Mike McGee00:02 — If you look at our G2 category, there are, I think last I looked, there was 97 listings in our category alone. I think the average is somewhere around 75 or 80. How does a buyer evaluate all those options and how do you make sure you're the one that stands out from the pack?
I think ultimately that boils down to just the whole what's in it for me of the whole thing. Really, we're trying to earn someone's time and attention and we're hoping to affect change. And so the way that you kind of present all that and talk about yourself, I think you really have to be rigorous in how you organize that messaging and how you kind of come to the table with who's going to really create that deep empathy with the audience.
Benjamin Ard01:08 — Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Mike. Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike McGee01:13 — Thanks for having me.
Benjamin Ard01:14 — Yeah, Mike, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun conversation. In the 400 plus episodes we've done on Content Amplified, we have not covered this subject, so I'm excited. I'm going to put that little teaser out there, but before we dive into it, Mike, let's get to know you, your background, your history, everything so that the audience can kind of know you before we get into the subject for the day.
Mike McGee01:34 — Yeah, absolutely. My name is Mike McGee. I'm the director of product marketing at Vantaca. Vanica is leading the connected future of community association management and we do that through technology, pro services and education.
Benjamin Ard01:48 — Very cool. I love it. How did you get into marketing? How did you get into the space? Tell us a little bit about your background.
Mike McGee01:53 — Yeah, absolutely. So I got into marketing through customer success. A long story to how I got to that point. But about eight years ago or so I started at a company that was in property management software. I was a customer success manager really managing the relationships of some of our largest customers. And I did that for a few years. It was really enlightening and impactful for me to really kind of understand our customers' goals and aspirations and trying to figure out how to help them take those goals and map them to the tools that we had available to them such that they were really able to see the full value of the investment that they put into the software, right? So I had done that for a few years. I was really into these one-on-one relationships and figuring out how to message things in certain ways that would break through to create that sort of change that you're looking to instill in someone to help reach these mutually beneficial goals, right? So as I was thinking about what the next step would be in my career and what kind of things I wanted to do and how I wanted to leverage all the stuff that I had already learned to do, I really wanted to get closer to building things and being part of how we bring some products to the market and services and how we talk about those things. I think that was kind of a skill of mine as a customer success manager. So I was thinking, how do I take what I do on a one-to-one basis and bring that on a one-to-many basis? That was kind of the impetus for getting into marketing. But yeah, from there it's been kind of a roller coaster and it's been a few years now of constant change and constant fluctuation and really just trying to understand how I can make the most impact at any given time given the circumstances.
Benjamin Ard03:45 — I love it. That's amazing. Mike, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun conversation. This is something I don't have a ton of expertise in, but I'm excited to learn more about. What we're going to talk about is PMM org planning. So to kick things off, when you think about the traditional way of organizing PMM teams, why do you think that traditional way of structuring these teams may be broken?
Mike McGee04:05 — Well, two things. So for one, I don't know that I would necessarily call myself an expert on this either. I'm a relatively new leader to the space. I just started with FANICA back in May of 2025. So we're still working through how to scale this properly. But all that being said, I don't know that fail is even necessarily the right word either. I do think a lot of companies and team structure can work just fine. It depends on the product that you're selling, depends on the depth of the solution that you have, the market dynamics, the people involved, the stage of the company's trajectory, all that kind of wrapped up into one. As much as I like to break the rules and sort of go my own way, I think there is obviously some merit to the tried and true things, as much as I don't tend to follow that. The way things are done, they're done because they tend to work or they wouldn't be rules in the first place. Right. So I get all that. But I also believe that if you do things the way that everyone else is doing them, especially the way your competitors are doing it, you also tend to sort of inherit all the trappings and the pitfalls that everyone else encounters. So for us, we have a really highly differentiated product. And it's sort of a product marketer's dream in that sense. To stand out and clearly articulate how we're different, we really can't talk like everybody else and we can't do the things that everybody else is doing. So our competitors, they can say that they solve a lot of the same problems just by virtue of being a provider of community association management software. But ultimately I think it's really important to hold how you work up to scrutiny and the rules don't necessarily have to apply. We can kind of do whatever we want, right? So I always come back to just this whole Seth Godin-ism of like, who's it for, what's it for? But ultimately it's really just trying to be really clear with product teams and everyone internally about what are the stated goals and outcomes and what exactly do we want to happen? So I think it just really kind of boils down to clarity.
Benjamin Ard06:06 — I love that. And I love your definition. Like there are things out there. The traditional way isn't broken. People do it for a reason. That's a great place to be, but it's interesting that you're also saying, hey, let's look at the competitive landscape. And if we're doing exactly what our competitors are doing, we're going to have the exact same outcomes. We're going to have the same structures. We're going to talk about things the same way. We're going to be kind of one of the companies out there, just like everyone else. But if our objective is to be different, we're going to have to be different in a few different ways. And I like the way of looking at that and saying, it's not broken, but if we want to be different, we're going to have to be different. So I think that's really cool.
Mike McGee06:44 — Yeah. And I would add to that too. I mean, this is something that we talk about quite a bit with new sales reps, new business development reps. If you look at our G2 category, there are, I think last I looked, there was 97 listings in our category alone. I think the average is somewhere around 75 or 80. How does a buyer evaluate all those options and how do you make sure you're the one that stands out from the pack? I think ultimately that boils down to just the whole what's in it for me of the whole thing. Really, we're trying to earn someone's time and attention and we're hoping to affect change. And so the way that you kind of present all that and talk about yourself, I think you really have to be rigorous in how you organize that messaging and how you kind of come to the table with who's going to really create that deep empathy with the audience.
Benjamin Ard07:33 — I love that. That's cool. So when we were emailing back and forth about finding a subject for today, this theme kind of came up. And you talked about publication models. And you use that for inspiration. So for my next question, what are publication models? What do you mean by that? And what are the traits that you're looking at from these publication models that you feel like could really help benefit a marketing org?
Mike McGee07:55 — It's an interesting one. And I would say that I'm sort of going back to scratching my own personal itch, I guess you could say. I had originally in the early days of my foray into tech, I really got deep into publications like The Verge and Wired and, you know, you name it. There's so many different opportunities for how these publications kind of present themselves. And one of the things that really stood out to me, and this is kind of a plug, I guess, but like Decoder from The Verge with Nilay Patel is one of the shows that I just, I listen to every episode. Nilay has said multiple times that it's sort of a show about org charts. There's always a question around how are you structured? Who does what? Kind of really in the weeds discussions. And I find it super beneficial just to hear how other leading companies are thinking about these things. And one in particular episode stood out was the one with Brian Chesky from Airbnb, or at least the most recent one. I think he's been on a few times, but he had been talking specifically about how the team had been, how they restructured their product management and product marketing and program management and sort of blended these roles into a unique need for their business. And just hearing the thought process behind it was something that just started the gears turning in my head a little bit. And not to say that we're emulating that specific model. It was just a way to think, again, the rules don't apply. We can do whatever we want really. And there are structures around these sort of things, but when I was looking at say how digital newsrooms are structured, it really started to become clear that the way that our business at least operates has a lot of parallels with, say, reporters and their beat and editors and all these different layers of persona based messaging. So that's something that really stood out to me as something to chase down and inspect. Simultaneous to all this, our internal teams had started going through a transition sometime last year. So our customer support team, historically we have a broad platform, right? So it's kind of a monolithic set of modules and configuration and different opportunities to learn and master certain workflows. And when you are a support agent on the other end of the phone who has to know every tiny little detail of the platform, because you never know what the call is going to be on the next call on queue, that's a lot. It's a lot to ask people. It creates a long ramp up time to become kind of an expert in the software. And it really makes it challenging to kind of maintain that staff over time. And the really good people will obviously, they'll kind of move into new roles and things like that. So what they ended up doing was they reorganized the team around the roles that exist on our customers' side. So you would get a functional specialist based on your particular role in your company who knew exactly what to say and how to say it and could speak your language and really only was responsible for being an expert in that one area of the software. It works so well that we've expanded that into our implementation and onboarding programs. And now same type of thing where when you're going in through an implementation, you are talking to people who know your job just as well, or maybe not just as well as you do, but they know how the software maps to your specific job. And that started to really feel like it spoke to a lot of our product differentiation to me. And I started to realize that as we scale the product marketing function, it would be really cool to basically have product marketers who know the roles on the other side. Beyond just sort of like the executive buyer layer, I think historically we've done a lot of selling directly at the buyer and we say, this is what the platform can do. And here's the ROI and all of that. But for individuals who are using the software after it's been bought and implemented, some of that life cycle marketing can fall flat sometimes when you're trying to message to everybody. So this is something that I'm really feeling passionate about in that sense to make sure that every persona involved has someone that is speaking directly to them and can tell them what they really should care about as we're increasing release velocity and really trying to solve things on a granular scale.
Benjamin Ard12:33 — I love that. I think that's so cool. You're organizing the whole business around who are the users, who are the people that are engaging with our business and how can we provide them the most relevant support, most relevant content, onboarding. I mean, all of these different functions to say, okay, great. We know you inside and out and we're going to provide this value. So with this change as everything is kind of going down this road, how is this impacting things? What is the goals that you set? How is it making a difference? What are you feeling the difference in the org structure is doing for the team?
Mike McGee13:07 — Well, there's a couple of changes that I see afoot. We're scaling the team, right? So I think as of right now, I have two very talented members of my team who are kind of holding down the fort on a lot of these things. We'll have hired maybe by the time this is out, three new people on our team. And that was part of the impetus for why are we doing this right now. As we grow this team, as we start assigning work, how do we figure out exactly what people's individual swim lanes are? I believe that the impact around this structure and strategy will lead to a deeper level of empathy for our users. It will allow for a stronger sense of ownership for individuals on our team to really kind of just really dig in and fully grasp the people on the other side of the computer. One thing I really love about the company and our customers is every time you ask our customers what they love about working, or not even that, you just ask them broadly, what is your experience with FANICA? Every single answer is always about the people. Much more so than the products and the services and the solutions and the, you know, et cetera. And I really liked this approach of just really putting faces to names and saying, you know, as we reach out through email marketing, as we put on webinars, like the person who knows your role is a very specific person. And we've kind of gotten away as a company from using the marketing team as the email sender, right? It's a person and we get all the out of offices as well. So there's all the failings of that strategy. Regardless, I think ultimately structuring around, structuring our entire business around how our customers do business really speaks to our origin story as a company. Ultimately a lot of competitors in the space were sort of born out of different industries, whether they were originally a tech platform or they were in a different vertical and had expanded or came from a sort of tangential industry like banking. And our system was built by a community management company that tried everything in the industry and just nothing worked the way they thought it should. So in a lot of ways we have that grounded approach to, we understand what the challenges are traditionally with community management software. And we understand how to solve that better than anyone else. That's kind of a lot of what we're after with putting the right people in place so that all these problems are solved.
Benjamin Ard15:53 — I find it fascinating because there's this huge trend where businesses are really putting, like you said, a face to a name. They're letting their internal teams really have the microphone. They're letting them send the emails. They're letting them be on the webinars. And it feels like people are building personal relationships. In this day and age of AI, I feel like it's even more important for people to say, I want to know the person behind the company. And we're seeing this trend. I love that the organization naturally has shifted into a position where, you know, the persona. And now they're like, sweet. I know the three people in the company, you know, on the support side, the implementation side, the product marketing side. I'm seeing the same three people all the time. And I know them by name. I know their little personality quirks. I know who they are, but they talk about only me. I feel like I have a relationship with them. Okay. I think this is fascinating. I love how you're organizing the org for that. Mike, we're almost out of time. So one final question. What did the transition look like? And I know you're going through the transition. For anyone in a business who's asking themselves, hey, maybe we should look at this, but I don't know what getting from A to B is going to look like, what the process will be, what steps we need to take, any kind of pieces of advice, things that you've seen in transitioning the org into that different kind of a system.
Mike McGee17:19 — Yeah. So what I will say around product marketing is, you know, I don't feel like I've ever been in a place where my job felt very static, right? So product marketing is kind of change in and of itself. You're kind of always trying new things and doing things differently. Obviously teams can be structured very differently depending on the needs of that business. So you can go by discipline and functional specialty. You can go by scrum team or product management pods or vertical or market segment. None of those are necessarily wrong. You just need to try things on for size and see how well it connects to your customers and to your business. The other thing I would say is I don't necessarily know how easy it would be to execute a big change like this in some companies. I'm fortunate to be in a company that has its origin story so deeply rooted in differentiation. And I do think I'm afforded some trust to kind of color outside the lines a bit and deliver on some brand promises in ways that are less tested and less proven. But I think, if I was thinking about like what that change could look like, or just ways to start inspecting that, I think the first place I'd look to is more like what's working well and what's predictable and replicable. You don't really want to force a big change on your team just for the sake of disruption, right? I think that could easily backfire. Folks don't feel grounded. They don't feel bought into the mission. So I would kind of look more at like the gaps and inspect whether you can fit that into your existing framework. And if you can't and there's no tenable way to get from where you are to where you want to go, then maybe a more major overhaul is probably worth thinking through. But ultimately I think it's really just important that you look straight at your customers and make sure ask yourself whether you are serving them to the utmost of your potential.
Benjamin Ard19:08 — Love it. That's awesome. Well, Mike, thank you so much for the insights and the great conversation today. It's been awesome. For anyone listening who wants to reach out and connect with you online, how and where can they find you?
Mike McGee19:18 — Probably LinkedIn is the best place to find me. Again, Mike McGee at Vantaca. But yeah, that would probably be the best place to go.
Benjamin Ard19:25 — Love it. For anyone listening, scroll down to the show notes, regardless of what platform you're on. We will link directly to Mike's LinkedIn profile. Click on the link, connect with Mike, say hello, say you're from the podcast. Be great to connect with him. Mike, again, thank you for the insights and a wonderful conversation today. I really do appreciate it.
Mike McGee19:42 — Thanks, Ben. I appreciate it.
