AMA: Etsy Senior Director, Product Marketing, Maureen Sitterson on Developing Your Product Marketing Career Path

This is a great question! As a new PMM on a team or new to a company, the most important thing that helps build credibility is trust with partners in product and marketing. Building a strong foundation with your partners is critical in every PMM role. Spend time getting to know your partners and their teams - what are their goals? what is important to them? How do they like to collaborate? After you've established that foundation, the next most critical thing you can do is start to critically evaluate the current customer experience and ask questions that will help you inform your strategy and where you focus. If you do those 2 things well, you'll quickly build trust and credibility.

You can segue into product marketing by either 1) strategically taking on projects in your current role that give you product marketing adjacent experience (like helping to develop positioning or a value prop, helping to launch something) or 2) offer to do a 10-20% time commitment project to help the product marketing team. Chances are, the product marketing team at your company is lean and will welcome the extra help! There are a lot of creative ways that you can gain product marketing experience in your current role. If those options aren't available, another great way to get experience that would be valuable is to become an expert on the customer of your current company. Become an expert on current research and customer pain points and find a way to be a part of solving them. Doing so will give you a great foundation for any marketing role and will be valuable as you continue to work toward a move into product marketing.

A head of PMM needs to have a birds eye view of the overall customer experience and the road map for improvements and be able to translate that into a strong narrative. A head of PMM also needs to be a great leader focused on developing excellent talent. To hone both while being a senior PMM, you can: * Take on a step-up project to help your team develop an overall narrative for how the product experience is changing and improving your product for customers. * Offer to mentor a more junior member of the team to build leadership skills * Build strong relationships with senior level partners and help your team strengthen collaboration with those partners

Messaging and positioning is crucial to PMM, but writing is a skill that can absolutely be developed. A few ideas to improve your writing: * Find a great mentor and have them ruthlessly edit your writing to help you improve * Take a writing class - these can be really fun! * Prioritize reading in your spare time - it's a great way to help you learn from great writers. * Partner closely with copywriters or the content team at your company and learn how they craft copy.

1. Challenge: When I was working at American Express, I was focused on leading organic growth after we ended our partnership with Costco. This was a very challenging time for the company and we had to determine the metrics we cared about with regards to organic growth and the best way to drive them through the levers we had available. It was one of the periods of my career when I grew the most because we were truly building structure from nothing, and that was rewarding and motivating. After we set clear and specific goals and strategies to achieve them, I was responsible for reporting on our progress. I learned a ton about storytelling through data during this period which propelled me through my next few roles. 2. POV on Mistakes: Anytime I've made a mistake at work, I've seen it as a positive, because it is so much more memorable than when things go well. Making a mistake enables me to learn how to avoid doing the same thing in the future and the painful memory of doing something wrong is the most powerful teacher.

I'll share 4 instead of 3! Here are the 4 things I would focus on developing: 1. Strong command of key metrics, and ability to use them to tell a clear story 2. Ability to distill a complex idea into a simple, customer facing story or value prop 3. Understanding of and focus on customer needs 4. Ability to collaborate with diverse peers and partners

I think this all depends on where you personally see your career going. If you love product marketing and want to stay in the product marketing function, I firmly believe it's a function that enables continuous career growth. If you want to eventually become a CMO, typically you need to hone other skills outside of product marketing. One way to do that is to develop close working relationships with other marketing leaders and learn their craft from them. Product marketing is a function that could also be combined with others (like CRM) - taking on a hybrid role like that as a promotion opportunity could be a great way to gain marketing channel expertise while continuing in PMM.