comes to balancing feature parody and differentiation, you have to balance that founder intuition and what the founder really wants to go after with user feedback and actually check in on your customers, listen to what they're saying, check yourself in the market and then go back and look for those unique levers that you can pull. You can see when you're excited about something, but maybe people don't actually care about it, or your customers are begging for something and you've been ignoring it. Those are really the times when product marketing comes in and listens to the customer and then comes back to product with that information.

Kate Donahue:

Some people, they see Pitch and they see the brand design. They're like, "I want this to be a really specific design tool." They want us to go deeper in some areas. Other people, they're always giving feedback based off of their context. If they're coming from a more enterprise environment, they want to push things into another. It's like having this broader group of users and customers now to give feedback, it helps us maintain perspective on where are points of differentiation and innovation, and where do we really need to focus on parody features? Because we don't want to build everything in PowerPoint because we're deliberately trying not to do that, but you start to get a sense of where do we need to shore up certain feature areas? Where do we need to prioritize things that maybe early users didn't feel so painful or we don't because we know the full ins and outs of Pitch, but that the average person really relies on or starts to miss once they fully made the switch to Pitch.

Christian Beck:

Today, on the Better Product podcast, I am joined by Kate Donahue, the Head of Product Marketing at Pitch. Kate, I first heard you on another podcast talking about Pitch. When I heard you talk, I was like, I need to talk to you, so I'm really excited to have you on to talk about it. Welcome to the Show, Kate.

Kate Donahue:

Thank you very much for inviting me.

Christian Beck:

Jump into Pitch and how it's connected to this future of work, I'd like to hear how you got started at Pitch and what it was like when you joined.

Kate Donahue:

Pitch was founded in late 2018. I joined just over two years ago, June, 2019. It was a really interesting time to join. Pitch had been on my radar. I live in Berlin, where Pitch headquartered. I remember seeing it announced, its existence, and I was familiar with Wunderlist. I followed Hacker and a bunch of productivity blogs back in the day, so I had that recognition and I always had this secret passion to work at a productivity-focused startup. I was eyeing them from early in their journey. I joined to be their first product marketer and to take this early stage version of their product, figure out a plan to get it in the hands of users, get feedback and then start to build up the marketing practice leading up to our launch.

Kate Donahue:

At the time, it was a very, very compelling value proposition of joining the company. As a marketer, you never really get to join pre-product, pre-launch. You join after the fact, you get a bunch of things that you inherit. Okay, go make this work with whatever has been put in place. The fact to come in pre-customer, pre some strategy work, pre really active product and shape things was such an irresistible opportunity, partially for the virtue of having that experience for the first time and then just idea like. You always, as a marketer, want to be like, if I had the foresight to do this all again, if I was given this opportunity to go back in time, I would avoid XYZ pitfalls. This felt like a golden opportunity to see into the future a little bit to build up the marketing program I would've wanted to inherit.

Christian Beck:

How do you do that when you're pre-market? How do you even start to develop a plan for what to do with the product before it's even in the hands of users? Were people aware of it? Was Pitch's name out there in a community at all before you joined?

Kate Donahue:

Yeah. Pitch was already known within the Berlin startup ecosystem, primarily because of Christian Reber and Wunderlist. They were a big startup darling in the early 2010s in Berlin, but outside of people who actively follow funding, actively follow the Wunderlist team and their paths, not a high amount of interest. Early on, one thing that was really nice that I inherited was a bit of an active waitlist, primarily people in Europe who followed the news and followed Christian. It was nice to know that there was some mix of people we could get in touch with, plus a good pool of current investors, people just within the founder's network that we could start to talk with early [inaudible 00:08:53]. We knew that we aspired to be a global company from day one and who's going to use early stage products, probably people in San Francisco, probably people in bigger startup ecosystems so we wanted to make sure we could start thinking about through early marketing, through promoting our limited preview that we could start to raise awareness pre-launch in these larger English-speaking markets to prepare for a nicer reception come public launch.

Christian Beck:

What was the goal of Pitch when you started? What was the goal or the vision in terms of what Pitch was doing that made you feel like there's something here, that it wasn't just another attempt to create presentation software bound to fail? What made you feel like there was actually some potential there?

Kate Donahue:

One area, it was the fact that the founding team and the early team behind Pitch, really design-focused, really customer centric. You use something like PowerPoint and Google Slides and you don't necessarily feel the love from the team behind it. It doesn't really cater to your needs. It has a lot of features. It's not so guiding or opinionated to help you accomplish what you need to do really quickly and really competently, so that there were people who... By the time I started to, we were already working with teams like MetaLab to really scrutinize the details of our early design, that they were so focused on that experience and really thoughtful, having debates, really rich discussions about what you might, at first glance, consider pretty trivial thing. It was really exciting to me, especially in the case where a lot of product marketers, where you don't always get to work so closely with product teams. It's being able to see that up close and being able to see the thoughtfulness drive every decision that they made and how deliberate the product experience was shaping up to be was super exciting.

Kate Donahue:

Then I guess the second piece, when we're thinking about the vision, so our vision is to be the first complete platform presentation. Early on, we're just having those conversations and doing early user research. Making the presentation is yeah, a little bit of a hassle. Some presentations are easier than others. The before and the after of creating the presentation is also a bit of a nightmare. Finding the templates you need, getting the approved brand assets, getting the inspiration for how you want to structure your story. None of us are really good at that and nothing we use makes it really easy. If you do find something good, it's not baked into PowerPoint or Google Slides, you're already using a couple of tools up front.

Kate Donahue:

Then when it comes to distributing presentations and getting insights, again, you've got to jump to SlideShare, jump to Dropbox and use WeTransfer to send it as an attachment. There's so much friction. These people trying to solve really specific experiences around getting your brand assets, getting it into a deck, getting into the hands of someone and that the team was thinking really holistically about was really exciting. It comes back to that again, the people who are really productivity-minded and just thinking about the full user experience and not just making a better presentation tool.

Christian Beck:

You mentioned, yes, I am a designer by trade. Small silent clap for that and more evidence that having a great design focus is important for products, but there's a couple of other things that you just said in there that I want to uncover what you mean by. First, you said that existing presentation tools weren't really as opinionated or guiding about what they did. The other thing you mentioned that was interesting, it seemed to do what, at first glance, seemed like trivial things really well. What do you mean by those things?

Kate Donahue:

When I think about things like even the toolbar in the edit, you compare Pitch and you'll get a closer look once you become a highly active user. It's really minimal and it's really minimal by design, so we tried to boil down things to bare essentials of what someone needs. What are the most important things that people need to communicate effectively, not what are all the bells and whistles? When you look at the ribbon across Microsoft products, and it's a triple decker with different views, depending on where you are in the menu. None of it's really focused on helping you do what you get done. It will give you lots of options. If you want to have drop shadows on text, if you want to animate things in wild ways, but we really focused on the most essentials and then from there, focused on what are the ways to do it quickly.

Kate Donahue:

We also have this inline editor, so when you just click on the slide, click on an element on that, you'll see this little editor just gives you your like, okay, this is text so you probably want to bold it, or italicize it, or change the color, or maybe change the heading style. You don't have to go through the menu. You don't have to go through layers of UI to get there, but then also being considerate of design-oriented users who are not necessarily comparing us to PowerPoint. They can use Figma if they really want to trick out their designs. Thinking through, okay, what are some of the things that they need that help the way they work with non-design folks and having things in a design panel that let them control the letter spacing, let them work with their custom fonts. It's that balance, helping everyone feel like a designer, but also helping designers feel like this is still a tool for them and not focusing on breadth of functionality and instead, giving people really the essentials.

Christian Beck:

No, that makes sense. We've talked a lot about the design of the product, which you're a product marketer. The fact that you're talking about it too, I think is another good indicator that it is a design-focused company, but I want to get back to your role in product marketing, not just in the beginning stages, but what is it like today? How do you continue to guide the product today?

Kate Donahue:

There's a few things. One, we try to keep that feedback loop between what we're hearing from customers, what we're seeing out in the market and how product teams are thinking about spending their time. As a company, we're currently structured in this sort of pillar model. We have several product teams because presentation software has a lot of components and they're organized into a few core pillars around the creation process, the presentation process, and then things around workspaces. What gets people into the product, what helps them share and invite others. Then we have a product marketer and a community support lead who are dedicated to each pillar as their point person. Just like with product teams, you want people to build up domain expertise and to have really strong opinions on what they're working on.

Kate Donahue:

We also want that on the support side, on the product marketing side. There are people really looking out for that team's best interests, making sure that the feedback that comes in from users is filtered, interpreted, given to them in an actionable way and that we can also stay really close to their roadmaps, thinking about the things they want to prioritize or the things they're dealing with. If a feature they're working on maybe seems too big at first, trying to help them make the right decisions confidently and grounded, not just product data, but also user feedback. That's been something we've pursued since the very beginning, even my first 10 beta users, trying to build up that idea that we're constantly getting amazing feedback and people do feel the pain. They're [inaudible 00:15:50] presentation software and are willing to go into detail and then guiding that.

Christian Beck:

Why is user research important for product marketing? Why is that important for what you're trying to do?

Kate Donahue:

It gives us a way to start to understand the value of any feature you might be releasing, understand the use cases where it's most valuable, understand who it's most valuable for. Everybody, every knowledge worker uses presentation software, not everybody needs to use it in the same way. It starts to give us this initial lens in how we want to segment messaging, who are we really building things for? It just starts to shape the way you might consider naming. The way you might consider supporting copy and also starts to set a context for how we might think about interpreting feedback we get once a feature is released. Like user research up front, we'll usually do usability studies, we'll show off prototypes. We try to get some of that initial feedback while the work is in progress, or before we consider building something at all, to understand where it might be most valuable.

Kate Donahue:

Then from product marketing, from the time we're getting ready to release something or we're taking something into beta and then after it's been released, we're the ones receiving most of that feedback alongside community support, bringing that back to the team. It's helpful to be grounded in what were the key questions going into this? What were the hypotheses, and can we thread the needle through what we're hearing once people are starting to use? Are we validating our initial approach? Are we hearing things that are a little bit unexpected and how can that then be taken into consideration as people think about improving features or thinking about other features they might want to develop?

Christian Beck:

Now that you've been there for a while, do you find that the feedback you get or what you're hearing from users is changing over time, or is it more tied to there's a new feature so you hear new things?

Kate Donahue:

I suppose that's a little bit of both. We launched about eight months ago now, so one of the nice things when anybody can access your product is that anyone will access your product and they will give you a nice dose of reality or dose of validation. It is really useful because you enter with our limited previews, the wait list. It was invite only, so you're in a little bit of this bubble. Just by nature, you want people who are enthusiastic to give feedback, who are going to report bugs. That tends to be a really specific type of person. We knew going in, early user feedback would, in some ways, be representative of what life would be like post-launch. In other ways, we knew these people are really hyper-focused. They're maybe product people themselves, so we do have to, I don't want to say take things with a grain of salt, but not to be so reactive based on that early feedback.

Kate Donahue:

Some people, they see Pitch and they see the brand design. They're like, "I want this to be just a really specific design tool." They want us to go deeper in some areas. Other people, they're always getting feedback based off of their context. If they're coming from a more enterprise environment, they want to push things into another. It's like having this broader group of users and customers now to give feedback. It helps us maintain perspective on where are points of differentiation and innovation, and where do we really need to focus on parody features? Because we don't want to fill it averaging in PowerPoint because we're deliberately trying not to do that, but you start to get a sense of where do we need to shore up certain feature areas? Where do we need to prioritize things that maybe it early users didn't kill us so painful, or we don't because we know the full ins and outs of Pitch, but that the average person really relies on or starts to miss once they've fully made the switch to Pitch.

Christian Beck:

You mentioned something that I find talking to with founders, which is feature parody versus differentiation. I bring it up because I think we can get into this a little bit here in a second too, because you're building a product that's been around for a really long time. The notion of presentation software is definitely not new, which means that there are expectations with feature parody that exists. A tendency that I see a lot of people do is that they feel compelled when they're building something new to say, "I have to have everything that the other one has to even have a level playing field," but you seem to contrast it with saying not everything will be. How do you differentiate between the unique value props versus we actually do need to have this feature to match, or I know that a competitor has this, but we're not going to do it for that? How do you actually sort through that to make sure you're making the right decisions on those points of differentiation and parody?

Kate Donahue:

It's a constantly evolving process. I think early on, the leadership team, the founder team has a really good sense of intuition, so there's a little bit of wanting to build a product that you would be happy to use. Then as you start to get user feedback, you check, is there still a good alignment there? Where are they maybe even highlighting opportunities or pushing us to think in a way we hadn't anticipated, either in prioritizing certain things or in thinking about novel approaches to what we want to build?

Kate Donahue:

I think one good example of forcing to prioritize, custom fonts, not something that every presentation tool supports. Something we were planning to support, but much later in our journey. I think after a month or two in our beta, we were like, "Okay, like this is actually a really big hook for us." This ends up being a really great way to get people started with Pitch and show a demonstrable value proposition that's something that Google Slides would be able to immediately solve and having to figure out a way to support it with some workarounds, and then figure out an elegant way to bring it into the product.

Kate Donahue:

There's constantly conversations and you have to check yourself. At a certain point, you get really excited about innovating in a certain area and exploring new technologies and thinking about this just mind-blowing way to accomplish something. Then you have to look back and see, okay, some people really want to be able to strike through text and they don't know the shortcut for it. This is where the constant exposure to feedback, curating it, making sure everybody in the company is aware so that there aren't those blind spots is the right set of checks and balances. One thing we found from the differentiation perspective is with Pitch, it's really about we're greater than the sum of our parts. This means that these different areas of maybe feature parody across different tools, coming together in a beautiful experience, ends up being a point of differentiation in and of itself.

Christian Beck:

I want to dive into where I alluded to a bit of the fact that you're trying to make a better version of something that people are familiar with because I had this question. We talked a little bit about this before we started, which was what are misconceptions of your product? How do you handle those misconceptions from the product marketing perspective?

Kate Donahue:

A little bit of... As with internal marketing, you're trying to not just market a solution, but also maybe make people aware of a problem they might acutely face, but might not be so aware of it. The biggest challenge in the space we're in is that we're fighting against free and pre-installed software and probably not just one, I imagine. You're a PowerPoint user, but if you're on a Mac, you probably also have Keynote on your machine. If you're a G Suite customer, you probably also have Google Slides and you probably do use all three to some extent, depending on why. It's like, how do we fight for space on your computer? The one thing is just the, why do I need another presentation tool when on the face of it, my tools are fine, or I know how to wrestle with them? I know which 10% of the functionality I'm going to use and my team's comfortable.

Kate Donahue:

The next thing is the inertia. Nobody wants to generally learn new things themselves. When you have to get other people and you have to push for behavior change, it's stressful to think about. It's almost easier to do nothing at all, even if you're giving up. We really try to educate around those two areas. To the earlier point, if you're using multiple tools, why is that? When you want to work with other people, you can work in Google Slides, but when you want to make something really nice and slick, probably going to Keynote. You want to work with crazy charts, or you're doing some deep dives in Excel, you may be going to PowerPoint. A service is business, so depending on what your client uses, maybe that also forces your hand, but they all have limitations.

Kate Donahue:

One of the things we found being really successful early on in the beta selection process was let's go after people who are using, minimum, two tools to get their work done because there's a reason they're doing that. If we can solve and keep them in one tool, even though we are not a fully mature product, we think there's potential in that. That proved out to be really true. If you want to collaborate, but you really care about brand consistency, you can't do that today. When people are accustomed now to this unbundled new breed of technology, if you're on Notion and you're on Airtable and then you have to go back into the Legacy toolset, it doesn't feel as good. I think that's where we can really start to enter the conversation as the tool that can make people feel empowered and still help them move fast, and helps them feel proud of what they're putting out, whether it's for a customer, whether it's for an internal meeting.

Kate Donahue:

As soon as they get that validation in the room, my colleague people write in about the jobs they've gotten from the pitches they've made in Pitch. They write in about how they impressed their boss at a meeting. All these things that it sounds like I'm bullshitting you because I'm a marketer, but we get it. We hear it and it's so exciting. It's super validating. That gives us confidence that, at least for the immediate future, we can continue to educate around this greater than the sum of its parts piece, helping people be aware of what they're lacking, or having to go between multiple tools.

Kate Donahue:

Then while we continue to build up functionality, build up education, that battles against the inertia piece. There's easy ways to get behavior change. You help people import their presentations. You give them templates to start with. You provide them with materials that show how easy it is to get started. You don't try to change the organization overnight. You try to change a use case. You try to change one habit, and then that catches on and it becomes easier for people to make the case to move their work over. It's not rip and replace, it's a gradual... It's more of a land and expand model in that sense.

Christian Beck:

This is a part of our Future of Work series. When we thought of this series, Pitch came to mind because I've always felt like this is the future of presentations. High design, making design, almost like the default. I think it's too easy to make bad decisions in PowerPoint. You can make well-designed PowerPoints, but it's hard to raise the bar and then two, collaboration, which has come a long way, but it's not... Like even on your site today, just right at the very top, you've got two people collaborating inside of a deck with a editor. It's very clear what you're doing. To me, I feel like that's the future of work. What I'd love to understand, it's hard to ignore the last year we've gone through, so have you seen that future change in the way that you're all thinking about it today or is your vision and roadmap pretty much how you'd expect it to be today?

Kate Donahue:

From a product perspective, given that we were always focused on being cloud-based, on seamless collaboration, in many ways, I felt like we were prepared for the last year. We had a product that could withstand that. There were features, like live video collaboration that sprung out the feeling of distance, the missing of the water cooler moments. Just again, the stacks of tools you have in order to get work done. Sometimes you want to talk out a deck again. Again, I come from the agency sides. Preparing a big pitch, you're gathering around a machine, you're gathering around a conference room pushing pixels in real time. Live video collaboration was a nice way to bring that experience into the product and something that was going to work well, give people access to their slides and high fidelity and help everybody do work faster. I think that's maybe the big standout change.

Kate Donahue:

Obviously now, as we move to maybe a more hybrid model, I think people are [inaudible 00:27:46] long-term where some people are going to be co-located, some people are remote. That is a good thing to consider now. It's like you do need some things where people can collaborate remotely where video makes sense, but we also need to think about the other tools that people are using to work, to get done. How do we integrate play into that, and just how we can be a bigger part of the workflow around the mix of async and a real time presentation delivery. That's one thing we're keenly focused on right now, too, is if you are remote and you can't deliver that winning pitch, if you can't build consensus in the room, what is the next best thing?

Kate Donahue:

One of our teams is cooking up something pretty interesting. Actually, I think we talked about it in our series B announcement with narrative recording and playback. It's like, how can we help people be really effective in the way that they persuade, convince and communicate, even if they're not in the same time zone, even if this is actually a piece of knowledge that will continue to live outside of when the presentation was first created and delivered? People are going to consume decks asynchronously because they're really where the most valuable knowledge is stored. How do we make sure that those ideas are compelling, they're delivered in a personable way and don't rely on the static slide alone to get the message across?

Christian Beck:

That's interesting because I think what I'm hearing is you've almost evolved out of the thing that you're trying to improve is the pitch, the deck that you're making. Can we make that a better thing? What you're describing now and where you're looking is almost can we make the presenter better? It seems like the asynchronous thing may contribute to that because if you're live, you can get away with being the worst presenter because you're talking to people and things like that. I don't know. That's what I'm hearing is that the shift that you're talking about is helping the presenter.

Kate Donahue:

I would actually take it a step beyond. It's helping teams find alignment. Presentations are curated knowledge throughout the company. When you think about the ones that are put in a centrally accessible way, it's where consensus is formed. It's where big strategic decisions are made. Presentations are usually boiled down to the most concise need-to-know materials. We think about the ways that we can make that information useful, relevant, and actionable.

Kate Donahue:

With our workspaces, that's where that's organized. We want to make sure it's easy to discover what's happening, to be notified when there's conversations you should be participating in so that it's easy for people to stay up-to-date on what's happening. Then with the recorded narrative, it's making sure that information is engaging, that it's well understood. I think the issue we all fall into in our pre-Pitch lives is okay, I need people to consume this information. I will make this slide 12 point font, and it is going to be text heavy. The information is all there. Is it going to be consumed? Is it going to be understood? I don't know, so we try to optimize for the most effective way to drive alignment and communicate a company's most important ideas to each other.

Christian Beck:

I feel like you need your version of Clippy that sees when somebody is decreasing a font under 12 points. Are you sure about that? Sure you want to do that? This has been great. I'd love to know... You talked about your series B announcements, you're forward-looking with Pitch. I think that most of us in the world are starting to look forward again, which is really refreshing. You, as a company and Pitch and product marketing, what are you most looking forward to over the next year with Pitch?

Kate Donahue:

On the one hand, I'm super excited about the roadmap ahead. We're working to bring publishing and more community-oriented features into Pitch. I think it's just going to be really transformative and inspiring to help people almost open source their best ideas for the world. Then from a marketing standpoint, my first year and a half at Pitch was marketing under the radar, marketing via a beta. We've only been out of launch about eight months and have started to add to our marketing team, kind of round things out across disciplines. Now I'm excited to actually do the marketing, and to scale up our operations and to bring more data and insights into the work we do, and just make everything a really finely tuned machine. I'm just super pumped for the year ahead. Super curious to finally see what the world's from building with Pitch.

Christian Beck:

Thanks for joining us and if you haven't yet, be sure to join the Better Product community. We've got all sorts of content and resources for you. If you want more audio, don't forget The Business of Product is our latest show to join the Better Product network. You can find that and more at BetterProduct.Community.