AMA: Atlassian VP, Head of Product Marketing, Jira, Claire Drumond on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

LinkedIn. I recommend you spend time building a strong profile, use the features to showcase links to your work and take the time to write your bio & description for all of your work experience. While I review resumes during interview processes, I always look people up on Linkedin for more detail. Another great place to invest is on your Google Search Results themselves. There's a lot you can do to clean those up and make sure that anything you've published comes up when people search your n ...Read More

I really believe doing is the best way to advance your PMM career over certifications. That said, courses can give you a good baseline for frameworks and vocabulary, especially if you are changing careers or just getting started. I've taken these course and have found them useful for getting alignment in a newly formed product marketing team, for example. However, I really believe there's nothing more powerful than simply time in seat paired with a great network or mentor. My advice instead of t ...Read More

I attribute my career progress to two things: curiosity & persistence. Curiosity: I started my career as a journalist, and I find great satisfaction in trying to understand the why behind most things. In a professional setting, this has led to me learning about all aspects of the business I'm apart of, from marketing to data science to product development. This has helped me tremendously as a product marketer because our craft sits in the middle of so many different business functions. The b ...Read More

Product marketers need to be great storytellers for their products, but also for themselves. Internal communications, cross-functional collaboration, and executive comms are crucial to growing your career as a PMM. This is because product marketing is not only a functional career, it's a strategic career. You have to be able to influence your product teams, your business teams, and your supporting marketing teams. You are often the face of the product and need to be able to speak publicly or wit ...Read More

Great writers are not born great writers. Writing is a skill like any other hobby, sport, or craft -- you have to practice all the time. If this is a growth area for you, I would suggest enrolling in a storytelling workshop like Duarte to make sure you have the right frameworks and tools to construct compelling stories. Then I would practice by writing blog posts, fake press releases, internal strategy documents, etc. using your framework of choice. Continue to ask yourself if you can make it si ...Read More