* Practice some basic questions you will get using the STAR method (The STAR method is a structured manner of responding to a behavioral-based interview question by discussing the specific situation, task, action, and result of the situation you are describing) * Do you have a product marketing philosophy? * What’s the biggest project you’ve led? What worked/ didn’t? * Challenge: If you had $5k to spend in any way you wanted, how would you spend it and why? * Will this be the same type of role you’ve done before or something different? * Have you been promoted in your previous role? * How did you manage success in your last role? * What new skill have you learned lately? (personal or professional) * What metrics are important to manage as a product marketer? * For case studies, here are some common ones I've seen to be prepared for: * Fill out a messaging & positioning doc for a product of their choice. * Create a mini go-to-market strategy for a product they like and present it to the team * Dissect a launch, and to tell you who they think it was positioned to (and why), the highs and lows, and what they would have done differently * Yasmeen Turayhi wrote a great book I'd recommend

Tiering and t-shirt sizing a launch should be based on "how impactful is this to my customer and the company?" If it's a brand new product suite, a new offering in the market either for the company or the space, or a material investment/improvement from what exists today--that's a Tier 1, full-court press (whatever that means for your company!) Moderate improvements, new SKUs, bigger features that are exciting but not totally new and different for the company are the market are more medium-Tier launches. Smaller features and incremental updates can be covered in release marketing only, maybe in-app notifications, or documentation because they're more for end-users vs buyers are Tier 3.

Yes, templates can be helpful, as long as they don't limit your creativity and thinking. Sometime you can get into a "rinse and repeat" rhythm with product launches and miss bigger opportunities — and a really rigid launch template can create that dynamic. One resource I've found to be effective to help other teams know how/when to plug in is a "Teams We Work With" document. Organized in phases (discovery, development, strategy building, GTM rollout), it details each of the teams that PMM engages with and 3-4 sentences about how we work with them. It helps create transparency about who's involved, awareness of just how many teams are involved, and clarity on when stakeholders should expect to jump in. GTM brief templates can be helpful, too, with the right flexibility — with ample space to share target audiences, goals & KPIs, risks, timeline, GTM channels, creative assets needed, FAQ, etc.

I'd have to go with this classic: "Describe your process for launching a new product." Why? A product launch is the quintessential act of product marketing. It places the product marketer as the orchestrator between product, sales, customer success, and core marketing. If you understand how to successfully launch a product, you understand how to be a successful product marketer. The best answers to this question don't start with a laundry list of channels and assets--they start with the "why". Why are we launching the product? What do we hope to gain? Is the goal primarily to generate leads? Drive revenue? Gain awareness? How will we measure success? Once the purpose and goals of the launch are made clear, the next steps are typically as follows: 1: Nail the messaging and positioning (get this into a doc as a single source of truth, and ensure every single deliverable and piece of content ladders up to it) 2: Make a list of the deliverables (internal and external content that needs to be created, the customers who need to be involved, approvals and buy-in, etc.) 3: Build your launch plan (specific activities that need to be completed by certain dates by specific owners) 4: Establish a regular check-in cadence to execute on the plan and ensure everyone is aligned

B2B - The foundation of any successful launch is a compelling insight. This is especially true in B2B. To get to that golden nugget, even if you have a research group and/or an awesome, collaborative sales team - meet the customers. There is nothing like first-hand experience when it comes to truly understanding customer. That's where your aha moment is most likely to happen. - On the creative delivery front, remember that in B2B your LTV is typically extremely high, especially if you're at the enterprise/10,000 employee level. Instead of a "campaign" or broad approach to marketing the message you've developed, imagine what you would do to reach one, specific large client if you had $1000 to spend. Come up with creative ideas and ask yourself if they're scalable. - Make sure the sales team is on board with the messaging hierarchy. They are your biggest clients and they are the one in the trenches every day hearing the same things from customers. Be sure to listen. Include them. The insights you develop and the way you reach your shared audience should get them excited. B2C - For either B2B or B2C, once you get alignment on the key value props and messaging hierarchy. share it out like crazy. I'm a fan of actually printing out the top three value props, in order, and posting them on the wall. That hierarchy should serve as the Source of Truth for everything and anything related to communicating the product. It can't do that if it's sitting on a proverbial shelf i.e. in a Google Doc no one has opened in five weeks. - In B2C the messaging hierarchy is critical, but I notice a lot of people fall down on the creative delivery. Finding where in-product you want to tell the story (and it better not just be a company blog post) and the external channels is not the end. If you're just throwing together creative that has the words you want to say and the brand colors, you're missing a huge opportunity. The bar for creative excellence should be just as high as the bar you set for strategic positioning. If you don't feel like you're the creative type, partner up with someone who is to ensure your message gets to customers in a compelling way. - Because they're public-facing, B2C cross-functional teams are often wider and everything gets a bit more scrutiny. Start bringing people into the process early and over-communicate the state of the launch, creative and results. 

Great question, here are 3 potholes to AVOID when building 1. Not becoming the undisputed expert on your product, market, and audience: * Great PMM teams form strong opinions through rigorous research across market, product, and competition * Focus on three areas: market/persona understanding, competitive intelligence, and deep product knowledge * My favorite research methods: win/loss analysis, paid expert interviews, Gong calls, customer interviews, using competitor’s products, and podcasts 2. Not embedding with Product Management early enough * PMM should join product management discussions early in the product development lifecycle. This ensures PMM can: * Effectively scope and plan launches with full context * Develop and review differentiated positioning before go-to-market * Have time to conduct market and competitor research and course-correct if differentiation isn't strong enough * And in many cases, influence the product direction based on market insights 3. Not getting radical alignment on your messaging house * In the early days of building PMM, it's easy for PMM to think the foundational messaging is complete and understood by the company. More often than not, this is not the case. * It takes more discussions, collateral, and enablement sessions than you'd think making sure everyone, from exec leadership to ICs are fully enabled and aligned on your brand and product messaging. * It's easy to move quickly and skip this step, but it is crucial you spend enough time evangelizing the messaging before calling it done. * Certification programs go a long way to ensuring this is done well.

I love this question because I came from brand marketing before. I like to think about it as the distinction between the promise and the proof. The partnership between these two teams is essential. Brand is the promise you make to your customers about your core ethos and what they can expect from you. It sets the tone for the relationship and is the thing that you often fall back on when times get tough. The brand team owns this promise, but like any promise it has to be believable. Your product is the proof. Product Marketing owns showing how the promise of the brand is relevant in unique ways that meet the needs of the audiences you serve. It's on product marketing to make the promise real every day when a customer uses your product or when you're introducing a new product for the first time.

It's pretty difficult to get a straightforward read on the effectiveness of your messaging and positioning but there are a few things you can do to ensure your messaging is more likely to succeed. 1) During the process of creating the messaging, work with your market research team to test aspects of the messaging with prospects and customers. This can be both quantitative test of words or descriptors you use as well as qualitative tests where you actually test aspects of a pitch with customer. 2) Get input early and often from your sales, customer success, and support teams. 3) Use A/B testing to evalute how the messaging resonates on your website, search, social copy. Once you've created the messaging, you can use your channel metrics to track how well it's resonating but give it time. Any change of messaging takes a while to take hold with the audience (be it sales or customers) so don't be in a rush to make an update just because you see metrics dip initially.

Alignment across the org is critical to having strong internal and external messaging. I take these steps to gain org-wide alignment: 1. Identify executive/key stakeholders & goals * Determine which executives will be part of the development process, which will be informed, and the elements they feel are critical to convey * Understand the goals of the teams that will use your messaging and the components they need for their work streams 2. Support messaging with data * Research the latest market trends relevant to the target audience, how the audience is responding to those trends, and the competitive landscape * Gather input from internal research teams and subject matter experts 3. Keep stakeholders in the loop * Check in regularly with stakeholders throughout the development process and share key insights that shaped the messaging 4. Launch and support * Share messaging in a live setting to generate excitement for the story and answer questions that are top of mind * Go on a roadshow and attend team meetings to dive deeper into the story * Host office hours to support teams using the messaging to guide their work streams

For clarity, I’ll draw a distinction here between product research and product launch research. 1) Product research happens before resources are committed to build the proposed product. Product research is critical to ensure that you are, to use YCombinator parlance, “making something people want”. This is frequently called validation research. You are validating that A) a customer need exists, and B) what you propose to build will meet that customer need. And you are seeking to understand the nuances around that customer need. Individual customer interviews are the main way that validation research is carried out. 2) Product launch research is conducted to ensure that your launch is effective in driving launch goals, which might be product adoption, increased customer acquisition, revenue from an incrementally-priced product, enhanced customer retention, etc. While in early-stage startups a single person may have a PM and PMM role, in more developed companies it is typically the PM who is the primary owner of product research, and the PMM who primarily owns product launch research. (This fits with my general belief that the PM should own product strategy, and the PMM should own go-to-market strategy.) Thus, from here, I’ll elaborate more on product launch research. The amount of dedicated research you do for a product launch should be commensurate with the importance of that launch. For more important launches, the research will likely include: 1) Customer research. Which launch messaging will most resonate with customers? What questions and objections are customers likely to have when presented with the launch messaging? 2) Competitive research. How differentiated will this new product be in the marketplace? How have competitors positioned similar products? What is the likely response from competitors once we launch our product? The PMM’s launch plan should have sections that cover the above two types of research, summarizing the findings and making recommendations accordingly. But here’s the thing: the reality of being a PMM in a fast-growing tech company is that the PMM’s window of time before launch is often quite brief. Even when the PMM has good lines of communication with the Product org, the PMM may only get a few weeks to prepare for the launch with the launch team they’ve assembled. For that reason, the PMM is often very limited in the amount of dedicated launch research they can do before they have to draft and finalize the messaging for the launch. So what should a PMM team do, to ensure that their launch is well-informed with knowledge of the customer and the marketplace? The PMM team should establish listening posts and intelligence-gathering processes so that, when it’s time to prepare for a new product launch, they’re already well-informed with regard to the usual research questions that surround a launch. These ongoing market research activities should be 80% of how a PMM knows about customers and the market — and the PMM can close the remaining 20% while preparing for the launch, to answer specific questions related to the unique nature of that launch. What are some examples of those ongoing listening posts and baseline intelligence-gathering processes? 1) Listen in on product validation interviews the PM conducts with customers. 2) Listen in on calls the AEs hold with prospects, or the CSMs hold with current customers. (Additionally, if you have a sales call recording system like Gong, use keyword searches to scan through Gong audio transcripts to find conversations of note.) 3) Read posts in online customer communities, whether first-party or third-party communities. 4) Read popular third-party websites and blogs written for your target audience. 5) Survey the Sales and Customer Success teams to learn about their perceptions of customer needs, and/or hold roundtable discussions with them. 6) Survey or poll your customer base to get their perspective on chosen topics. 7) Read websites and sales materials from competitors to understand how they describe their offerings and how they position against their competitors. 8) Sign up to use competitor products, and conduct detailed product teardowns to understand the nuances of competitor product capabilities and shortcomings.