It is hard to believe three months have come and gone since my move from product development (engineering) to product management (marketing).  My post for Month Two was about conferences and the bulk of my labor over the last month has been focused on preparing for MIX (which, incidentally, starts this coming Monday and has sold out).

My other focus areas have been around getting content created for driving customer/partner satisfaction, adoption and, of course, revenue.  In my role, I focus primarily on satisfaction and adoption so the content I am responsible for is mostly targeted at things like outbound messaging (e.g., keynotes, talking points), customer education (e.g., Web sites, training videos, user group presentations) and industry awareness (e.g., articles, press/analyst briefings).  I also contribute technical feedback to external content creators; for example, book authors writing about our products and technologies.

In the past two weeks alone, I have reviewed nine chapters of one of the first books on “Atlas,” created keynote content that will be presented at MIX, written an article on “Atlas” for IEEE Computer Magazine (for future publication) and had several design review meetings with the vendors we are using to completely overhaul http://atlas.asp.net.  Although I don’t directly focus on revenue — there is an entire business development team whose primary responsibility is revenue and the products I oversee are, for the most part, free — I am responsbile for arming the field (salespeople, evangelists, consultants and support engineers) with the information they need so we continue to win accounts, close deals and delight our customers.

Someone said to me yesterday, “You sound like you’ve been in marketing too long.” as we were updating some slides.  Since he was one of the first people who encouraged me to pursue my current position in Developer Marketing I figured I would take that as a compliment. :)