Building a Visibility Plan So the Right Customers Learn About Your Product
Company: Salesforce
Role: Product Manager
Category: Product Design & Strategy
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Other
You are the product manager for a product, and you have been asked to increase how widely it is known among the people in its market who could buy or use it. How would you do it?
The interviewer leaves the product open, so state which product you are assuming or ask. Explain whom you would target, what message you would lead with, which channels and product levers you would use, and how you would tell whether awareness is rising and turning into business.
```hint Awareness among whom
Awareness only matters among the people who buy and use the product. Define that audience, then work out whether the real gap is that they have never heard of the product or that they know the name but do not see why it matters to them, because the two call for different plans.
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### Clarifying Questions
- Which product is this, and is it new to the market or established but under-recognized?
- Who buys it: individual users, or businesses where a group of users, budget holders and IT decides together?
- Is the goal awareness itself, or awareness that turns into trials, pipeline or revenue within a set time?
- What resources do I have: a marketing budget and team, a sales force, or only levers inside the product?
### What a Strong Answer Covers
- A clear target audience and a baseline of current awareness, with a diagnosis of where the funnel actually breaks
- Positioning and a message that state what the product does differently for that audience
- Channels chosen and sequenced for that audience, including product-led levers a PM controls (free tiers, sharing, integrations, existing customers)
- Metrics from awareness through pipeline, a way to attribute impact, and guardrails against vanity numbers
- Collaboration with marketing and sales, and an honest view of cost and timeline
### Follow-up Questions
- Six months in, aided awareness has risen but sign-ups have not. What do you investigate?
- How would your plan change for a consumer app instead of software sold to businesses?
- You get half the budget you asked for. What do you cut first?
Overview: A product manager is asked how to make more of a product's potential buyers and users aware of it. It tests audience definition, diagnosing whether the gap is reach or positioning, choosing channels and product-led levers, sequencing, and measuring awareness through to pipeline without relying on vanity metrics.