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 rec ...Read More

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 a ...Read More

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 m ...Read More

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 help ...Read More

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: Communication and Coll ...Read More

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 ...Read More