AMA: Quizlet Director of Product and Lifecycle Marketing, Caroline Walthall on Product Marketing Career Path

Both can be valuable, but what you’ll get from each is different and the risks of each path are different. You’ll also want to think through what you need most from this next chapter in your career. The upside of going with a scrappy startup is you can get your hands dirty and rapidly gain experience on a wide range of product marketing projects across inbound and outbound PMM. It can be refreshing, especially early in your career to be given latitude to own more projects and the accountability to deliver. As you mention, with fewer marketers on a team, you have a chance to come in early and make yourself a trusted cross-functional advisor. As you prove your capabilities through enough cycles, you’re likely to be granted permission to hire other marketers to work with you. This was my story at Quizlet. I came in as a senior IC and one of the only product marketers, and in just a year, I worked across several product groups and made an impact. That gave me the credibility to lead the product marketing team going forward. Also, I’ve found that building a team from the ground up can be incredibly rewarding. That said, if you go with a scrappy startup, I’d make sure there’s a very clear line of sight to company growth and that you have confidence you’ll be given the opportunity to build a team. If not, it could end up being a quick dead end where you are just the “kitchen sink” marketer. While this can be valuable for a season or two in your career, especially earlier on, you’re not going to be able to focus enough to establish the skills you really need to prove for future product marketing roles. Also, keep in mind that going to a smaller or scaling startup means you have to tolerate a lot more uncertainty and that you’ll have to build up systems from scratch. This can be great if you are operationally-minded, but if that’s not a strength of yours, it may be more challenging to find success with this path. The upside of entering a role at a more established company is that the role of product marketing will be more established and there will likely be clearer definitions of success for you in the role. You may also have more resources to accomplish both research and go-to-market activities, which can expose you to more marketing channels, more sophisticated ways of working, and a more rigorous approach to measuring success. At a more established company, you’ll usually have an established level of product market fit that you can build on. This can give you more space to optimize and work on new audiences, features, or strategic bets rather than trying to spin “all the plates” to keep things afloat. Having more focus can help you tell a really compelling career story of how you helped build up a business unit or new initiative over time. You can still work your way to a management path with this approach. You can work to being a Group PMM lead if you go deep enough in a particular area and become the go-to person for that. That said, if you go with a more established company with a larger team, you need to really believe in your manager and their commitment to helping you grow and continue to increase scope over time. Be sure to screen for whether there is a lot of sensitivity for “stepping on toes” or extremely strict adherence to “swim lanes.” Too much structure can hold you back from expanding scope at the rate you’re capable of handling. Ask your prospective manager whether there tend to be opportunities to shift laterally on the team. Completing “rotations” on other products and groups can help you expand your influence to prepare you for management track. At the end of the day, you have to carefully vet your hiring manager, the company’s growth trajectory, and the culture of how roles and responsibilities are set. I have a personal preference for environments with more flexible roles and responsibilities because this has always let both me and my team adjust the types of projects that product marketing can drive to be most impactful for the company. In a more established company, you’ll have the advantage of working with strong leaders and you’ll see a high bar set for what excellence looks like. It may be beneficial to get a bit of a mix of both in your career to both sharpen (big company) and round out (small to midsize company) your skillset.

Careers in product marketing can be really varied, but I’ve noticed a few commonalities in successful PMMs’ stories. (Caveat: This is a simplification of a linear career path, but most people's paths aren't actually like this the whole way through!) 1. Establish marketing experience in one or a few channels early in your career to learn how to create great campaigns, bring messages to like through copy and creative, and test and learn via experimentation. Learn the ins and outs of your channel and take ownership over the nuances of your campaigns’ performance. 2. Show your user empathy. Get to know your target audience better than anyone. Volunteer to help with research projects, ask if you can listen to qualitative interviews either live or recorded, and take your “study” of the user seriously. Pull insights from what you hear and start injecting that into your campaigns and GTM work. Rep the user in meetings whenever it is appropriate and additive. 3. Raise your hand for a PMM role or apply to one at another company. Depending on your level of experience, sometimes a lateral transfer is an easier way to “break in” to PMM. 4. Lean hard into your PMM role. Figure out what success looks like at your company and determine how you can deliver a lot of value to cross-functional partners as quickly as possible. 5. As you get more launch cycles and research reps you should be growing your influence and strategy chops, and you should pursue opportunities to get promoted to the next level(s). 6. Establish a solid track record of success and collaboration and eventually, become a PMM lead, Group PMM, and/or Director of PMM. 7. Continue to specialize and move towards VP of Product Marketing, or go for a Head of Marketing role (Head, VP, CMO). This comes with experience and developing out a solid career story over time that shows how you’ve not only challenged yourself, but how you’ve also made a large impact at companies you’ve worked at. You can always take a very different path, like into product, or into consulting, and not all careers need to be linear. It’s much more common to have a mix of lateral and upward moves. Plus, occasionally for the right company or based on life factors, you may consider a step “back.” There are no real “rules” and I find that a "ladder" is too restrictive a metaphor for the world we live in today. The five skill areas that I tend to emphasize with my own team include: 1. Research & Audience Understanding 2. Product Partnership & Business Understanding 3. Positioning & Messaging 4. GTM: Launches & Adoption Drives 5. Leadership & Strategic Influence These might be slightly different in wording across B2B and B2C and depending on how much emphasis your company needs from PMM on inbound vs. outbound product marketing. But at the end of the day, a well-rounded PMM will know how to deliver value across any of these areas. Research & Audience Understanding: PMM needs to serve as a strategic anchor for the rest of the marketing org (and often the product org as well), when it comes to representing what customers and prospective customers care about. Even if User Research has its own org or if product research is heavily driven by product and design, PMM needs to conduct at least a few forms of regular research to keep a pulse on the market and the customer experience. This may be in the form of ongoing surveys and brand trackers, in product surveys, qualitative research and interviews with specific audience segments, or one-time market surveys to help you establish a baseline understanding of how your audience is and isn't getting their needs met. Product Partnership & Business Understanding: Understanding your audience and their needs and wants is not enough. To offer up valuable solutions, you need to deeply understand your current product and business model. Understanding what metrics and levers are crucial to driving company success is essential to being able to filter your ideas. It will also help you establish a strong basis of mutual alignment and understanding with your product partners, which is crucial to getting anything done! Positioning & Messaging: This is table stakes as a product marketer. Good positioning and messaging can be challenging to align on and put into practice. Make sure your understanding of the overall solution landscape is comprehensive and that you feel close enough to both your customers' pains and aspirations, and to the unique ways your product addresses those challenges. Then, you have to distill all of this into a simple point of view that describes how you are the ideal solution. You develop relevant messages that illustrate specific benefits that relate to your point of view. Lastly, these messages have to be broadly adopted throughout your marketing so that they are repeated enough times to be effective. Realistically, you might not strike the right copy variants immediately, so you need to be able to test-and-learn. You need to have a mix of well-researched conviction in a point of view on the market, and the tenacity to test your way into the right ways of bringing that POV to life. This is very challenging work that extends end-to-end from corporate strategy down to specific ad units and landing pages. You also have an opportunity to flex your storytelling and brand marketing muscles here. GTM Launches & Adoption Drives: As a product marketer, your work does not end with delivering a blueprint for the marketing messages you need to get to market. You need to play an active role in shaping how those messages get to market. To do this, you need to learn as much as you can about all the marketing channels you have at your disposal and build relationships with your various channel partners. GTM planning requires a lot of collaboration and leadership to align on an approach, budgets, timelines, and roles and responsibilities. And it often requires a lot of cross-functional coordination to ensure all the pieces keep moving to deliver on time. Some advice here: make sure you have some direct ownership over a few channels to make sure you have “skin in the game” and that you’re empathizing with your channel partners’ execution-orientation. Like positioning and messaging, your learning and development in this area are never “done,” because how we reach customers is endlessly changing. Leadership & Strategic Influence: No matter what level PMM you are, you likely need to play certain “glue” functions across your organization. While this cross-functional coordination can sometimes be draining, it also gives you a clear pathway to building influence in your organization. When you deeply understand your stakeholders and their goals, you can help bring everyone together to make sure you deliver value to the market. In order to do this well, you need to constantly work on your communication and collaboration skills. And as you rise in the ranks, you also need to make sure people see you as a key voice to have in the room. This happens when you learn to be an astute contributor, how to sharpen other’s thinking for the better, and how to call out needs for alignment or action.

First of all – you have to make sure you are being very explicit with them about your goal to grow into a product marketing role. Ask them if they’d be willing to help you build a short one page career growth document where you can align on high value activities that suit the company’s needs and your own aspirations for growth. When framed this way, it’s very hard for a manager to say no to laying out ideas and having a conversation. Three approaches to consider (and you can mix them): 1. Ask for stretch projects on top of your GTM workload 2. Look for opportunities to mentor others on some of your GTM work to help show that you are thinking ahead for who can grow into your current role and workload 3. Build stronger relationships with PMs For the first one, to assuage your manager’s concerns, first make sure you are doing your current job really well. Then once you feel sure of that, ask to take on some “10% time” projects to stretch into more of the product marketing work that you’d like to grow into. If you’re currently doing GTM work, you may want to spend more time on inbound product marketing like customer and market research. The easiest way would be to initiate some research projects that are related to your existing GTM work. Can you conduct more interviews prior to running A/B tests to learn why certain messages, designs, and features seem to resonate with users? Or, if a launch underperforms against expectations, can you generate hypotheses and conduct market research to see what the barriers were? I would imagine you don’t need too much “permission” for this category of work. The next thing would be to ask explicitly to help do some product discovery work, or to sit in with colleagues who are doing that and offer to help them take notes and discuss insights. For the second idea, we’re still trying to make sure your manager can find some peace with your aspirations to grow beyond your GTM role. Look around at your broader marketing team. Who might be interested in stepping up and into some of the work you currently do? How can you show a spirit of mentorship in sharing your load with someone who is looking to expand their scope to a role like yours? If you can show that there is a potential long term path to “replacing” you, you might meet more acceptance from your manager, who is probably just stressed about getting all the work covered. Lastly, internal moves are built on much more than just your manager. Find ways to start to build stronger relationships with specific PMs and product leaders who you already know. As you meet more regularly with some of those folks, you may be able to ask them directly how you can help augment the product marketing support they are already getting. Make sure to touch base with any directors of product marketing, too, as you don’t want to be perceived as going rogue. But at the end of the day, if you have more people in the product org and other cross-functional orgs like sales, design, and analytics in your corner, you’ll be much more likely to chart a path into PMM successfully.

As with products you sell, positioning yourself successfully has to be led by actual value creation. 10 tips to position yourself for a PMM lead role by delivering expanded value: 1. Increase your role’s scope by offering or asking to take on additional features or product pods. This gives you broader exposure to the overall business and to different leaders across the organization. 2. Enhance the depth of your understanding in at least one area. Become the go-to expert for either an audience, a set of features/products, a part of your funnel, or something that gives you domain authority. This is built on research and experience driving GTM work in that area. 3. Sharpen your PMM super power. Then use it, and share out about those wins much more often. Reputations are built on reps. Are you a great writer? Lean in hard on copy testing and share the results. Strong at synthesizing insights? Take on some new research projects and educate your colleagues. 4. Ask to lead or coordinate a larger marketing moment outside of launches that you own. Figure out how to be a great facilitator across the rest of your marketing org to bring a bigger campaign vision to life. 5. Build relationships with Director level and above leaders in other functions like product, design, sales, engineering, and data science. Even just casually keeping these folks in the loop on the outputs of your work goes a long way to increasing your visibility. 6. Take a more active role in setting and proactively sharing progress on OKRs. The more ownership you take of metrics and reporting, the better. 7. Ask great questions of your peers and leaders in meetings. Show you are looking to more deeply understand people’s thinking, even if it’s not an area you are a decision-maker on. 8. Relatedly, read the room in meetings to learn the delicate balance of when your inputs are going to be a value add vs. extra noise. You need to be seen as someone who can pick up on these nuances and ultimately make sure the collective agenda is advanced over your own. 9. Notice opportunities to improve cross-functional collaboration. Then, take initiative and set up working groups to develop shared solutions to the challenges you are all facing. There are often gaps in how orgs are set up, but PMM can help stitch those gaps together to make sure you are presenting a more unified product experience. 10. Think of subtle ways you can drive process efficiencies or work quality for your overall PMM team. If you are staying on top of the latest industry benchmarks, AI tools, and thought leadership, you can propose small updates to how the team works that make everyone’s life easier. 11. Bonus idea (when it’s an option): Offer to cover work for a colleague who goes on leave. This can be a quick way to expand your understanding and your scope in a short period of time without stepping on toes.

* First, check in to ask what the roles and responsibilities have been up to now. If they haven’t been documented, do a mini “listening tour” with the key players to offer to document how things have gone and what they think could be better. Listen closely for what they really care about. Ask to get your hands on other core documentation that has held together GTM plans. * After reviewing what has been done, think about ways you can demonstrate how you can drive efficiency and clarity in the overall plans and execution process. * Understand what aspects of GTM, launches, and roadmap planning execs feel most invested in having a stake in. Clearly share a proposal for review checkpoints and explain how you’ll involve them in early strategic mapping to make sure they are able to say their piece. * If they are still reluctant to give up the reins, ask if you can help take discrete parts of the workflow to build up some trust with them. What have they struggled with? What is time consuming for them? Where do they perhaps have knowledge gaps that you can fill? * Lastly, make sure you understand what their primary goals are. You need to diagnose why they feel the need to keep this important work to themselves. Are they worried about hitting revenue targets? Are they concerned that people at other levels won’t be able to drive decision making fast enough? Are they especially attached to a certain part of the strategy work that they are passionate about? Knowing the core reason for holding this work tightly can help you build their trust in the right areas so that you can take work off their plate and demonstrate your own ability to lead this cross-functional work!

There’s a long list of potential skills any Director of Product Marketing needs to have, but here are the most core skills needed for the role, in my experience. * Clear communication (verbal and written) * Marketing strategy * Research for decision making * Product intuition and curiosity * Management and coaching * Strong grasp of marketing analytics * User empathy * Strong organizational skills * Collaboration and facilitation skills * Ability to synthesize information simply

It’s going to vary depending on the company and your manager’s expectations. So make sure to have this conversation directly with them as well! That said, here’s a starter checklist to see where you stand. * You know not just how to do the work, but how to scope what needs to be done. You’ve become quite autonomous and a driver of your own project list. Related to this, you ask for feedback, but your manager trusts your work output and is okay with not reviewing everything you put together. * You’ve established you can drive end-to-end marketing from clear strategy to strong execution by doing this at least several times at a meaningful scale. * You frequently demonstrate how you are learning and sharpening the company’s audience, product, market, or business understanding. This will typically be through research and through GTM testing and campaign analysis. What is working and why? If you can’t answer that yet, you need to spend more time developing your hypotheses and testing them. * PMs ask you to join key strategic meetings or to be a thought partner as they refine their thinking. * When you are asked to lead a cross-functional or broader marketing project, you feel comfortable both facilitating and calling some shots to move the group forward. In these instances, your peers grant you the authority to lead and make decisions without second guessing you. Are you already checking 3-4 of those boxes? Great! If so, you are probably in a good place to start talking to your manager about the specific skills, outcomes, and projects that they are looking to see to help you reach that next level. Having an open conversation and documenting your agreed upon action items is key!