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

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 handled by other teams, particularly in larger organizations. I'm also seeing more requests for PMMs with experience in product-led growth (PLG) and enterprise GTM motions.

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 that you show that you have most of the requested skills is key.

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 know that candidates don't have all the details to create something like a 30-60-90 plan (especially for more junior PMM roles), so they're hone the assignment to a more concrete deliverable that reflects the day-to-day responsibilities, skills, and expertise required for the job.

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. Assuming that you updated the sales messaging, conference decks, etc. once you confirmed the updated messaging on the website, you can also include qualitative information. For example, are sales reps telling you that it's much easier to frame up the product, market, and/or company in their conversations? Are you hearing prospects and customers adopt the language from the updated messaging? This is particularly true for companies that are trying to do category creation or coin new terms as part of their messaging and positioning. If people quickly bounce from the site, it might mean that they don't understand what the product does or how it helps. If sales reps spend half the call just trying to articulate what the product is, how it relates to the problem space, etc., that might indicate that the messaging and/or positioning are off. You do need to have a baseline in order to show "success". If you're updating messaging and positioning, particularly on public-facing assets where you already track quantitative metrics, you should be able to see at least some effect of the change. One struggle is that teams often change too many things at once. They update the core concept, the copy, the screenshots, the colors, the journey, etc. in one fell swoop. This makes it much more difficult to understand which element had any/most impact. If you can stagger roll out the updates, you are more likely to be able to measure whether updating the messaging and/or positioning improved conversion.

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 conversations with Product Managers, insights about how the customer speaks into campaign briefs for creative/demand-gen/performance marketing teams, etc. Strong candidates can tell the full story from finding and articulating an insight, linking that insight to a next action (update onboarding, make a demo, etc.), taking or facilitating the action, and then measuring the outcome. It's not enough to just say that you ran a product launch or updated a product tour. WHY did take those actions? How did you measure them? Do you consider it to be a success? If not, what would you change next time to be more successful?