With the rapid rise in digital adoption and acceleration across industries, the line between online channels and the overall customer experience is blurring. As a result, the delineation between the once distinct—and often siloed—worlds of product and marketing is also quickly disappearing. More and more, brands are realizing that the efforts of one team directly impacts the effectiveness of the other and that the best customer outcomes can be achieved through effective product and marketing collaboration and building out a modern marketing tech stack designed to fuel product adoption and business growth.

Leveraging these two approaches is what helped Indonesia's e-wallet solutions platform LinkAja, which serves people who have previously been unbanked or underbanked, deliver impressive growth. The startup was able to acquire over 73 million registered users and become one of the country's leading financial services providers—and do it within just two short years. This in an area where as many as 83.1 million residents do not have a bank account and where the payment card usage rates are around .59 and .07 per capita for debit cards and credit cards, respectively.

To get at the heart of why now is the time to eliminate barriers between product and marketing, what product and marketing collaboration best practices look like, and how product and marketing tools can and should work together to improve customer KPIs, marketing and product leads at LinkAja joined experts from Braze and Braze Alloys data and analytics partner Mixpanel in an in-depth discussion of "The Converging World of Product and Marketing." In this recorded session, which is now available to watch on demand, these featured presenters shared:

How Brands Can Break Down Silos Between Product and Marketing to Drive Growth

Ensuring both teams embrace a customer-first mindset is key to eliminating barriers to growth. That means product and marketing teams should be looking at the same key customer signals, have a shared understanding of what these insights mean, and work toward the same objective to guide product-marketing alignment.

• Saskia Amalia Aryono, Product Owner at LinkAja: “It’s important to have the same objectives and focus on the same growth metrics (activation, engagement, retention) so that we are always on the same page rather than having our own agenda. Then collaborate with marketing on customer journey design and customer lifecycle from the product and marketing side to achieve these KPIs. If not, both teams will tend to compete rather than collaborate on things like product roadmap prioritization.”

• Rasis Maulana Setiawan, Digital Marketing Lead at LinkAja: “At LinkAja, our key principle is about being customer-first. When you focus on the customer, you will inevitably look at the key data signals from them and keep your product and processes uncomplicated. With all teams looking towards the same objective, product/marketing alignment will come naturally.”

How to Support Cross-Collaboration Between Marketing and Product,

Some key strategies for cross-collaboration between marketing and product highlighted during the event include agreeing on business objectives and metrics, co-creating experiments rather than running separate tests at the same time, and sharing timely insights to ensure everyone is on the same page, especially when it comes to product-roadmap collaboration.

• Saskia Amalia Aryono, Product Owner at LinkAja: “Every company should have a single source of truth when it comes to data. For LinkAja, this is a combination of their first party data from users, secondary data from tools like Mixpanel and Braze, along with qualitative research from the Customer Experience team. All this will add up to create strong justifications across cross-functional teams on every product decision to be made.”

How to Build Out a Tech Stack That Supports Both Marketing and Product Priorities

For starters, it's important that your overall stack is designed to meet both teams' objectives, with product analytics and consumer-facing messaging easily integrated and able to work seamlessly together. This is LinkAja's top criteria when selecting solutions to add to their tech stack. Ensuring product and marketing tools are fully integrated can help improve internal communications, stakeholder alignment, metric prioritization, and democratizing access to data—all of which have enabled LinkAja to cut back on time-consuming reporting and meetings.

• Rasis: “We don’t have a big team, so we really wanted to cut down the reporting process. With our stack, we can easily send campaign data from Braze to Mixpanel. From there, Product can simply log into Mixpanel to view consolidated data, reports and insights. This helped to improve our internal communications with all stakeholders and ensured that everyone was seeing the same set of data, and looking at the same focus metrics.”

Final Thoughts

To dive into these learnings and more, check out the recording of our "Converging Worlds of Product and Marketing" webinar featuring product, marketing, and growth experts from Mixpanel, LinkAja, and Braze, now available to watch on demand.