AMA: Enable VP of Product Marketing, Amanda Groves on Product Marketing Career Path

The biggest trends we're seeing in the market are related to consumers having: * more choices * less budget * more pressure to perform Causing: * longer sales cycles * "no decisions" * sticking with "status quo" This means as a PMM, we need to focus more than ever on our competitive positioning muscles. Sharpening competitive positioning and differentiated value propositions are critical skills for PMMs to finesse to ride the undulating waves of market changes. Help buyers understand why your brand is uniquely positioned to solve their pain, and give compelling enough messaging to incite them to act versus languish in no decision.

Growth marketing is an excellent background to segue into Product Marketing. Some projects you could consider showcasing to potential employers are: * Data-driven optimization projects: Showcase how your growth marketing background has influenced a specific "mico-funnel" or growth lever in a business. Bonus points if you're able to showcase segmentation by a specific persona, vertical, industry as prospective companies deeply care about targeting and personalization within the PMM profession. * Influencing internal stakeholders: Showcase how you influenced a change within the business from your past. This could be from drawing on qualitative of quantitative data, identifying an area of "red" that needs improvement, or unlocking a trend to invest more into. How did you influence the business to act on your findings and what were the outcomes? Highlighting your abilities to influence stakeholders is an important part of PMM and something businesses are keen to invest more into.

Hello! I would say that you're continuing to build on a strong PMM base given the pivot from product marketing into a more general role. When considering new roles that are back in a specialization, I'd encourage you to focus on the following facets of PMM in your resume: * Data-driven decision making * Influencing the roadmap * Segmentation * Messaging and positioning * R&D: competitive, market, customer intelligence Showcase how in your past roles you've been able to impact the aforementioned areas and help businesses hit their north star goals. Once you get to the interview stage, ensure you prepare answers using the STAR interview method: * Situation: Describe the context or background of the situation. * Task: Explain what you were required to do or your responsibilities. * Action: Describe the steps you took to fix the situation. * Result: Explain the outcome of your actions and what you learned from the experience. You can use numbers or hard data to illustrate the results. The STAR method helps ensure that your answer is comprehensive and covers all the points the interviewer is looking for. Align your experience to PMM competencies and articulate HOW (via STAR) to stick the landing on your next PMM role.

Hello! I would encourage you to ask for feedback in the interview follow-up to understand where things are misaligned. In general I hire for: Aptitude, Attitude, and Coachability. If you are showcasing your empathy, curiosity, and prowess for the assignment at hand you will strike a positive chord with the hiring team. I'd also suggest having conviction in your point of view as many companies want PMMs to influence and incite change. Make sure you do your homework and prepare compelling questions that showcase you're able to suss out unique solutions to complex problems.

I think there is always upside in advanced education however I myself as a hiring manager do not require it. There are many certifications now that folks can get from organizations like Reforge, Pragmatic, and PMA that help teach on the job skills and competencies. These programs may be able to move faster with SaaS trends versus traditional MBAs. It just depends where you want to work in terms of company size, stage, B2B/B2C, etc.

There are a few things that have helped my career in PMM. I have a journalism background so having a keen sense of asking questions to answer the five Ws: who, what, where, when why—has helped me develop targeted messaging, positioning, and push back when needed as it relates to market readiness of a new product. I also think having empathy, curiosity, and strong active listening skills are extremely important to developing a strong voice of the market. These traits also help with influencing stakeholders, fostering collaboration, and ultimately being the CMO of the product lines you serve as a PMM.

This is a great question and one that is definitely unique to the individual. I'd say for me, doubling down on my strengths while being aware of my weaknesses has been the move. We all have natural strengths that lead us to follow a certain path. Studying journalism and being a strong believer in words, empathy, curiosity, has allowed me to follow a certain trajectory that wouldn't have been possible if I focused on my weaknesses. However, as things evolve, certain weaknesses will essentially plateau your career. For example, I would consider myself an "expert" in PMM from an IC perspective, but knowing I wanted to break into exec leadership challenged how I delivered messages, held conviction, and said "no" versus being a people pleaser. Being self-aware of what subtleties you need to change to crack a growth curve are essential to incremental changes. TL;DR to things can be true at once: you can double down on your strengths while improving your weaknesses.

The customer is the ultimate aligner. If you're able to show your proximity to the customer via surveys, research, and interactions you'll have more influence in strategic conversations. Build a bench of customer intelligence to help the company make decisions that are both good for the target audience, and for the business... this is the critical area to invest in to become the strategic growth lever the business needs, and is always lacking intelligence on.

Rolling out the New Product Introduction process has been a critical part of my success in organizations. Also developing "tiering calculators" messaging and positioning templates, and defining the difference between "market readiness" and "development complete" has really set me apart as an expert/influencer v. an order taker.