MarTech Interview with Nate Abbott, Head of Product at Front

Nate Abbott, Head of Product at Front shares a few proven product marketing tips and best practices in this quick catch-up:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Nate, tell us about yourself and more about your role at Front

I’m the Head of Product at Front, a customer communications software company. My job is to lead the strategic development of Front’s product to bring product features to market that enable customer-facing teams to build stronger customer relationships at scale. Front’s over 7,500 customers span many industries and job functions but we’ve found a particularly sweet spot in industries and teams that require tightly coordinated client and/or customer communication. What we’ve seen firsthand within our customer base is that for marketing firms, this is particularly true: responding to customers requires the whole team and making sure that you’re responding fast and accurately is critical. Some examples of marketing software companies I work with are Hootsuite and leading SEO agency Boostability among  many.

During the nearly four years I’ve led product at Front, I’ve led many major product launches; helped grow the Engineering, Product and Design team from 30 to over 140 people; and mentored our growing team of product managers. One of the main reasons I came to Front and one of the main reasons I’ve remained is because of the people. It is rare to work at a people-first company that focuses so much on company culture. Of course, the product drew me in as well because there’s truly nothing like it on the market. I’ve worked in product management for over 15 years and before Front, I was fortunate to work at Airbnb leading product development for Experiences and I also held roles previously at MapQuest and as the founder of my own travel startup, Everlater.

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What are some top practices you feel Product Heads/Product Teams in B2B need to be following today?

At a time when most product teams are under intense pressure to deliver it’s essential that product leaders prioritize the culture of the teams and organizations they lead. Putting in place an organizational framework that maintains a sustainable work/life balance is crucial to supporting well-being across teams and preventing burnout. At Front, we have a program called Flexible Fridays that allows employees to choose how they spend their Fridays each week. Front-eers can spend the day working heads down without disruption or flex and take care of life needs outside of work. What we’ve found is that when people have more agency over their life, they’ll be happier and perform better.

How can teams today use their product journey and roadmap to build a more interactive and feedback-ridden product growth and development journey that also leads to better customer experiences? 

My entire team is constantly spending time with customers to both share our roadmap and where we are planning to go, and also gathering feedback on where we should iterate and pivot. This cycle only works, however, when customers are getting feedback that their requests are being taken. In Front, support and account management teams move their feature requests to a shared inbox for product; we then link those to our issue tracking system. This means when we ship a feature a customer requested, the message automatically bumps in our support and account management teams, where they can alert the customer. This is the heart of our customer feedback loop that allows us to build trust and have the best roadmap.

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We’d love to hear from you on the kind of core strategies that help drive product initiatives at Front? 

It’s Front’s core belief that customers should absolutely ride co-pilot with us as we develop our product. Often we practice “co-development” with our customers on strategic features. This means we actually design for a few use cases first, which are the customers we’re co-developing with, and then expand the product as we go towards general release. One example of this is our customer Homeward (a modern home finance company): they were experiencing hypergrowth and needed a new solution to implement their complex routing workflows that power their unique mortgage offering. We worked closely with them and built our new smart rules which allow you to build complex routing systems for thousands of users with a single rule.

A few thoughts on the future of Product Marketing and Martech? 

With a horizontal product like Front we are used by many departments like account management, operations, support and sales as well as across many different industries.  For any customer industry we serve, product marketing plays a critical role in framing the value of our product to the customer and our product team partners incredibly closely with the product marketing team, which has given me a unique view on the future of the product marketing role. I predict that product marketing will shift from a function that primarily focuses on increasing feature adoption to one that understands market segmentation, creates compelling content to change customer perspectives, and drives demand generation through deep product domain expertise.

The companies that will get product marketing right will do so because they realized that product marketers are the connective tissue across an entire organization and are critical not just to marketing execution but broader GTM strategy. The job is no longer just defining a company’s segment, crafting messaging, and driving awareness. Product marketing is and should be infused throughout the entire customer journey/lifecycle – shaping the product roadmap, storytelling, driving demand, fueling customer success, etc