AMA: Prove Head of Product Marketing, Leandro Margulis on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

Well, the question of "What is Product Marketing" Could mean different things at different companies, but my answer is that we provide the voice of the market and the voice of the customer internally to the product manager so we can build products that resonate with our audience, and we are the voice of the product externally providing the appropriate messaging and positioning to go to market.

This is an iterative process, and always better to over-communicate than under-communicate, so we can get everyone's feedback and input and people feel they have been heard and their input taken into consideration. Even if you do not end up going in a certain way, be able to explain why not and why that input was still helpful.

Product Marketing is an evolving role and can mean slightly different things at different companies, from sales enablement to competitive analysis and everything in between. Hence, I would suggest this product manager to define what product marketing means to them and find / build a place most aligned with what they want to do.

First of all, you are in the right place in the Sharebird Community :) I would also recommend the Product Marketing Community and PMA. There are not only resources you can consume, but also communities you can consult, stay active with that can enrich your professional and personal life with meaningful connections, and also provide you with additional professional growth opportunities.

For any promotion, I look for the person to already be performing at the next level, and have an interest in doing so. Not everyone wants to be a people manager. That said, if they do and they are already managing contractors, agencies, and other people are working with them from other departments, we can put a plan together to make this happen and provide any additional coaching if needed to support the person's success. 

One of the main skills I see to success in PMM im Empathy. Empathy in the sense of being able to to put yourself in other people's shoes. You are the customer and market advocate internallt and the product advocate externally, so understanding those different perspectives can help a LOT in any PMM materials you are developing, from slides to demos to websites to campaigns.

Product Marketing could be under Marketing or Product depending on the organization. The good thing about a Product Markering role is that the role, by its nature, interacts with many different parts of the business, from Sales to Marketing to Product, so Product Marketing gives you an opportunity to see how the organization works beyond product marketing and prepares you well for leadership roles accross the organization.

This is one of the reasons to work for a smaller company where you get a wider scope, there is always pros and cons on each company type. Now if you are in a large company with a small scope, Make the implicit explicit and talk to your manager and others to express your interest in learning more about the wider scope. That should open doors to get more involved with a wider variety of product marketing tasks.

This question reminds me of Reid Hoffman's book "The Startup of You". If you think of yourself as a startup, think about which skills you have and are good at, what others you want to learn, and see how you can hone on those skills in your current or upcoming role as well as which other skills you want to learn or develop so it will help you get the next role. There are different career paths for product marketers, so you have options.

While all relationships are important, having the right relationship with Product (Product Manager counterparts) is critical, so you can provide them the input about customers and market that can influence the PM's roadmap in a positive way. That said, relationship with Sales are also critical, as you may be supporting them with the right materials for them to do their job.

I would say that providing the voice of the customer and the voice of the marker to the product manager so we can build products that resonate with our audience is key. I would also say that providing the appropriate messaging and positioing for our products to go to marker is critical. In order to do so, we need to understand the competitive landscape well.

Make sure you have periodic meetings scheduled with each separate and some times with both together. As PMM, we bring the "voice of the customer" and the "Voice of the market" from the outside in, and we provide the messaging and positioning for the go-to-market strategy for the "inside out", so we need to get sales input and feedback intro product to influence the roadmap, and make sure we educate sales on the product in the best way possible so it resonates with their customers.

Have you help others launched products or features and you can talk about what exactly you did in that process? Or have you launched any type of campaign, event, etc where you can showcase the skills that are transferable to a product launch that you can talk about? A lot of the skills needed to launch products are transferable from other disciplines.