AMA: Mixpanel Director of Marketing (Product Marketing, Growth, Content), Brittany Sudlow on Product Marketing Career Path

Making the jump from presales into product marketing is very realistic! Here are some areas I would focus on Talk the PMM talk Study the frameworks: Get comfortable with messaging houses, value-matrix exercises, and persona message mapping, GTM plan, etc. Read some classics: Obviously Awesome by April Dunford for positioning, Crossing the Chasm for buyer journeys, and the Sharebird and Product Marketing Alliance blog for tactical how-tos. Get certified: A short course (e.g. Pragmatic Institute’s ...Read More

Great question, these are the areas I would focus on as someone who has spent my whole product marketing career to date, in SaaS.  Speak SaaS-ese fluently Get comfortable with the key metrics to track CAC, LTV, MRR/ARR, churn and ARR.  Know the key levers or channels to move those metrics. Learn the difference between sales-led and product led growth (plg) Play with some key tools Onboard yourself to a number of SaaS products, observe the differences between the products, their onboarding their ...Read More

Great question! Here are the areas I found to be the most helpful in standing out and making an impact at a startup. Customer Conversations: Get on Zoom or in-person frequently. Nothing beats direct feedback for sharpening your positioning, uncovering new use cases and spotting friction points before they become crises. Generalist & DG Mindset: PMM at this stage wears every hat—demand gen, content, field, product launches, partner co-marketing. Embrace the breadth: it’s your fastest path to ...Read More

Think of launching PMM like any other product—hook them, place it where they live, invite them in, then prove the value. For example: Lead with a knockout headline Treat your intro like an ad: short, benefit-driven, and impossible to ignore. Plant it in the right ecosystems Don’t just post in Marketing channels—share in Sales, CS, Product, Enablement, even the leadership Slack. Wherever key customer questions happen, PMM should be top of mind. Open the doors with Office Hours Set up a an office ...Read More

I’m sure you are well on your way to CMO! Here’s what I’d double-down on from a PMM POV Digital & growth marketing fluency (Demand Gen) Get really comfy with every campaign type (paid, SEO, email, ABM), the core metrics (CAC, LTV, MRR/ARR, churn) and how pipeline generation shifts between PLG and sales-led motions. This is the area I would go deepest on other marketing functions. 10 years ago CMOs usually came up from DG…that’s pivoting to PMM lately but still heavily DG focused.   Brand sav ...Read More

I would recommend starting small and going big, later. Startup phaseHonestly, I’d kick things off in a scrappy high-growth startup. When you’re figuring out which slice of marketing you love, there’s no substitute for: Wearing every hat – one day you’re in demand gen, the next you’re doing PR, then you're setting up a conference booth. Creative constraints from tiny budgets force you to test, learn and iterate very fast. Rapid visibility in a small company can help your successes get seen—and re ...Read More