AMA: Honeycomb.io VP Marketing, Jo Ann Sanders on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

Due to the collaborative nature of the Product Marketing role, KPIs can sometimes be hard to attribute directly to Product Marketing success. Do you have recommendations for alternative ways to measure the true impact of Product Marketing?

(context: small company, still establishing product marketing function, no senior marketing leader to guide, lots of room to carve own path, looking for best ways to support success!)

I'm on my 5th year of product marketing in my career, with another 5 years before that in general demand gen at very small companies. I've had management experience in the past, but not in a Product Marketing role. Often times in smaller companies, there will be 1 or 2 PMMs, usually in a very flat hierarchy, or a single boss, with no room to really move up a proverbial ladder and into management experience. So what are ways that I can prepare myself now, so that if the time comes to apply for a Director position (either internally or at another company) that I can be considered even without recent people management experience? Are there any courses for this that are highly regarded in the management arena?

Ex... GTM: it more important to be skilled at product or feature-specific launches or to be skilled at high-level overall GTM (messaging, positioning, pricing, packaging).