AMA: Asana Head of Global Product Marketing, Eric Bensley on Product Marketing Skills

Keep raising your hand and try to demonstrate your capabilities beyond your current role. Jump at stretch projects and think bigger about what you're doing. If you're doing enablement, are their strategic questions you could be asking for the campaigns motion to make sure the two tie together? Could you put a proposal together about how to do something different that could change the way your company works? To get the stretch opportunities, your leaders need to see your capabilities. Show them you're interested in more with your actions.

Positioning and product launches. The differentiation is at the margins. Anyone can create a fact sheet....not everyone can create a keynote. Anyone can launch a feature....not everyone can get press attention on a launch. I often talk about the difference between a good PMM and great PMM as the last 10%. Good PMM's get to 90% done, great PMMs care about getting it to 95%, 96%, 97%. It can feel ambiguous but good PMM leaders notice the difference here.

Communication is #1. This is what I look for in senior leaders regardless of focus area. If it's a core PMM, I want to see launch assets or customer-facing assets. If it's a GTM PMM, I want to see internal decks walking through how strategies were set up and sold to stakeholders. Here's what I look for in communication: -Is it concise? -Is it clear? -Is it compelling? Details matter here. I look for people that intentionally choose every work and image. The failproof way to learn this is work on customer-facing content that gets a lot of views or internal content that goes to executive stakeholders. The key is to create content for the harshest critics, over & over again.

I don't know if the skills change dramatically, and that prob feels counterintuitive. Of course, if you're going for an AI PMM role, you need to know the space in depth. And I'd say it's helpful to understand the AI space for most tech company PMM roles right now. That said, communication is communication. Gen AI tools can help you get to an MVP faster but the nuance of understanding the buyer, channel, and company goals is something only a human can grok. In a previous answer, I covered that good PMMs get comms 90% there, great PMMs do that last 10% best. AI gets us to 90% faster but doesn't nail the last 10%. Communication is still the most critical skill.

Short answer is that the PMMs that stand out to me are the ones that anticipate challenges and proactively address them. All PMMs can take work that's assigned to them but very few create their own meaningful bodies of work. I actually wrote a post about this if you're interested: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-show-your-leader-youre-eric-bensley/

You're starting in a good spot here on Sharebird. I think writing and deck design are fantastic foundational skills that you can learn through online course OR in pro-bono work. It's hard to say without knowing more about your current situation but are there areas in your current work or personal life that need better communication? An upcoming event? A blog post? etc? Where can you get the at bats?

This one has to start with clear, shared goals/OKRs. You have to understand what the product team is on the hook for and figure out how your work aligns. Some product leaders are trying to get more impressions on their product, some are focused squarely on pipeline, etc. For instance, with the most recent launch I'm working on, product leadership cared most about landing a certain number of customers. So our comms to that team and between teams is about progress, pivots, and anything to do with hitting our customer goal.