AMA: Eventbrite Global Head of Marketplace Marketing, Yify Zhang on Develping Your Product Marketing Career

There are four areas of competencies as a PMM / PMM leader. It is usually good to focus on one of these as your unique "strength" and keep the rest going so that you are functional. As you advance into a management position, you can hire those strong in areas where you're weak. Strategic Thinking - the ability to break down complex problems into achievable questions / topics. The ability to identify opportunities that result in significant growth for the company, and well-structured communicatio ...Read More

I was hired into my current management role, but in terms of how I moved from an IC to a management role earlier in my career: The company I was working for was building a zero to one product marketing team. I was tapped for the role as I delivered strong strategy-driven work (e.g., new opportunity assessments/business case, competitive intel program, growth strategy) and had solid sponsorship on these projects from senior leadership who shared my work (and my name) proactively with the rest of ...Read More

I think every product marketer can benefit from working at least one job in a role outside of Product Marketing. This helps you gain perspective on how marketing channels / attribution truly work, what matters when it comes to creating growth loops that brings new customers, and makes you a better partner to these teams. Also, the age of a generalist / non technical VP of Marketing is behind us, especially in Tech. Marketing executives are expected to have deep expertise in either Growth (e.g., ...Read More

The competencies that moves one from individual contributor to manager are not unique to Product Marketing. What is unique is how these are applied, within the PMM scope in your role / organization. Generally these are: Strategic thinking: the ability to break down complex and ambiguous problems into questions / topics that can help guide the work of a team, and your XFN partners. The higher you move, the larger your scope becomes. The ability to move between levels of detail to ask the right qu ...Read More

Being a great writer is not a critical skill for being a great PMM. I would focus your attention on getting good at "positioning", identifying what truly matters to customers (pain point, benefits), and knowing how to identify great copywriting that conveys this. You can partner with copywriters, or even get this through contracting sites like Fiverr / Upwork (if no copywriting resource exists and your organization is low on resources).There are other competencies as a PMM (see below). I would f ...Read More