AMA: Hopin Director, Product and Solutions Marketing, Sharadhi (Gadagkar) Patel on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

One of the best pieces of advice I got was to take the necessary time I needed to be a "sponge" and let things soak in, before going straight into "solve-mode". Of course, that's easier said than done :)  When joining any startup as the first product marketer, you'll be getting requests from every angle from week 1(and sometimes before you even start!) - and that's especially true with PMM, because it is such a cross-functional role. This is what I've found to be helpful:  30 days: understand bo ...Read More

Product Marketing has so many different specialties that it’s almost impossible to be a master of all of them. My advice is to pick a product marketing swimlane and develop a strategy or project that you can completely own and run with. This way, you become the go-to person at the company for messaging, or competitive intelligence, or solutions marketing, or product launches, etc....you develop an expertise in this area, gain credibility, and can then make the case for higher visibility projects ...Read More

This is a great question, and one that I ask most of the candidates I interview at some point in the process. The kinds of materials I like to see are dependent on the job they’re being hired for, but generally speaking pitch decks, sales one-pagers, competitive battlecards, messaging docs, launch strategies, buyer personas - these are all helpful bodies of work to share with your PMM hiring manager. If you’re brand new to Product Marketing or even Marketing in general, don’t feel shy about maki ...Read More

An A+ product launch example to me includes the following characteristics or elements: What stage of the product launch the candidate was involved in.  1. Clear delineation between the PMM and PM’s responsibilities for the product launch and where there was overlap. 2. Examples of cross functional alignment between product, marketing, and the GTM teams. 3. An example of something that didn’t go according to plan during the launch and how the candidate overcame it. 4. An out of the box marketing ...Read More

As mentioned before, product marketing is one of the most cross-functional roles of any in most companies. And as such, you’ll be getting requests for projects and deliverables from every angle. The first thing I try to understand is: what responsibilities fall under me vs. another team (ie: is there a separate pricing team? Enablement team? Market research team?) Once my purview is clear, I put together a Product Marketing Charter (my PMM mission, PMM pillars, responsibilities under each pillar ...Read More

One of my favorite parts of being a Product Marketer is that a lot of the work that we do is highly visible and can affect completely different parts of the organization. For example: buyer personas of course help sales sell your product, but they also help your engineering team figure out who they’re actually building the product for. Or competitive landscapes - this is a project that everyone at the company from your IT team to HR to Leadership is hungry for - everyone wants to know where you ...Read More

Absolutely! While there are probably several key metrics to what makes a successful Product Marketing team, there are so many different paths to getting there based on a number of factors that are oftentimes not in our control. This, combined with the fact that Product Marketing is still very much being defined, makes strong intuition one of the most important skills a Product Marketer should have, in my opinion. As PMMs, we’re often asked to make decisions without all of the necessary data, cha ...Read More

There’s probably a thousand different combinations of answers to this question, depending on who you ask. I’ve seen incredibly successful PMMs come from all sorts of backgrounds - everything from engineering, to education, to real-estate backgrounds, and everything in between. However, I think there are 3 common skills that I’ve seen across the most successful PMMs I know:  1. Empathy and understanding of your customer base and what they want. 2. Excitement and a deep knowledge of your product a ...Read More