AMA: Postscript Vice President Of Product Marketing, Sam Melnick on Developing your Product Marketing Career

Managing up is a huge part of being a PMM, especially when aiming for a leadership position. How this is done depends on where you are in your career and what is expected of you. An IC Product Marketer needs to manage up and across, but I'd expect them to seek out specific direction from their manager and other key stakeholders more frequently than a senior manager or Director who should come with more developed plans and recommendations. That said, there are a few common themes that I would recommend regardless of current level: 1. Understand Your Leaders: Get to know your leaders' preferences, communication styles, and priorities. Do they want to be brought in early in a process for input or are they good just reviewing your project plan or goals? 2. Proactive Communication: Regularly update your leaders on your progress, challenges, and strategic direction. Be proactive in seeking their input and feedback, change happens constantly, your leader is your conduit to getting information quickly and making sure your work aligns to top-level goals. 3. Use Your Leaders to Prioritize: Don't look to leaders or stakeholders to tell you exactly what to do, rather use them to prioritize initiatives effectively. Go to them and say "How would you prioritize these X initiatives?" or "Which of these projects should I drop?" 4. Adaptability: Remain flexible and open to feedback from your stakeholders. Product Marketers are in the middle of A LOT of different teams and projects, you have to show that you are willing to adjust your approach and pivot when necessary. Digesting new information and addressing feedback is an important part of managing up. 5. Measure & Tie to Goals: It's easy to get lost in the execution as there is always more to do, but show leaders that you are tracking specific goals that relate to corporate initiatives and report back on progress.

PMM's are prime candidates for leadership positions due to the cross-functional nature of the work. Great PMMs and PMM teams are working with Product, Enablement, Sales, CS, Ops...not to mention all of their marketing peers. Because of this, there are plenty of opportunities to lead through influence or as a project lead. While not all PMMs want to move to official people management (which is perfectly fine!!), for those who are interested, I look for the following skills: 1. Communication and Collaboration: They must be able to lead a project and communicate goals across diverse teams. 2. Macro Thinking: Ability to look at their projects and focus areas and connect them to larger company and market trends. Bonus points for being proactive with these ideas and bringing people together to execute on them. 3. Results Orientation: Track record of delivering measurable results, meeting targets, and driving business growth through their projects and product areas. Specifically driving the full cycle of goal definition, tracking, and reporting. 4. Leadership Presence and Mentorship: Demonstrated ability to work with others, lead projects by providing clear direction, and find ways to mentor and support jr members of the team. And an added piece of advice, if your goal is to become a people manager, tell your manager! The opportunity may not present itself immediately, but get it on their radar.

Some of my favorite PMMs have spent time in field roles— Sales, Sales Engineering, and in particular Customer Success. Getting first-hand experience working with customers and prospects is invaluable and having empathy for the people serving your customers is also important. Exposure to sales provides invaluable insights into customer needs, pain points, and purchasing behaviors. Roles like sales engineering offer a deep understanding of product functionality and technical aspects. Experience in customer success equips PMMs with a holistic view of the customer journey, from onboarding to retention and where value is delivered. Having a diverse background like this fosters empathy, adaptability, and a customer-centric mindset, qualities that are essential for success in product marketing.

I'd expect PMMs to interface heavily with Product, Enablement, and Go-to-Market teams, this is almost a daisy chain where PMM is partnering with Product to usher the company's offerings to the customer. Bringing value to the market and driving revenue for the company. Of course, Product Marketing should always be interfacing (and partnering!) with the core marketing team as well. Depending on the go-to-market model, where PMMs spend time will differ. And over the next few years, I don't expect major changes, but if it's not already happening I'd encourage and expect increased collaboration with finance and operations teams. PMMs need to work closely with finance and ops on TAM analysis, forecasting, and identifying future opportunities, and locating gaps in the revenue model. This continued, and potentially greater, collaboration with finance and ops will give PMMs a more holistic view of the business and greater impact on company strategy and success. Some of my favorite initiatives are ones in which I've been able to lock arms with finance and create significant change in an organization.

1. Use your expertise and unique knowledge to partner with Product Marketing on a project, any project! When I was a CSM on a new product, I started by working with customers to solve their specific problems. Because I was good at that, sales began bringing me into pre-sales conversations to pitch prospects, I then started creating content for my pre and post-sales engagements. It was easy to take that work and partner with the PMM team to codify and scale my work. That was me moonlighting in PMM and helped prepare me for a full-time PMM gig. 2. Step in and help other departments solve their problems. Product Marketing is pulled in SO many directions. There are very few departments we don't work with and often it is to help solve specific problems. So if you want to get into Product Marketing, get experience working with other teams and help them solve their problems. 3. Find ways to document and share your knowledge. Much of Product Marketing's work is gathering and synthesizing information. Then distilling it into impactful content (PPTs, talk tracks, web pages, enablement sessions, etc) that the field teams can use to drive more revenue. You probably have knowledge or information like this, practice getting it into the right format and sharing it with the teams. And of course, the best thing to do is take informational interviews with as many PMMs as possible. Ask them this question, ask them how you can help them, and ask them for more introductions.

This is a tough topic/question as PMM teams can be structured in INFINITE ways. A lot depends on company size, company goals, your product counterpart and that team's structure, and the needs of the GTM team. Currently, my PMM team matches up with specific PMs in a ~2.5:1 ratio, I try to match PMM > Product, so they are the go to person on that offering. I also have a PMM focused on Launch and Process, they are responsible for helping define the process of bringing products to market and helping program manage any tier 1 or 2 launches. I then have PMMs handle auxiliary projects or offerings (think unique services or differentiators that may not have a clear "product owner"). This might be a full time role or side of the desk project depending on the company priorities at that time Enablement and Market Intelligence are also on my team currently and I've had customer marketing in the past. The common theme is I want everyone on my team involved in the most impactful, challenging, cross-functional projects at the company!