Hello and welcome to the bottom up skills podcast, where we are starting another new series. Boy, they come quickly. Don't they? And today it's all about product and marketing coming together. Now these two things, product development, marketing. Advertising. They don't usually live together and putting them together can be a little clunky.

So what I'm going to do for you today is part of this three part series that we've got coming up. I'm going to give you three really powerful suggestions, ideas that, again, help you bring marketing and product together. Just that little bit more, just that little bit easier. And. Today, we're [00:01:00] going to start with perhaps one of the most powerful things that I discovered when I jumped from the marketing world to the product world.

It's this idea of identifying pains and gains of a user. Now these pains and gains are all what people experience as they're on the way to getting a particular job done. Being healthy, losing 10 kilograms, uh, going for a run, uh, being productive, sending emails, writing a document, whatever the job they're trying to get done, they get are running into all these blockers that can ever have all these hopes and dreams.

And we call those the pains and gains of the user. So we might ask ourselves, you know, what prevents your customer from getting that job done? And what gains would make the customer's life better. Okay. So let's build this up and start with product traditionally. Like a product person is going to look for pains and gains through research, [00:02:00] prototyping, being close to the customer.

And from that begin to build some user cases, some user. Flows, you might even call them. And this is sort of a, an idea of how the product might start and how it might start to serve the problem solving that needs to happen here. Now, once you have your use cases that you've kind of mapped out, you know, imagine that it's on a big whiteboard and you've got like a 10 stage process for getting a job done.

You might then go and build a prototype because you've kind of validated the use cases in Ingram and prototype. Now, importantly, with bottom up, we always always prototype with the end user, none of this, like a fantasy, uh, you know, innovation theater in the boardroom. No, no. Get on the streets and work with your real customers.

Now let's say you've. Dan you're prototyping. You've learned a lot. I think then you're ready to build an MVP. And once you validate that, then you can launch [00:03:00] version one of your product. Okay. So this is a straight through line of what really good product people will follow. And then a lot of this is based on lean startup, lean analytics, um, and you know, you want to test and learn at every step of the way.

Now what I discovered when I was presented with this thinking almost 10 years ago, it like all the lights went on because it maps beautifully to marketing. And in fact, what I'm going to propose to you today is the pains and gains of your end-user of your audience. These pains and gains hold not only the secret to great product, but they actually hold the secret to great marketing because here's what can happen when you actually test pains and gains.

For your product, you can also discover the emotions that your user, that your consumer customer or audience what they experience when they hit the pains and even better [00:04:00] when you relieve those pains and create the gains. And these emotions become the great starting point for telling the proposition.

We've got something great. That's going to be remarkable and it's going to create new value for you and you'll have the right emotions to tell that given story, that proposition. Now, once you've done your proposition testing, you can then bring that alive in some really rich vivid interactions. And after that, if you validate that and you can even test how customers might tell each other how they might advocate, how they might share your story.

And what's so powerful about this is whether you want to build the product or you want to build the marketing and promotion of it, the source of the right powerful insights. His pains and gains of the user. And it's one source, one single source of truth. And you can build both great product and promotion, [00:05:00] but I got a little excited about this because what I've discovered is that not only.

Can pains and gains of the user use, uh, be the starting point for our marketing team and a product team, but all those Excel wizards who like to make sure we've got a business case, they can profit from this too, because it's the pains and gains are the very starting point of your business hypothesis.

So you can go off and build, measure and learn around that hypothesis and make it even better. But, you know, I've had a couple of coffees today and. Therefore I am so excited because I think not only can we build great product from pains and gains, we can do great promotion and great profit. Like we just talked about with that lean hypothesis, but the fourth pay the people.

Can actually start with pains and gains as well, because think about it. If you have your marketing team, your [00:06:00] business team, your product team, all obsessed with solving and relieving pains for your users, creating gains for them as well. Then this becomes the mission that becomes very attractive for people to join the team, right?

So you can actually build a culture. You can build a team that wants to address. I want to relieve those pains and create those games. So the sort of behaviors that you model in the office, the systems, the symbols, all the things you say and do to celebrate, to bring your culture to life can STEM from the very same thing.

It is the pains and gains of the user. So. Just to recap, if we all take a step back and actually reflect on what are the pains and gains of users, how are we going to relieve the pains? How are we going to create the gains? I propose to you that beyond just creating a [00:07:00] product, we can create great promotion, great people and culture, even great profits too.

Now what's really important is that you do these step-by-step. Actually, you need to do these in lockstep together as a system so that you can do this on a continuous iterative basis. This is not just like a ha a habit. Or a startup process. This is sort of a lifestyle. This is sort of a way of being as a business.

And what I call this is bottom up innovation. It's really working with users. No more guessing, validating everything, building teams around a really well tested, well validated hypothesis. So there you go. That is the first of our three part series in how we can bring product and marketing people together, because there's never been a better time for this conversation [00:08:00] because when you look at Patagonia, when you're looking at Apple, when you look at Nike, what you really see here are companies where product and marketing come together, where you might say that the best product.

Weapon that these companies have is their marketing, or you might say the best marketing weapon that they have is their product. So without getting too grandiose, I think. What is seriously being something that has been so siloed. That is the partnership between product and marketing people. I believe that we already have the evidence that the best companies on the planet are already blurring the lines in merging these efforts.

And hopefully if you embrace this idea of starting with user pains and gains, you will be able to as well. Okay. I hope you've enjoyed this. There's another two parts of this series. And ...