Let’s turn Polimorphic into a GovTech legend

Hi team, my name is Zane. I'm excited by this opportunity to join as your Sr. PMM because my experience is a direct match for your needs and stage of growth.

I’m impressed by Polimorphic’s direction, team culture, and traction, and would like to use my background as an entrepreneur and founding product marketer to support Polimorphic in becoming the greatest success story GovTech has seen.

• Five years as a founding product marketer at GovTech companies, including Bang the Table, Konveio, and Social Pinpoint.

• A deep focus on AI strategy and experimentation, both for building new products and for creating smarter workflows.

• A passion for your mission and customer obsession, and the knowledge to begin marketing and contributing to Polimorphic on day one.
  
  
  zane.w.taylor@gmail.com | 405.205.5417 | Boulder, CO, USA

Customer-obsessed? 🙋‍♂️

When you study entrepreneurship as a degree, the main thing they instill in you is to be customer obsessed. And I made that into a core part of my professional identity. It’s one of the reasons why product marketing feels so natural to me.

In most cases, it’s a PMM’s job to be more (holistically) obsessed with customers than anyone in the organization. The idea of joining an entire company that shares this focus? Outstanding. Remarkable things will follow.

“Zane exemplifies what a product marketer leading partnerships should look like. From the beginning, he made a clear effort to build a genuine relationship with our team by taking the time to understand our needs, communicate openly, and establish trust.

What truly stood out was his deep commitment to Johns Creek's success. His product knowledge, enthusiasm, and flexibility were all key, but it was his strategic problem-solving, ability to garner internal support, and thoughtful, relationship-first approach that made him especially effective.

Ultimately, Zane helped us set a new standard for how official City plans are presented online.”

Jennifer Chapman
Senior Communications Manager at City of Johns Creek, Georgia
President, National Association of Government Web Professionals (NAGW)

I’m able to lead, coordinate, support, or influence launches at Polimorphic, on large or small scales, with creativity and wisdom.

I have a high bar for what qualifies as a "launch." On one hand, there's the ever-evolving game of GTM strategy, which I've spent years practicing from every angle.

Then there's the all-out, hyper-coordinated blitz culminating in big moments at events and across the web, like a Kickstarter campaign or a product launch at CES.

The award-winning launch I helped to coordinate at CES before GovTech involved a roughly 7-month internal process requiring collaboration with around 50 different people. It's been a few years, but I've seen what it takes to put forth a large launch for a product with global sales and distribution from the inner circle.

“Zane was an instrumental force behind the successful global launch of Sphero Specdrums. He joined us from the Specdrums team (following the acquisition) and quickly proved himself as a natural product marketing leader with a bias toward action and the ability to thrive under pressure and strict timelines.

Throughout the product development process, his collaboration across members of our engineering and product teams nudged the product’s direction in ways that proved essential to the product’s success. Zane drove key aspects of Specdrums’ go-to-market plan, from defining the messaging in our sales playbooks and sales decks to steering our product launch at CES 2019, culminating in the product winning "Best of CES" by WIRED.

Zane has a bright career ahead as a product marketing leader, and I would welcome the opportunity to work with him again.”

Jon Carrol
Chief Technology Officer at Sphero

Launch Experience Summary

In a broad sense, I’ve worked on launches from the ground up countless times and supported other launches at various individual stages (like Sphero’s Holiday shopping campaigns).

Strategic GTM refinement

• 🔑 Pricing & Packaging for Business Impact: Generated an effective pricing model at Konveio that shortened sales cycles for new customers while optimizing ACV with the creation of an attractive (and fair) ladder of pricing tiers up to our enterprise plans.

  • This was an ever-evolving pursuit with almost quarterly revisions to our tiers, value metrics, and product, ending with the model and programs Konveio has been growing with ever since.

• 🔑 Strategic Growth Hacking: Konveio’s consultant partnership program leverages “land and expand” in clever ways enabled by simple product tweaks. This is currently serving as a hugely important driver of new logo growth and retention.

Launches

• High-Volume Feature Launches: I was responsible for launching dozens of features at Bang the Table and managed all feature release communications at Konveio, establishing new processes like release notes pages to improve clarity for customers and internal teams.

• 🔑 Pioneering New GTM Motions: I led the creation of two separate product-led growth (PLG) initiatives at Konveio, presenting self-service platforms aimed at frictionless sales over long sales cycles. Both were launched at key events, 3CMA and CNU, respectively.

• Kickstarter Campaign raising 12x its goal.

• Award-winning product Launch at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

• EngagementHQ’s “Bluehaven” platform overhaul (See below.)

EngagementHQ launches

Launch strategy & product messaging as buyer enablement and renewal security

“Bluehaven” was the company’s largest and most impactful product release in its 12 years of existence.
The release reskinned their entire platform, added new features, changed workflows, and reimagined the look and feel of the entire platform for both administrators and our clients’ residents. This naturally creates some business challenges.

Rather than making a ‘flash in the pan’ launch video, I chose to focus more of my effort toward more fundamentally overhauling the company’s product narrative for its future with Bluehaven, and create a long-lasting impact for the organization. Five years later, the new demo video still appears prominently on the acquirer's (Granicus) website with minimal modification.

• It established a new narrative for the brand and sales demos, highlighting benefits and themes over features.

• It served as critical buyer enablement, shrinking the sales cycle.

• It showed the Australian market we still had "it," keeping long-time customers from leaving us for new competitors.

Konveio’s Feature Posts

We launched several innovations at Konveio rather soon after GPT made it possible, namely AI-search and AI-Analytics. Both are refined and add real value to our customers. I’m proud of what our small team was able to do.

Event presence

I designed all of our materials for conferences unsupported. The largest we could go as such a small team was to include a cutout of Buddy the Elf holding a cardboard sign (which originally said “you sit on a throne of PDFs” at CNU’s conference). People kept stopping by to take a selfie with it, so it became a cheap conference tradition from then on.

Zane spent his first month of consulting as our Sr. Product Marketing Manager on-site with our team in Brisbane, Australia. 

Zane laid the foundation for the product marketing function and unified our global teams around the foundational messaging of both our brands. He engaged with every department to develop a suite of competitive intelligence resources from battlecards and platform comparison charts to comparison pages for key competitors.

Zane was embedded in our marketing department for all four months. He generated useful artifacts that helped our teams write better content and campaigns on their own. By the end, our leadership team could really sense that he had made it a point to make everyone on the team more energized, creative, and effective in their work. There was a tangible difference before, during, and after his contract.

I came to see him as a budding product leader. One who is notably passionate about supporting internal teams, our clients’ success, and the future of the product. Outside the scope of our work, he demonstrated a creative eye for innovation across GovTech and always had an original idea to discuss about the future of AI in the industry.

Brian Ashton
Chief Product Officer at MySite
(DBA: Social Pinpoint & Consultation Manager)

Driving Webinar Registrations & Enabling Sales

This video was a collaborative effort with Account Executive Michelle Stevens to create a coherent message that would drive traffic to a newly crafted demo site and generate registrations for her upcoming webinar. Michelle is a subject matter expert, but I produced the video from tip to tail and created the demo environment.

The result of the collaboration was:

• Overwhelming Demand: The webinar received so many registrations that we had to upgrade our company's Zoom membership to accommodate the participants.

• Long-Term Sales Enablement: The video and demo environment remained a key sales enablement resource for the entire sales team for several years, even after the company was acquired by Granicus.

• Bonus - Empowering Colleagues: A key part of this project was coaching my sales counterpart to help her find her voice, work through the script, and deliver a confident performance on camera. I am particularly skilled at empowering internal partners to communicate effectively and shine.

  • This skill comes from two backgrounds. First, as an entrepreneurship student coaching others on elevator pitches. This skill led Specdrums to win multiple pitch competitions, one from Red Bull and the other from CU Boulder for $75k. The other half comes from my time as a videographer, interviewing people who have never been on camera before.

Bonus idea:

There will come a time…

…when the most effective perspective that helps Polimorphic to close deals, will be just… regular people.