Head of Product Marketing · 2022–2024 · Full-time
MarineTraffic → Kpler: building the function, then surviving an acquisition
The situation
Four product lines, no shared answer to what any of them was or who it was for. Sales had started writing its own material.
MarineTraffic tracked ships. MT Central, In Transit, Port Call Optimisation and Fleet Ops each had their own buyers, their own competitors and their own idea of what the company sold. There was no product marketing function to speak of. When sales needed a story, sales wrote one, which meant four product lines were being described a dozen different ways by the people closest to revenue.
Then Kpler acquired the business, and the AIS product line became the merged output of three separate acquisitions. A stronger product that nobody could explain in a sentence, already being sold.
When I arrived
When I left
Four product lines, four stories
One story per line, one source of truth
No product marketing function
A function and four PMMs running it
Sales writing its own material
A messaging matrix tied to proof points
Nobody knew which assets were stale
Every asset with an owner and a refresh date
What I built
The function itself, structured on four pillars (market intelligence, positioning, go-to-market and enablement), and a team of four PMMs to run it.
Across the product lines: a messaging framework and use-case documentation for MT Central, battlecards against Spire, S&P and VesselTracker, the Visibility for Containers solution deck, and a three-tier launch framework covering 27 activities for Port Call Optimisation.
Post-acquisition, for Kpler AIS: a two-page Product Oracle covering spec, metrics, limitations, packaging and personas as the single source of truth; the sales playbook; a messaging matrix per persona; a customer-facing factsheet and internal FAQ; an end-user pricing model; and a 50-question competitive intelligence framework filled across six competitors with a metrics layer covering thirty companies.
Underneath all of it: a deliverables framework mapping every asset to its owner, its destination and its refresh cadence, and OKRs measuring research coverage and cross-functional trust rather than assets shipped.
Enterprise pipeline grew 30% over the period.
The judgment call
Every deliverable got an update frequency and a destination, not just an owner. Most teams track who made a thing. Tracking when it goes stale and where it lives is what turns a folder of documents into something a team can actually maintain, and it's what later told me exactly which assets had rotted.
The second one worth naming: the Product Oracle includes an anti-persona. Who the product is not for: small fleet operators. It's the field most companies refuse to write, and the one that stops sales burning a quarter on deals that churn.
And the third: the strongest line on the Spire battlecard wasn't a feature comparison. It was a dependency: a large share of the competitor's terrestrial data came from our own network. Feature arguments get answered in the next release. Structural ones don't.
Frameworks installed