AMA: Airtable Senior Director, Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Christy Roach on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

There are two things I think you can do to help you here. One is stupidly easy, one is harder. Let’s start with the hard one first: You might need to readjust your compensation or seniority expectations to get the role you want. You clearly have great experience and training, and I don’t think you should discount yourself, but sometimes moving into a new discipline might mean taking a “step back” in terms of what you’ll be paid and what your title will be. It sounds like you’re open to that given that you’re applying to entry and mid-level roles. But, if you’re going in with compensation expectations that are much higher than the role is scoped for, it’s likely you won’t get the role. Now to the easy part: Once you decide you're willing to make the adjustments necessary to move into the role, communicate that in a cover letter or intro email! As a hiring manager I sometimes hesitate to interview more senior candidates for a role that I think might be too junior for them because I don’t want to end up in a position where a team member has outgrown their role in 9 months. But if a candidate communicates why they're making this move and why they want the role, I feel much more confident considering them, even if I see them as more senior than what I was looking for. My suggestion is to start with a cover letter. No one writes cover letters anymore. Or, if they do, they are completely impersonal and generic, touting the skills the candidate has without connecting to the job description whatsoever. It’s a shame because a cover letter is the best way for you to get out in front of any assumptions someone might make it looking at your resume. You can explain why you’re interested in the role, that you are willing to make a career shift because you’d like to get into product marketing, and what about the job stood out to you so much. A few more tips: If you can, take on a few projects in your current role to help flex the PMM skillset and include that in your resume and in your cover letter. If you have friends who are product marketers, ask them about their roles and see if they know anyone that’s hiring that they can introduce you to. I don’t think you have to have an intro to get in a job, but I definitely make sure to talk to candidates that come highly recommended by people I respect, even if their background is a bit different than what I was originally looking for. Good luck!

Everyone’s definition of soft and hard skills differs, but here are the nine skills that I think are the most important for a product marketer to have. I've used these skills as a compass to help me grow in my own career and have turned them into a success guide for my team at Envoy to use: Soft skills: * Cross-functional excellence: As a PMM, you have the opportunity to lead without being a manager of people. A strong product marketer is someone who takes others along with them, rather than telling people exactly what they want them to do. They’re able to create strong relationships across the company, with product managers, engineers, designers, marketers, support folks, and more. They’re natural connectors who know who to go to in an organization to get things done and can influence cross-functional stakeholders to support and prioritize projects. * Executive presence and clear communication: As you get more senior, you'll spend more and more time presenting plans, public speaking, and communicating with executives in the company. The stronger you are at presenting and public speaking, the easier this will be for you. Executive presence also means knowing how best to leverage an executive’s skills to get feedback that will help your project, manage their expectations, and ensure they feel like they’re in the loop about work that matters to them. * A pitch in, get-it-done attitude: Being a PMM can be unglamorous at times. Sure, you get to run the big launches, but what people don’t see are the hours you spend writing support macros to ensure the team has what they need to answer incoming tickets, the amount of times a day you have to field seemingly random requests that don’t always fall neatly into your scope of work, and how often you get looped into last-minute, urgent projects that you didn’t plan for. PMMs that can approach this type of work ready to pitch in and help are often those that are seen as the most dependable and trustworthy, which helps them create strong relationships across the company. In my career, I've always made sure I'm never above doing the grunt work that's needed to get something across the finish line. While I don’t do it every day, I’m happy to roll up my sleeves to take a screenshot for a help article or write a macro if it means the team will be more successful and I reward members of my team that have the same attitude. Hard skills: * Market, competitor, and product expertise: PMMs should know their product inside and out, be an expert on its features, capabilities, and limitations, and be able to help partner teams figure out solutions to customer problems. This takes work, and it shouldn’t be overlooked. On top of that, you should know your competitors' products almost as well as you know your own. What does the competitor’s product have that yours does not? Where do you lose? Where do you win? How do they position themselves? These are all questions you should have an answer to. Last, you should know your market. What are the trends in the market in which you operate? What are the factors that influence decision making for your buyers? What’s coming down the line in terms of regulations or industry shifts that your company might want to get in front of? The better equipped you are to answer these questions, the more strategic value you'll bring to your company. * Positioning, messaging, and storytelling: Messaging and positioning isn’t a soft skill - this is something you hone and work at. This skill is all about being able to create tight, clear, compelling messaging frameworks that identify the target customer, nail their pain point and the benefits your solution provides, and clearly explain how you're different than what else is on the market today. A leader I used to work under said “The person who most accurately identifies the problem earns the right to solve it”, and I think that’s a really clear articulation of how specific and focused you should be in your messaging. You always know when a messaging framework is ready for prime time when you would defend every single line of copy, are able to explain why each line is necessary, and can show how each phrase ties back to the feature or product itself. * Know your customer: There are two parts to this. The first is knowing your personas. Specifically, you should be an expert in who buys your software, what their titles are, where they sit in an organization, what matters most to them, and how to market to them. The second is connecting that customer persona with actual customers who use your product. If you’re not talking to customers throughout your day-to-day, how can you represent the voice of the customer to the product team? I have OKRs for my team to have a certain number of interactions with customers each quarter to make sure that customer empathy doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. The key is getting these customer insights and then doing something with them to make sure that those insights are driving your roadmap and activities. * Go-to-market planning and execution: PMMs are responsible for creating unique, impactful, cross-channel GTM plans that will help your product or feature hit it’s launch goals and drive sustained adoption and revenue. Product marketers should understand which channels drive success and identify the metrics they want to move so they consistently hit their goals. Another part of this is studying how other companies run their launches and taking inspiration from that for your own launches to up-level your approach. * Process management: It’s often said that PMMs should act as the quarterbacks to a launch. A big part of this is ensuring there’s a process in place within the marketing team and with partner teams in order to make sure that everyone has the information they need and clarity on what’s expected of them to make the launch a success. If there isn’t a process in place, it’s up to the PMM to create and drive new processes to fix problems. It’s also up to PMMs to point out when a process is no longer working for your team. * Making data-driven decisions: The need for data and analytical skills continues to grow in the product marketing space. I personally wouldn’t call myself a “numbers person”, and I don’t think you need to have the data skills of an analyst to do the job. That said, I do think you need to understand your company's baseline metrics, be able to pinpoint the data that would help the team make a decision, and back up your plans and initiatives with data that supports your proposal in order to succeed in your role and provide value to your organization.

The most important thing to keep in mind is this: having the product marketing title doesn’t automatically mean you get to influence the roadmap. You have to put in the work and show your value to get a seat at the table. There are three big levers to pull here to help you shift the way product marketing works from a team that’s just responsible for the launch of a product to one that’s involved in the entire product process. 1. Create a partnership with your PM: When you’re thinking about how to influence, you’re probably thinking about managing up and influencing people who are more senior in the organization. While I agree that managing up is a key part of a PMMs work, most people are over-indexing here. I’d argue that you should spend the bulk of your time trying to create a strong relationship with your individual PM partners, not their managers or their manager’s managers. Take your PM partners out for coffee or lunch and get to know them, ask them questions to clarify the assumptions that you’ve made about them, understand how they’d like to work together. Tell them, straight up, that what you’d really like to build is a partnership with them and ask them what a true partnership relationship would look like from their POV. They might not give you the answer you want, but that’s okay - at least you’ve got an answer! Once you know where you’re starting from, you can build from there. Say the PM told you that they don’t think you should be involved in defining the customer problem and you feel strongly that you should - as soon as you know you differ in that area you can start showing your value here, providing information or insights that might be helpful. To be clear, your objective should not be hearing all of your product partner’s opinions and then going on a quest to prove them wrong, but starting to show where you think you can provide partnership can be the starting point you need to shift the way the PM thinks about your involvement in their work. 2. Come to the table with insights and data A lot of PMMs come to the table with a point of view based on instinct and that doesn’t take them very far in terms of actually being able to influence the roadmap. This is an area that I’ve struggled with most in previous positions because I didn’t have access to data or I didn’t know where to get insights. The insights that are best to lean into are: * Competitive intelligence: Looking at how competitors solve a similar problem and what your team might be able to do to match, exceed, or differentiate yourselves from the competitor’s capabilities * Market sizing data: Helping a team understand how much opportunity exists in the market for the products or features the team is considering to help them make prioritization decisions * Customer-facing team insights: Being the bridge between the sales, CS, and support teams and product and helping give a clear overview of each team’s priorities and needs. So often, the loudest voice gets what they want on the sales side, and PMM can really help make sure the team gets an accurate look at the feedback from all of the customer-facing teams. Another important factor is to look at when you’re presenting this information to product. So often, PMMs are bringing this intel too late in the game, where decisions are already made and these insights start to feel like hurdles that a PM has to jump over to get their product out the door, rather than something that can help them make decisions. If you’ve built a strong relationship with your PM (see step 1) you can see if they’ll show you their early thinking or investigation into a potential feature or product where you might be able to supplement with insights or data, so you’re doing the right work at the right time. 3. Get leadership bought in An all-star PMM can do a lot of work to change the way that product thinks about their role, but if it’s just one product marketer pushing on this, you run the risk of that one product marketer getting a seat at the table without the fundamental role of product marketing shifting within your company. PMMs are usually independent, very senior individual contributors but, at a certain point, you need to make sure your head of product marketing and head of product are aligned on what product marketing’s role should be at a fundamental level. Let your boss know when there are issues or roadblocks, keep them in the loop on the work you’re doing to change or shift your role in influencing the roadmap and make sure they can be an advocate for you in making that change.

It’s hard to pinpoint “typical” because product marketing is a field that sets you up for a few different paths depending on what you want to do. Being a product marketer gives you problem-solving, strategy, and execution skills that can help you in so many different careers so I wouldn’t want to say there is one specific path you should take. That said, I’ll talk through the one that I’ve walked, and that I’ve seen many of my peers take as well: Very few people are product marketing managers as their first job out of college. Some large companies have associate product marketing manager (APMM) or rotational programs that give new grads exposure to this work and, honestly, I wish I had known this existed when I was getting into marketing. For most, myself included, a PMMs career started in a different type of marketing or on a customer-facing team. For me, that was a social media coordinator role for a telecom company. It wasn’t what I wanted to do long term, but it was an important foot in the door. From there, you build up your marketing skills. I was able to transition into partner marketing as my next role, which gave me the ability to flex my product marketing muscles through the partner efforts I ran. Other roles can be in digital or content marketing or even as a marketing generalist. The key is to build up the foundational skills you need to excel in marketing as a whole. After 3-5 years of experience, many marketers are then able to move into a PMM focused role. This might be a more junior role to start than other PMM roles on the team but gives you the ability to do product marketing full time. From there, you’ll often stay in an individual contributor (IC) PMM role for a few years and get promoted into a Senior PMM position. This can often represent a fork in the road. You don't have to lead a team to be a successful product marketer. In fact, I know many PMMs who have become very senior, specialized IC PMMs who are at the top of their field without ever leading a team. For those that want to move into management, the next step is often to move into a Group Product Marketing Manager role, where you’ll oversee a team of product marketers focused on one specific part of the business. This helps you learn how to lead without being responsible for all product marketing. This is also the time where you have to decide if you like leading a team and getting one step removed from the day-to-day work or if you’d like to go back to IC PMM work. From there, you can move into a Director of Product Marketing or Head of Product Marketing role which is where I’m at now. Depending on the size of the company, this role is responsible for all product marketing (smaller company) or a specific product line or line of business (larger company). Moving forward, there are Senior Director and Vice President of Product Marketing roles and, eventually, the opportunity to lead the entire marketing function as Head of Marketing or CMO. I can't speak too intelligently to that since I'm not quite there yet, but that's what's on my mind as I look to become an expert at the Director level and continue to grow in my role! 

Great question! I've been lucky to work at a wide range of companies and while each was satisfying and challenging in their own way, I've definitely figured out what works best for me. For me, working for a big company brings resources and clear growth paths, and I’m grateful to have started my career there. * The pros: At a big company, you know exactly where you fall in terms of job leveling, and what you need to take the next step up. Your work is clear and tied to a very specific line of business and you feel confident in the company’s success. * The cons: For me, the thing that was challenging about working at a big company was how “figured out” things were. I found lots of processes and frameworks were already built at a big company and it was up to me to execute on a clear set of activities, which was great as I was starting to learn, but started to feel restrictive after a while. * How I felt as a PMM: As a product marketer, the relationship between product, product marketing, and partner teams was tightly scoped and while those swimlanes were helpful bumpers at first, they felt a little restrictive as my skills grew. After that experience, I made a 180-degree shift and was the 52nd employee at a very small company. * The pros: When a company is that small, every day is a test of how productive you can be, how many good decisions you can make, and how much hustle you’ve got, which gave me a lot of energy at that point in my career. It was great to be able to directly see the impact my work had on the business, and the entire company felt like one team working together, which was incredible. * The cons: Even with all the positives, I’d say this size was hardest for me. As a product marketer, I wasn’t spending much time doing the type of product marketing I loved, like getting to know customers, helping drive the roadmap, crafting messaging, or launching products. Because we were such a small team, I wore a lot of different marketing hats and was spending a lot of my time working on lead gen efforts for the sales team - which is definitely not my area of expertise. In this type of company, you’re asked to do whatever the business needs and you don’t always have guidance on how to do it well. * How I felt as a PMM: After that experience, I realized that even if I didn’t want a role that was too structured, I did need some structure to succeed. I also realized how important it was to have a close relationship with a manager who I could bounce ideas off of, turn to when I needed feedback or guidance, and who helped make sure I was learning and growing, not just spinning my wheels. Since then, I’ve taken a bit of a Goldilocks approach to choosing companies - not too big, not too small, just right. I’ve found that a Series B company of about 100-200 employees fits my personality and work style best. * The pros: There are plenty of things to build and decisions to be made, but the company has gotten validation in the product and financial backing that gives employees space to breathe and think long term. I love that I don’t have to go through too many “checkpoints” to get a project off the ground, send out a survey, or put together a plan. At the same time, I love that there is enough process that we’re able to make sure we’re making the right decisions and doing work that matters. * The cons: It's still a small, early-stage company, which means that there are areas of the business that aren’t figured out. Your career growth is not well defined because the company is continually changing, as is what’s being asked of you, and the company usually hasn’t solidified its levels, titles, or career growth guides so it can be hard to feel like you can really show the progress you’re making because it’s not a clearly defined path. * How I feel as a PMM: I love the role product marketing gets to play when a company is this size. The product has momentum and there’s usually a team of PMs who have a strong point of view on what they need to do next, but there’s still plenty of room for a product marketer to come in and help influence the roadmap and try new things for launches. As a leader at Envoy, I still get to get my hands dirty here and there while also creating the structure and processes needed for the team to scale.

I think the first question to ask yourself is, do you actually want to be an executive? After that, you should also ask yourself what an “executive” means to you. It turns out that a lot of people feel like they should be shooting to be in the C-suite without actually knowing if they want to be in the C-suite. From my understanding, it’s elite at the top but the air is pretty thin. It’s stressful work, and your neck is on the line when things go poorly. I've decided this is something that I want, but it took some soul-searching before I made that decision. If you decide that an executive role is what you want, you should also think about what level you’re shooting for. Of course, executive usually means the C-suite, but at a large company there are plenty of very high level roles focused just on product marketing, like the VP of Product Marketing or the SVP of Product Marketing. If you decide that yes, you want to be an executive and no, being a SVP of Product Marketing is not what you want, then there are a few options for you. If you love product, you can chart a course to being the Chief Product Officer. If you make this choice, you’ll need to move into a true PM role and build your career from there. Lots of people move from product marketing to product, and the PMM skillset can help make you a more well-rounded product leader. Don’t want to go into product but still want to be in the C-suite? Another route you can take is moving into a COO role. If that’s what you’re looking for, it’ll be incredibly important for you to get some operations work under your belt. That can start in marketing ops but you’ll also need to get insight into sales ops and customer ops in order to truly succeed at that role. Of course, there’s also the option to move into a President or CEO role. As a product marketer, you’re inherently a problem solver so it’s not an implausible jump, but it won’t be a straight shot from PMM to CEO - you’ll likely take a few stops along the way, including a few other C-suite positions.

Some of the best product marketers I know started in sales roles, but it can be hard to make the jump from sales into marketing. As a salesperson, you know first hand how messaging is landing with prospective customers, what the needs of those customers are, and where your product wins and where it falls short compared to the competition -- all of which is invaluable to a product marketing team. The trick is taking that knowledge and building out the other foundational skills you need to make you ready for a PMM role. I'll focus this answer on how to move internally within your own company, but this advice still applies if you're looking to move to a new company in product marketing. My first suggestion is talking to your manager and the product marketing lead at your company to let them know that you’re interested and ask them what you should do to show this is a role you can take on. From there, I’d suggest taking on some sales enablement and training work. A lot of a product marketer’s role, especially in B2B SaaS companies, is focused on making sure the sales team has what they need to be successful. Getting your feet wet in that area will help you show your aptitude in the sales enablement side of product marketing. You can also take the lead as the sales point of contact for a large product launch to get exposure into how products are launched at your company and also give you the opportunity to drive some of the work yourself. Once you’ve been able to show your experience in core product marketing work, you may be ready to put your hat in the ring for an open role. You likely will have to interview, rather than just having the job given to you, but lean into the strengths you have around understanding your target customer and insights around messaging, training, and product expertise.

This is a hard jump to make! Not to sound like a broken record, but the first step is communicating with your manager to let them know that you want to move into management and getting their feedback on what you’d need to do to make that move and what timeline might be realistic. I can’t say it enough, being clear in what you want and communicating that to the people who can help you get there is essential to growing your career. From there, there are a few things you can do to help the process. First is taking management training, getting a career coach, getting 360-degree feedback, and reading books on management to help prepare you for the shift. I really enjoyed the book “The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You” by Julie Zhuo. It helped me in my management career but is also a really honest take on management that non-managers can learn a lot from. 360-degree feedback can help you understand where you need to grow in order to be seen as a leader in your peers’ eyes and a career coach can help you work through that. I did all of these things and think it’s helped me in my career tremendously. The other piece is keeping an eye on what the business needs. I became a manager when Asana was around a Series C, 350 person company. I made the jump by proactively writing a job rec, pointing out where our team didn’t have coverage, and why this person should report to me. My manager and I talked about it extensively and I got lots of feedback from her. And, because I had her blessing and buy-in on the role, she was able to help me make the move. The lesson here is that being a manager doesn't just happen when you think you're ready, it happens when there is a business need, and it’s up to you to help find that need and help fill it. I was able to make the move because I spotted a gap on our team and came up with a plan to fill it, not because I finally got the blessing that I was ready to be a manager. A lot of people wait until someone taps them to become a leader and, while there are people this happens to, it's not always the case. I knew I wanted to manage a team and I took the initiative to figure out how to make it happen in a way that was good for the business and good for my career goals. I encourage you to do the same! 

This is a great question! I know lots of product marketers who worry that in getting more specialized they’re missing out on the opportunity to get that broad skillset. I reject the idea that you have to change jobs in order to get the experience you want and think there are plenty of ways to get it in your current role. Here’s what has worked well for me: Do your homework: While there are some skills that are universally important for a product marketer (ex: bringing new products to market), there are some that are more niche and specialized (ex: specific expertise in freemium business pricing strategies). Before you start mapping out how to get the experience, you need to figure out what experience you want to get and what’s not as important to you. This likely sounds like a “duh” comment, but I’ve talked to many people who know they want to be great product marketers but haven’t done the legwork to figure out what that means to them. To start, have an explicit conversation with your manager about what they think are the skills you need to have to be a great product marketer, rather than making assumptions about what they think. From there, talk to some leaders you admire who have the type of well-rounded career you’d like to have or, better yet, are hiring for the role you would like to get a few years down the line. Ask them what types of skills they see as mandatory for someone they’d hire onto their team and compare that list to the skills that you’re getting to build in your current role. Don’t have any leaders in your company that fit the bill? Reach out to people on LinkedIn, contact people from the Sharebird community, or approach people at meetups. I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally have always been open to chatting on the phone or getting coffee with someone who wants some advice. Create a shortlist and share it with your manager: Turns out, most managers truly want to help their employees succeed in their career goals. Once you have a list of the skills you’d like to build in your role, you should have an honest conversation with your manager about what you think the gaps in your skillset are and where you’d like to get exposure and get their point of view. Once you’re on the same page that yes, this is an important skillset to have and no, you’re not getting exposure to it in my current role, it opens the door to exploring opportunities to take on projects to build that skill. You have to remember that the company will put you in the role that they think is best for the business, so it’s important to communicate to your boss that you’re willing to go above and beyond to take on extra work in order to get the skills you’d like. As a manager, once I know what someone wants, and once they’ve made clear they’re willing to work for it, I’m usually pretty excited to find opportunities for them to get the skills they’re looking for. When you’ve got a strong performer on your team, you don’t want to lose them, but you also don’t want to keep them in a role they’re not happy in. It’s a total win for me when I know where my direct report ultimately wants to go and I can find new projects for them to take on to help them grow in their career. Seek out other teams who have projects like the ones you’re wanting to do: In talking to your manager, you might find that they are fine with you taking on other work, but aren’t able to give that to you themselves, either because they don’t have influence over that area of the business or they want you to take the initiative yourself to grow your career. If that’s the case, you can reach out to a lead on a team that does the type of work you’re looking to do and make it clear that you’d be interested in taking on a special project or helping out to grow your skills in that area. So long as you’ve already talked to your manager and they’ve agreed to let you dip your toe in something new, most leaders will be excited about someone who wants to help out their team. The thing to remember is to be realistic about the work that’s already on your plate, make sure you take on work you feel confident you can get done in the time allotted, and you and the leader who is responsible for the work are clear on what level of involvement you’d like them to have. Be realistic in your timelines: If you’re like me, as soon as you figure out what you want to be doing or identify a gap in your skillset, you want to tackle it immediately and all at once. Take my hard-earned advice, this mindset sets you up to fail. Take an 18-month approach to this work and map out, in 6-month increments to start, the skills you think are most important to build and how much work it will take to build them. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and you can’t go from never launching a product to running the quarter’s biggest product launch right away. You also can’t look at these skills like checkboxes that you do once and you're done. If you’re approaching growth as a bunch of checkmarks to help you get where you want to go, you run the risk of looking at execution as your measure of success, not the quality of work. Of course, you should push for what you want and set ambitious goals for yourself, but it’s important to recognize that once you and your manager have a conversation about where you want to grow, it may take a few months for an opportunity to present itself that gives you what you’re looking for.

I answered this above in my answer around soft and hard skills but if I were to pick my top, universally important skills for a PMM they would be: * Messaging and positioning * Cross-functional excellence * Understanding of data * Market, customer and competitor knowledge * Process management From there, it really depends on your specific role and where you want to specialize. The skills each PMM has really depends on what's needed for them in their role. 

You very rarely will start your marketing career as a PMM, so you should look for roles that help you learn a lot about the business and the customer and give you opportunities to work cross-functionally. Once you land that role, you may find opportunities to step in or help out a product marketing team, which gives you some of those more specialized skills that set you up for success as a PMM. In my opinion, the three skills you want to build are: * Messaging, positioning, and storytelling: Product marketers connect current and prospective customers to the value and magic of the product. It's not about specific features or functionalities, it's about the value they provide and how they can help your target customer. It's critical that a PMM can create strong messaging frameworks that get to the "why" behind a feature or product - and strong writing skills are invaluable here. Look for a role that helps you become a better writer and hone your storytelling skills. * Cross-functional expertise: A PMM needs to be able to work with different stakeholders and different types of personalities across the company, get their input and effectively rally them all around a shared plan. Look to build experience working with stakeholders across the company, figuring out how other teams work, and helping them succeed. Most roles will give you some exposure to this, and then it’s up to you to seek that work out to continue to grow this skillset. * Strong planning and project management skills: Lots of things go into a product launch and a PMM needs to be able to put together a clear project plan, be thoughtful about what needs to happen to get work over the finish line and can keep things organized as work gets underway. Look for opportunities to build your process and project management skills and you’ll be a huge asset to a product marketing team.

This has changed a ton as my career has progressed and continues to evolve as I get better at my job. What I measure myself on today is very different than what I’ll measure myself on in 3-4 years, and the key is being able to make those mental shifts and not measuring your current role by the same standards you measured yourself on in previous roles. Today I measure myself on the following: * Team engagement: As a leader, I am only as good as my team is. Before I look at their output, I want to look at how they feel at work. I can only be successful if I’m leading a team that is fulfilled, engaged, and happy in their job. At Envoy we do a quarterly engagement survey, but we also do weekly “pulse checks” to see what the team’s engagement is and what their workload looks like. Those scores tell me if I’m leading a high performing, engaged team, or if there’s something amiss. * % of team OKRs hit: I have my own personal OKRs to hit and those continue to help me measure my success but, as I’ve transitioned into leadership, I’ve also measured myself on how my team is progressing towards their OKRs. It’s not up to me to micro-manage their work or take their OKRs into my own hands, but it is up to me to make sure they have the support, feedback, motivation, and guidance they need to hit those OKRs. If we’re missing multiple OKRs on my team, we’ve either set the wrong goals or the team doesn’t have what they need to succeed, both of which reflect on my performance. * Speed at which we’re able to get work done: I don’t like looking at the sheer output of my team because I don’t believe that more activity always means better work. In many cases, we need to do fewer things, better. But, I do want to look at our team’s velocity to see if the team is growing in their ability to get work done and moving more quickly towards their goals because of the processes and systems I’ve put in place to help them. If a team member gets stuck or blocked, I need to fix that. * Feedback from other teams: The members of my team are extremely cross-functional, as am I. I look for feedback from my sales, CS, product, and marketing counterparts to tell me if I’m leading a team that is working well with others, making connections, and contributing to the business. Every time I hear that someone on my team is doing an awesome job or is great to work with, I feel pride in them and in the team I’ve built. * Cross-functional alignment: This is the one that’s really driven by me. I measure myself on how aligned I am with other leaders and the way I’m able to drive buy-in across sales, product, and more to create a successful product and GTM strategy. If we aren’t aligned at the top, our teams will not be set up for success * Revenue and customer sentiment: I don’t impact these as directly as I used to, but I do look at the revenue that’s driven from my team’s launches and the customer sentiment via NPS and feedback we hear as a way to measure if we’re creating compelling messaging, driving successful launches and, ultimately, bringing value to our customers and to the business. How this has changed over time: I used to look very closely at the metrics I knew I drove. As an IC PMM, that was leads sent to the sales team, revenue generated from launches, product adoption, and customer feedback. As a group product marketing manager, I looked at the metrics or line of business that my team specifically drove. As I’ve gotten more senior, those individual metrics are owned by members of my team, not me. It’s up to me to look at the success of the product as a whole and, more importantly, the success of my team as an indicator of whether or not I’m succeeding as a leader. It can be hard to remove yourself from the day-to-day, there are times that I really miss doing some of the tactical work and have to pull myself back, but shifting how I think about my own success has been key in making sure I’m leading the team well.

As a hiring manager, I try to balance referrals and recommendations within my network with candidates who apply directly to an open role from our careers page or job sites. If you just hire people that come from your network, you often miss out on quality candidates who bring diverse backgrounds and perspectives. I take recommendations from colleagues and connections seriously and always give them a phone screen, but I try to make sure I'm not only looking at the referrals I'm getting. That said, if you can get an introduction or a referral for a job, you should take it! You're much more likely to get your foot in the door. As a candidate, most of my jobs and opportunities have come because of the connections I've made and introductions my friends and colleagues have created for me. I feel really fortunate that it's worked out that way. The thing I will say is that sometimes those connections have been very weak. I've had someone reach out to a friend of theirs who they haven't spoken to in a while to see if they can make an introduction. Those weak connections have led to some of my most fulfilling roles. You don't need to be best friends with someone to ask them for a connection and if you're looking for a new role, I encourage you to see who in your network can give you a boost to help kickstart the recruiting process. In terms of where you should spend your time, meeting other PMMs is valuable even if they can't immediately help you find a role. It's been invaluable for me to have other product marketers to turn to for help and guidance and, yes, job referrals. However, I wouldn't dissuade you from applying cold to roles. I think a lot of people assume that hiring managers only look at referrals to fill their open role, but that's just not true. Some of the best hires I've ever made are people who cold applied to a role posted on my company's website. I touched on this a bit before but, if you cold apply, write a cover letter! Don't have it be formal and stiff, spend time explaining why you're excited about the role, what resonated with you from the job description, and anything you think would help your hiring manager get a feel for who you are and what you bring to the table.

Ah, it's hard to pick just one! If you'll make me, I'd say messaging and positioning. Every PMM needs it, it's a hard skill to build, and it will take you far. I recommend getting feedback on your writing, learning from your content marketers how to craft a story, and being open to tweaks and edits as needed to continue to hone your craft. Good luck!