AMA: Atlassian Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio, Ashley Faus on Product Marketing Interviews

Hopefully, there's at least 1 public example of the messaging and positioning (like the company website and/or product tour). You can show the website as it exists today, while talking through the research process to understand why the prior messaging didn't resonate with the audience, steps you took to refine and test the new messaging, and before/after metrics like traffic, conversion, time-on-site, scroll depth, and other engagements on the site as a way to show quantitative success metrics. ...Read More

In most cases, these types of deliverables won't be particularly useful because you don't have enough context to actually make solid plans or recommendations. And, while it's nice to think that it shows initiative, it also leaves a lot of room for the candidate to get something wrong because they don't have all the information. Instead, I recommend focusing on the assignment from the hiring team, using the full context of the interviews and the details of the assignment. Good hiring managers kno ...Read More

In general, it seems that the pendulum is swinging back to more generalist job descriptions. I'm seeing a lot more skills and experience related to traditional demand-generation and content marketing roles showing up in PMM job descriptions. Examples include wording like "manage end-to-end campaigns", "increase organic traffic", and "create content including blogs, product demos, and white papers". While most of these bullets are framed in the context of the product, this type of work is usually ...Read More

The biggest trait for me is genuinely caring about the audience and being curious about their needs. I can teach someone how to do competitive analysis or script a product demo, but I can't teach you to care about the people behind the screen. I also get very excited when I see people who can connect the dots across multiple teams and skill sets. PMMs act as the bridge between the audience and the organization, so they need to be able to translate pain-points into product improvements in their c ...Read More

I do recommend tailoring your resume for roles, but this doesn't mean that you need to have a version for every job. In some cases, it might mean re-ordering your bullets to reflect the most important aspects of the role, or adding some additional information if you have the skills and experience requested in the job description, but they aren't currently listed on your resume. Some companies ask their PMMs to handle tasks that might sit in another team in a different organization, so ensuring t ...Read More