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

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 prio ...Read More

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 mo ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 (TA ...Read More

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 Mar ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 % ...Read More

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 wi ...Read More

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 ...Read More