AMA: Plaid Product Marketing Lead, Valerie Angelkos on PMM Soft and Hard Skills

Understanding how Brand Marketing works is critical to succeed in Product Marketing as these two teams work closely together to bring any Marketing and Product work to life. Brand Marketing thinks about creating a long-term, strategic plan to continuously boost a brand's recognition and reputation. It involves creating and maintaining brand-consumer OR brand-customer relationships and marketing brand attributes—the traits that people think of when they picture a particular brand. I see this as t ...Read More

A couple of others that come to mind: 1. Excellent communication skills and the ability to adapt these to the right audience - whether that's for consumers at scale, customers, or internal stakeholders. 2. Cross-functional influence - PMMs sit in between customers/consumers, Sales, Marketing, Product and even more functions depending on the organization. The ability to rally folks towards a common goal and bring everyone along is critical. 3. Related to curiosity - that constant need to understa ...Read More

Most of my career has been spent in Marketing and I used my MBA to transition industries (from CPG to Tech) and location (from Latin America/regional teams to the United States/global teams).  While I had practical experience as a Marketer, what I learned through my MBA is the strategic and analytical side of marketing - focusing on understanding what frameworks are best to solve different problems, what data and insights I need to inform my decisioning process, and how to measure success of dif ...Read More

I started my career in Marketing (Brand Marketing, CPG) and always loved the intersection of consumer/customers, brand building, and business ownership. I went to business school to transition industries - from CPG into Tech - and locations - from Latin America to the US. MBA folks would know that most schools advise to only switch one out of three variables (industry, location, function). I chose two. During this search, I explored and interviewed for both options: Product Marketing and Product ...Read More

Product Marketing Specialists, Associates or General Marketing Specialist roles are good roles to kick-off your career in Product Marketing. They all will require you to develop Product Marketing skillsets and eventually become proficient in them -- including areas like working with Product/Tech teams to define product strategy, defining and understanding your target audience, launching a new product, feature, or service, running end-to-end marketing campaigns, etc. The difference is typically t ...Read More

Retention is a hard topic and I personally think a healthy amount of rotation across different companies and roles is critical to develop a robust PMM skillset, so I have that in mind when I think about the team's I've managed and how to provide them with what they need to feel motivated and continue to progress in their career. A couple of things I focus on: 1) Scope breadth and complexity - People want to continue to grow and feel they have incremental impact in their roles. I make sure I work ...Read More

Product Marketers should be user/customer-centric, insights-driven, and data-driven. Understanding what users/customers need with breadth (at scale, representative of your target audience) and depth (deep insights of your users in each of these segments), where the market is heading, and how your product is performing from a usage AND business standpoint is key in order to develop a robust understanding of where your product stands, where you should be heading, and what you need to build to get ...Read More

I'd weave these topics in as you answer the hard skill questions. Depending on your examples, theu could be easier to be included. Things to touch upon: 1. Leadership + Influencing without authority  2. Collaboration with XFN teams 3. Dealing with ambiguity (in particular in startup/smaller companies) 4. Managing conflict  5. Inclusiveness (this is something I look for frequently but hardly ever touched upon by candidates) 6. Communicating across stakeholders However, please note that a good int ...Read More

I personally used my MBA to transition from CPG to Tech. However, I've seen many do so without an MBA and generally speaking, it is possible by focusing on transferable skills, for example: 1) Focus on user insights - relevant across both industries but might be executed in practice in different ways. In Tech, and depending the size of the company, you rely more on UXR teams and product-usage insights whereas in CPG it's generally more scaled Market Research.  2) End to end campaign and/or progr ...Read More

I think it depends ultimately on what the team needs. In a highly technical area, I'd value industry and product knowledge highly, as long as the person is then coachable and open to learn on other areas within the PMM world. In a not so technical area, I'd prioritize PMM skillsets over other areas. Soft skills should be part of the package either way, aligned with the value of your team and company. Ultimately the goal is to find the right balance and bring different perspectives so the team ca ...Read More

First of all - I empathize with you and I know it's hard to receive critical feedback, but I applaud your interest in wanting to do something about this feedback and improve it. Feedback and manager relationships are often tough to navigate and there is no one-size-fits-all answer, but I'll share what has been helpful to me so far - both when receiving feedback and as a manager. I think you have a couple of questions here - so I'll break them up first: 1) On what to do with feedback and how to i ...Read More