To showcase your work without actually showing your work, you can instead show your process. Any messaging work will have a before and after, even if the prior state was an unlaunched product. 1. Describe what you were given. What was the new product/feature or existing messaging? 2. What was your process for determining the new messaging? 3. Were there any disagreements or misalignments about your new messaging? How did you get alignment to launch your new messaging through sales and marketing assets? 4. What was the result? How did you measure results to know whether it worked? Spend most of your time on describing your process. The hiring manager isn't hiring you for the specific messaging or results that you produced in your past role. They're hiring you because you have a repeatable, but flexible process or playbook to create effective messaging. Use the messaging you created as an example of that process and spend your time on that instead.

Brilliant question. If developed correctly, your messaging pillars should be evergreen (i.e. should not change on a dime) from campaign to campaign. Ultimately, your messaging pillars bring to life the core value your product/service delivers to customers and hence should be foundational. As you release new product features, think about how they ladder up to your core messaging pillars (aka the value you deliver to customers) and map them as such. Here are some best practices to ensure you get maximum traction from your messaging and that there is consistency across how channel marketers, PR teams, sales etc. use them. 1. Develop a 'How to guide' - In a how to guide, your role is to essentially breakdown and provide guidance to your key stakeholders on how they should be using your messaging - are there direct copy points they can leverage for the website, social, ad copy? Can your PR team directly leverage speaking points or use your messaging pillars? Can your sales team directly use your pitch with a talk track? Break it down for them with instructions, so it’s easy for your stakeholders to use and re-use your messaging. Good messaging is used on an ongoing and consistent basis across 360 channels - to promote customer recall. 2. Roadshow - Showshow your messaging across your sales, customer success, marketing organization - and explain how each team can effectively utilize your messaging. 3. Centralize where you store your messaging - so its easily findable and referencable by all stakeholders. Encourage folks to bookmark it

There are a few ways you can validate your messaging: * I like to start by doing a customer listening tour. Spend some time getting to know your target customer and pay close attention to the way that they are describing their process and pain points. When you unveil your final messaging, it's important that you're speaking to your audience in the words that they use to ensure that your message resonates. * I also like to look at market trends and SEO insights to help inform the direction. I'll often spend time on third party review sites like G2 to understand how they're defining categories and features. It's also helpful to comb reviews of your own product and your competitors to again understand how the market is tending to describe certain features and functionality. It's always helpful to root yourself in what your audience already knows, how they're talking about things, and how they're already searching for things in their own words. * When it comes to true messaging, like the actual six words that are going to appear in big bold leaders at the top of your website, you can conduct user tests to understand how this message resonates. This takes time and resources, so I'd only recommend this for really big projects, like a total repositioning of your product vs. a small feature launch. Have your team mock up your top 2-3 messaging variations and see how the audience responds through guided interviews. Alternatively, you can incorporate message testing into surveys or run A/B test on paid ads to see what converts. 

There are a few different ways to go about creating personas (which may be more closely aligned to “archetypes” or “segments” depending on the terminology your organization uses). The way you source the data largely depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. But the short answer is you can use qualitative data, quantitative data, or a mix of both. Either way, you’ll usually get the best results with primary research data - data you collect as opposed to insights you find in published research. Methodology: 1. Using qualitative data is a good choice if: 1. Your target audience is difficult to reach (e.g. HR professionals or executives of large companies) 2. You don’t have the budget or tools to conduct quantitative research 3. You already have a strong sense of who your user/buyers are and are looking for a deeper, richer understanding of these folks 4. You need to complete the research on a short timeline 2. Using quantitative data is a good choice if: 1. You want to better understand the total addressable market (TAM), which kinds of attitudes, wants and needs make each segment unique, and which segments are most aligned with your offerings 2. You want to learn more about your existing user base by leveraging behavioral data (e.g. platform usage or purchase behavior), and segment them into groups based on their behavioral patterns 3. You have the resources and time to fully develop the research methodology to accurately meet your needs Research Objectives: 1. You’ll also want to consider your primary research objectives. Are you looking for personas that will primarily impact current or future strategic initiatives? Which teams will be leveraging these personas? Will they need to be operationalized in a way that will include algorithms and formulas to track their behavior? 1. Whether quantitative or qualitative, personas that are primarily based on attitudes, wants, and needs tend to be more future-focused because they highlight unmet needs and areas of opportunity. If your goal is to grow your user base or create new, innovative products, this is a good place to start. 2. Personas that are rooted in current behavior help optimize for the present and shorter term strategies. For example, if you’re creating presonas to learn more about your most engaged users, or users of a particular product, this could be a good place to start. Protips: 1. Bonnie’s (Director of Market Insights) Pro tip: Prioritize the jobs to be done with your personas. If it only does one thing well, what should that thing be and who will leverage it the most? 2. Patti’s (Head of Consumer PMM) Pro tip: Get the most out of your personas by engaging all potential stakeholders before you finalize your research plan. 3. Sophia’s (Product Marketing Lead) Pro tip 3: Use what you have! Get scrappy and connect with whichever teams have the best access to your target audience (e.g. sales, customer service, data science, UX, market research, PMM, etc.). Take initiative to get in touch with customers, work with teams that have dedicated research resources (like UX and market research). 4. (For more, check out our answer to the question about persona framework!)

My answer would change depending on what we're talking about (B2b Marketing program vs Sales enablement program). For a sales enablement program: 1. Pitch Deck 2. Product use case glossary 3. Case study 4. Discovery question list or Demo video 5. (this isn't necessarily an asset) Prospecting lists / target account lists w/ enriched data

Product Marketing plays a critical role in launching products, but it is harder to measure. This question can come up frequently in performance reviews and setting OKRs for the coming year. Product Marketing owns several key areas of product launch - from defining customer needs and key features to launch strategy and target channels. Multiple goals may be binary - Did you do customer research? Did you create a launch plan? The challenge comes when you want to tie these activities to specific revenue results and try to separate what team contributed what percentage. The type of product also has an impact on what gets measured. For some it’s about active usage, or upgrades to premium features, while for others it’s about how many units are moved off the shelf. Product Marketing should help define the baseline goals and track improvements against these metrics as you optimize your marketing and outreach. One of the best options is to create shared goals. Frequently you can see conflicts between sales and marketing when the goals are different. Marketing may reach MQL goals, but sales may complain that the quality of leads were not high enough. The more you can align on the same goal, the more the teams work together to reach your overall revenue and profit goals. Ideally you can get to a point where everyone - from product management to product marketing to sales - are measured on the same target. Then each team can focus on how they can optimize their specific part of the process. In my current role, Product Managers, Product Marketing, and Growth Marketing all have common revenue targets. This enables us to all aim towards the same end goal. We can start with the customer journey and how we can contribute to bottom-line growth. Often it works well to create a prioritized list with all potential tactics back. Then we can easily determine if it’s more important to build a new feature or optimize our email messaging.

It is really hard to get these types of big deliverables right, as you won’t really have enough information as an interviewee to nail them. Unless I specifically ask for this type of deliverable, it can actually work against you. Instead, I prefer that candidates show how they think throughout the interview process. For example, prior to the hiring manager interview, spend a large chunk of time on the website and come prepared to talk about your observations re: what parts of their messaging you like (and why), and what parts need some work, offering a suggestion or two. Look at competitor websites and note what you think they do effectively. Look at the content your prospective employer produces and analyze where there are gaps in terms of content needed for the funnel, and talk about how you can fill those gaps. Is there too much thought leadership and not enough ‘how to’? Or the reverse? Are they lacking in customer evidence or competitive positioning? Do they have gaps in content for some of their personas - I.e. they are really strong with decision-maker content, but not so strong with content that appeals to practitioners. To me, this is more compelling than abstract deliverables.

1. There are a number of foundational research reports and insights you can provide to your product partners before they delve into the development process. These include: 1. A broader overview of the competitive landscape and market landscape 2. As well as a closer look at the health of your brand and how it fares against it competitors over time through brand trackers and CSAT (consumer satisfaction) surveys 3. In terms of users and target audience, they can draw on segmentation and persona research 4. And I find that my product partners greatly appreciate and rely on value proposition research to frame their design decisions and utilize messaging insights to better frame the end product to our users. 2. In terms of how we present these insights, we find it helps to give a preview to Product leaders first to clear up questions or reframe as needed given their feedback so they can become early supporters and proponents of the research. Also, when sharing out more widely to the product org, as calendars can be hard to manage, I find it easier to be added on as an agenda item on a recurring Product team meeting, as most of the team will be in attendance. Another way we are currently experimenting with having Product partners ingest and internalize insights at Glassdoor are through immersion workshops. This allows them to digest insights we currently have before developing new hypotheses, like incorporating new segmentation research. In this case, we can develop a shared understanding of the unmet user needs, break down the jobs to be done and identify user pain points of our target audience.

There are three key types of interviews you should consider preparing for when applying to a small or big tech company: · Product marketing core competency interviews · Behavioral interviews · Case interview / portfolio review assignments The skills companies look for are consistent, but each company assesses candidates slightly differently. For example, a company like Uber may lean on case study interviews (e.g., "How would you enter a new industry vertical…?") while a company like Amazon does more behavioral questions aligned with their cultural principles. Regarding resources I recommend, I wrote a few articles about how to prepare for PMM interviews. See below: 1) Product marketing interview preparation tips 2) Product marketing interview questions 3) Mastering go-to-market strategy interview questions

This is such a great example about how you can’t necessarily take a standard playbook and apply it to every company. The dynamics of team size, resourcing, stage of company, all factor in to how you approach defining the role of your team. To answer your question, it starts with finding ways to align your quarterly (or ideally bi-annual & annual) goals and getting clear on the unique value each team brings to the table. The last thing you want is to have competing time and resources, so you want both teams to be really proactive about sharing goals, priorities, and roadmaps in order to ensure you’re not duplicating efforts nor have competing priorities. Secondly, I think it’s important that there’s a shared understanding of the unique value each team brings to the table. In growth marketing, you’re going to have experts on channel strategy, performance, and distribution. In product marketing, you’re going to have experts on positioning, voice of customer, competitive differentiation. Get clear on that as a team. One last super tactical idea for you, I love a shared team brainstorm ahead of mapping goals and programs for the quarter. On the product marketing side, you could compile some research on customers, share the product roadmap, or do a competitive deep-dive to inform that brainstorm and help set up your teams to be aligned from the start. Hope this helps!