How a Guy Who Graded Film Got Tricked Into Product Marketing w/ Jason Druss
Jason Druss spent 15 years being the customer — a film colorist at Warner Bros, NFL Films, and his own Philly boutique — before Adobe pulled him into product marketing for Premier Pro and After Effects. In this episode, Jason (Principal Product Marketing Manager, Adobe) drops his takes: why workflow isn't a buzzword when you've actually lived it, how his team runs a private WhatsApp group with hundreds of users, and why being your own ICP is both a superpower and a trap.
If you've ever felt like a fraud talking about users you've never met, this one's for you.
More from this episode
Why "customer" gives Jason the ick (and what word he uses instead)
The PMM job is 50% talking to users — not Slack, not slides, not strategy decks
How Adobe's PMM team gets buy-in before a feature exists, not after
The Tarantino move: why Jason starts every story at the end
Being your own ICP is a cheat code… until it makes you look like a fanboy at annual planning
The exact reason Frame.io's Camera to Cloud killed an industry workflow that hadn't changed since 1920
Why every PMM should buy a pillow with their product's logo on it (yes, really)
The unsexy truth about "creative freedom" — you have to earn it with data first
How Jason found his PMM job: he wasn't looking, his mentor was watching his LinkedIn posts
Why "make it pretty" and "make it beautiful" are two completely different briefs
Time Stamps
00:00 Cold open — the misfit intros
00:45 Why this episode is different: a PMM pulled IN to PMM, not chasing it
01:30 Jason Druss intro — from colorist to Adobe PMM
02:15 THE QUESTION: Are product marketers marketers?
03:30 "We're storytellers before we're marketers"
04:30 Should the product or the user be the main character?
05:30 The trap of feature-led storytelling vs. workflow thinking
07:00 What "workflow" actually means (and why it's not jargon)
09:00 The Frame.io / Camera to Cloud story
12:30 How Frame.io rewrote a 100-year-old industry workflow
14:00 Jason's spicy take: PMMs must eat, live, breathe the product
16:00 How user needs have shifted dramatically in 5–10 years
18:00 The Premier Pro pillow story (and why every PMM should have one)
19:00 Where most companies fail at user research
20:30 The private WhatsApp group with hundreds of users
21:30 Weekly webinars, betas, and the questions you're NOT asking users
24:00 Scrappy is a state of mind, not a company size
25:00 Jason's career timeline: Blackmagic → NFL Films → Warner Bros → Frame.io → Adobe
28:00 The crisis of faith — leaving "colorist" behind
30:00 Why Jason's passion is impossible to fake
31:30 The dark side of being your own ICP
33:00 Mixing intuition with data — the PMM credibility unlock
35:00 Advice for aspiring PMMs: become a subject matter expert first
38:00 The creativity rant — your differentiator vs. AI
41:30 ROI, business metrics, and earning the seat at the table
44:00 The "beautiful circle" of product marketing (and who's outside it)
46:00 Where to find Jason + Adobe Max teaser
48:00 Outro
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