AMA: Albertsons Companies Vice President of Marketing, Francisco M. T. Bram on Platform Product Marketing

Unlike highly specialized roles like Finance, Engineering or even HR that traditionally have vertical careers, I don’t believe Product Marketing has a typical career path. As a generalist role, working as a Product Marketer allows you to gain exposure and experience across different functions, from customer research and product management to marketing and sales. I have friends and former colleagues that recently pivoted from Product Marketing to Product Management. Nonetheless, I believe the most common career path for a Product Marketer Manager is to develop into the leader of the team (Head/Director of PMM) and eventually grow into department head (Sr. Director or VP of Marketing). The most recent example is Greg Joswiak, Apple’s CMO that rose through the ranks as a prominent product marketing executive. Other examples include friends and former colleagues such as Mike Polner now VP of Marketing at Discord and Laura Jones CMO at Instacart, both with strong foundations in Product Marketing. As a highly cross-functional role, my recommendation is to leverage this opportunity to collaborate closely with other functions and learn about their day-to-day and roles and responsibilities, it might spark some interest and open up career opportunities you haven't previously considered. 

The best way for a product marketer to get promoted is by demonstrating the impact of their work. To do this, I incentivize all my PMMs to befriend data and tie their deliverables to key business and customer metrics. To me, the two most important categories of metrics are: 1) Customer insights a. Number of actionable insights that helped drive product development b. Number of actionable insights that informed a business strategy/service 2) Customer engagement a. Product adoption: This is the % of customers that adopted a new service or product launched by PMM. b. Customer lifetime value (LTV): The total dollar amount you're likely to receive from the customers that adopted the new service or product, over the average life of the product or services. c. Active and engaged customers: Number of customers that actively engage with the product, could be measured daily, weekly or monthly.

Successful product marketers are both right and left brained. Thus, in addition to the hard skills, they must possess soft skills to rally teams behind their ideas. There are five fundamental soft skills that product marketers must demonstrate: * Passion * Adaptability * Cross-functional leadership * Prioritization * Executive presence I wrote a blog post about these key PMM soft skills here. For Hard Skills, from my experience the most important skills are: 1. Market Sizing - Total Addressable Market (TAM) 2. Customer Segmentation 3. Narrative Design 4. Go-to-Market Strategy 5. Measurement Check out my blog post about these key PMM hard skills here.

When you're starting out your career as a PMM, it is very important to remember that your value promise is to customers and not internal stakeholders. I don't mean to say that internal alignment and buy-in isn't important but it should never take priority over serving your customers. In my early days, I spend 80% of my time trying to understand what were the needs of my internal stakeholders and ensuring I was supporting them fully, leaving little focus on the customer. The moment I started prioritizing customer needs over internal stakeholder needs, when I started to champion customers internally, my work started to gain much more purpose. And while this approach initially created some internal friction, overtime I gained a reputation for being the voice of customers and someone people would rely on to validate product and service roadmaps. Another thing I wish I knew early on was the importance of celebrating little wins. Driven by our ambition and desire to succeed, we often tend to give too much “air time” to our concerns, angst or even anxiety, forcing us to work extra-hard to ease some of those fears. As a consequence, we are left with little time to enjoy the ride, celebrate the little wins and be grateful for the journey. My advice to product marketers is: Enjoy the ride and find time to celebrate each moment along the journey. Out time on earth is limited and we spend most of our time working, so make a habit of finding ways to celebrate little wins, develop a purpose and enjoy the ride. 

That’s a great question. The most successful salespeople build relationships with customers by selling them the promise of a product or platform that will evolve, as their needs evolve. And in today’s digital environment where most transactions happen online, Product Marketing teams are the new Sales team. This means you need an airtight narrative that not only accurately positions today’s capabilities but also sells the vision for the platform. That’s the most impactful positioning Product Marketers can create. Think of your favorite TV show, where the entire season has one story arc (one umbrella narrative) that unveils across multiple episodes. The reason you probably decided to give that show a try was the premise of the experience you expect the show will deliver. The same is true for a platform in its early stages where each release is a chapter in your platform overarching story or narrative. In addition, building a strong platform positioning and narrative early on, will set the tone and inspire product and tech teams to deliver, creating a great opportunity for Product Marketing to help drive the product roadmap. The key is to ground your platform positioning in a deep understanding of the customer journey so you can build a future-proof narrative.

Product marketing and Marketing are all working towards the same goals: raise awareness, drive product adoption and drive business conversion to serve customers and help the company grow. Marketing has existed since the late 1800's with the invention of the first mail product catalogue. Tiffany's Blue Book was the first mail-order catalogue in the United States that really set the standard for product-driven marketing. For the longest time, the evolution of Marketing has been slow and steady with very few innovations. However, with the invention of the internet and mobile phones, marketing has evolved more in the last 20 years then its previous 200 years combined. This evolution also helped transform Marketing organizations centered around generic marketing manager roles to a hyper-specialized team of marketers. To create a strategy and an impactful marketing plan, PMMs need to know how to leverage each marketing function. To succeed in a modern technology company, PMMs need to understand and collaborate closely with very specialized marketing colleagues, such as Brand, Creative, CRM, Performance and Content. Product marketing owns the GTM strategy and are the marketing campaign architects. They leverage insights to develop a product narrative, segment the market and coordinate an integrated multi-channel marketing strategy. As a product marketing manager, you will partner with each marketing team to build a comprehensive, multi-channel integrated marketing plan. A PMM's marketing brief is the source of truth for all tactics and initiatives identified in the marketing plan. PMMs will create the strategy and marketing brief designed to inspire the other marketing functions to produce creative work and execute on the plan. A great brief not only inspires work but can ultimately move cultures, brands, people. A great brief is a combination of: a problem + an insight + an idea. To get the best out of other marketing teams, PMMs need to be as clear and unambiguous as possible in their briefs. Once the brief is created and approved, PMMs will act as GTM managers, creating weekly status meetings, keeping a timeline, managing the launch calendar and reporting on the progress of each tactic and initiative. Please note, that at smaller companies, PMMs may need to wear different hats and perform some of the work specialized marketing work mentioned above.

The most important thing you should expect from your new manager when you first join an organization is a detailed onboarding document with a 90-day plan. The document should provide background information on the company, industries, and competitors with links to source files and documents. It should also outline the company’s vision, the annual operating plan for the business and the department OKRs or goals. As part of your orientation plan, your boss should identify a list of key individuals for you to meet with topics to cover in each meeting. The document should also contain links to any customer research or insights that will help you inform your understanding of your customer base and target audience. This plan should also highlight what your core responsibilities are, how much budget you have at your disposal, what product launches you will be leading, how your success will be measured and what expectations there are for your first 30-60-90-day milestone. Finally, make sure to book regular time with your boss in your first 30 days, at least 2x per week as you ramp-up.

Product marketing is the process of taking the right product to the right market with the right narrative to the right audience and at the right time. More specifically, a product marketer is the voice of the customer, helping organizations uncover insights that can inform product and marketing plans. The best way for you to convey the value of PMM is to fight for your customers. A lot of times, PMMs will face the dilemma of supporting internal goals vs meeting external customer needs. No matter what, always represent your customer interests, be their voice internally. It may make you feel uncomfortable, possibly even create some short-term friction with peers but this won’t go unnoticed with senior leaders and overtime you will build a credible reputation for championing customers. You will start to have a bigger voice at the table, helping polish product roadmaps, weighing in on strategic partnerships and helping prioritize what new verticals to enter next. These are the stories and experiences that will position you as customer-obsessed product marketer helping you get promoted or nail that next job interview.

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