AMA: Cisco Head of Product Marketing, Webex Suite, Manav Tandon on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

Here's a non-comprehensive list of KPIs to choose from: Launch content # of press articles mentioning your product # of views on blog posts # of visitors to landing pages # of downloads of gated content # of social media post impressions # of users adopting the product/feature 30-60-90 days post-launch Demand Generation # of sourced MQLs (through activities like webinars) # of sourced SQLs (through activities like webinars) Position in Analyst Reports (e.g. Gartner, IDC, etc.) Position in Softwa ...Read More

Build relationships with your stakeholders in Product Management, Sales and other Marketing teams (Content, Digital, DG, Integrated, etc.). Ask them to invite you to meetings and listen intently to identify areas where they need help, and volunteer to help with with those areas - e.g. market trends analysis, customer segmentation, competitive analysis, content creation, sales enablement collateral, etc. In short, take the initiative to rise above your title and rank and prove to your stakeholder ...Read More

It's hard to pick one skill... product marketers have to master a variety of skills to be effective in their roles - influencing people, messaging, content creation, sales enablement, opportunity assessments, competitive analysis, etc. But if I had to pick one, I would advise product marketers to continuously refine their messaging skills. And what I mean by messaging is the ability to simplify complex topics and subjects into clear, concise and compelling stories and narratives that will resona ...Read More

The decisions you make are a combination of your circumstances and the options available to you. I think luck and timing is always an overlooked factor. I recently read Einstein's biography, and it struck me how fortutious it was that he failed to get a job as an academic after graduating from college and had to settle for a patent clerk job at the Swiss patent office. If it weren't for this turn of events, he might not ever have come up with the theory of general relativity, because the key ins ...Read More

A couple of other areas beyond customer that PMMs and PMs can find common interests in are market trends and competitive landscape dynamics. PMMs can provide conduct their own research and provide insights around the directions the current market is heading towards, or even suggest adjacent markets that could be served by the product. Similarly, PMMs can bring insights into the competitive landscape, including, but not limited to, their feature sets, brand reputation, pricing and packaging, and ...Read More

You should seek out product marketing specialist roles. In such a role you'll get to help product marketing managers conduct market, customer and competitive research, analyze data on product adoption and new customer acquisition, and develop marketing content and sales collateral. You'll have opportunities to learn from the PMMs the more strategic aspects of product marketing, i.e. customer segmentation, positioning and messaging, while you deliver tactical and tangible assets like drafting blo ...Read More