AMA: Klaviyo Sr. Director Product Marketing, Nelson Haung on Product Marketing Career Path

I’ve seen marketing writers be successful in transitioning to PMM because there’s a lot of shared skill sets across the two roles. The important thing is highlighting what those shared skills are in your resume and when interviewing. Some examples: ICP/Persona focus: everything starts with understanding the audience you’re targeting, and is also core to the marketing materials and assets that you’ve written and created. Messaging: builds off your ICP/persona focus to really tailor messaging on w ...Read More

I would say it’s a confluence of 3 things that come to mind. Being at the right company at the right time — I joined Salesforce in 2013 as it was really starting to scale up. The PMM teams at that time were still relatively small for the scale of revenue, and so I had a chance to learn and try everything in the broad scope of PMM. There’s something to be said for starting your PMM career at a well-established company where PMM was highly valued, and the infrastructure as well as experts were in ...Read More

I don’t think PMMs need to necessarily be “experts”, but I do think we need to have a foundational understanding of campaigns and other demand gen tactics. Fundamental to our jobs is “taking products to market”, and so understanding the distribution channels to reach the “market” is important. Marketing campaigns is one vehicle, and typically how marketing teams overall are measured (pipeline). The other benefit of understanding campaigns is looking at campaign performance from a messaging effec ...Read More

I would say “curiosity”. When you’re early in your career, it’s all about learning as much and as fast as possible. There are foundational areas where a junior PMM needs to be curious about and to learn. A couple including: Product — fundamental in our title, it’s important that you’re genuinely curious about technology (and ideally what you’re marketing). Buyers — desire to understand their pains, what tools they use today, and how best to engage them. So be prepared to share areas you’ve learn ...Read More

First, direct management of people is just one aspect of “management”, but really I would think more about “leadership”, which isn’t just about managing people. For the people management piece, when we identify folks on the leadership/management track, we’ll aim to get them experience through indirect reporting lines. This might be things like: Be the onboarding buddy for a new hire — helping create an onboarding plan, helping them learn product and how the company operates Act as a mentor to mo ...Read More

I’ve had the fortune of working for and with some amazing leaders who have really shaped my career and impacted my trajectory. This includes the current CMO of Klaviyo, who I worked for back at Salesforce! I haven’t gone as far as actively managing a “personal board of directors”, but I definitely have former colleagues and leaders who I go to when I am looking for career advice, how to lead teams, those sort of things. It’s good to think of these things, but also the reason I have a bench of pe ...Read More