AMA: Reddit Director of Community Product Marketing, Rachel Weber Callaway on Community Product Marketing Career Path

Diversity is incredibly important in tech. If we want to build products that have value and appeal to a wide audience, then all audiences have to see a home for themselves via that product or platform. The best way to build inclusive products is to have inclusive teams. When I'm hiring, I make an effort to focus not only on the diversity of the candidates and the interview panel but also on the candidates' professional backgrounds. It's important to remember that not everyone has the same opportunities early in their career, and if you only focus on candidates who have worked at specific companies, you'll inevitably miss out on highly qualified people who can bring critically necessary perspectives to your team. I would describe my team as diverse in several facets - though I can't take full credit. My team is made up of wonderful community experts, many of whom were hired in various other roles at Reddit and have made their way over to product marketing - so their hiring managers deserve a major shout for bringing them on board!

Here are a few tips for new grads looking to get into product marketing: * Keep an eye out for when you encounter product marketing in your life. I promise you're seeing it all the time. Don't just dismiss that tooltip the next time it pops up! Ask yourself why you're seeing it, what it says, if it's getting you to take the action it's supposed to, etc. * Similarly, try to reverse-engineer campaigns you see out in the wild. After seeing an ad or other marketing material, ask yourself: who were they trying to reach? What was the goal of the ad? What did the ad make you feel or want to do? I promise if you do this, you will blow the socks off any hiring manager when they ask you to share examples of work that inspires you. * Know and respect your skill set. This means both having confidence in your strengths and leading with them in interviews, but also being aware of what you don't know yet and what you're willing and ready to learn if given the opportunity. * A bigger brand name isn't always better when you're first starting out. Sure, it looks good on a resume, but a smaller company is going to give you more opportunities to learn and get your hands on more facets of the role.

I believe presentation skills are vital for most marketing roles, especially PMM. The PMM's job is often to bring many different cross-functional stakeholders on board with their marketing plan, and the best way to do that is to sell them on it—and the best way to sell is with a great presentation. The best way to develop these skills is simple: practice and present often. It's also important to remember that every time you present your work or GTM plan, you're effectively message testing. How is it landing in the room? What questions are being asked? Is the plan easily understood by the people you're presenting to? All of these are good hints as to how your end user or audience will receive your campaign. If you're uncomfortable with or nervous about presenting, don't be afraid to ask someone who loves presenting (it's usually pretty obvious who they are) for help! Ask them for tips, see if they'll read through your presentations and let you do a quick run-through, or even hop on a few extra calls a month to observe them. I can tell you from my personal experience I'm always thrilled when someone asks for my help when it comes to learning to be a better presenter.

Is it too cliché to say working hard and delivering good results? Because that's critical to any promotion. Once you have that as a foundation, you want to focus on a few other important elements: visibility of your work, your cross-functional and upward relationships, and the story you tell about your role and work to others. And always, always keep a record of your biggest wins and accomplishments; it will come in handy.

When showcasing your experience, consider the elements of your past roles most relevant to the product marketing job you're applying for. Is it a particular audience or segment you have a lot of experience with? Does it require a strong background in story-telling? Is it a product area that solves a problem you've tackled in another capacity? My team is comprised mostly of people who had not done product marketing before their role at Reddit but who all had deep experience working with communities and understood the best ways to gain trust, share messages that resonated, and build alongside a community—skills that are paramount to successful product marketing at Reddit. Not only that, I had no explicit background in product marketing. However, I brought consumer products to the Reddit audience many times when I was a creative strategist; I partnered closely with our business marketing team to help position our ad products for our brand partners. I collaborated with consumer product managers as I developed organic brand campaigns. All of these skills were not only relevant to the role of PMM, but were crucial in helping inform Reddit's Community Product Marketing strategy as I built out the function.

This is a great question—and the answer is that it is a unique blend of art and science, particularly at Reddit. We partner closely with other cross-functional teams to deliver our insights, most notably UXR and Community Programs. UXR brings a more data-driven research approach, and our Community Programs team provides insights from our most tenured and trusted community members. PMM then blends those inputs with our own observations and analyses of conversations on and off Reddit, competitive assessments, and market segmentation. We typically present our product and engineering partners with a synthesized readout (often in deck form). In true Reddit fashion, we start with a TL;DR - and then dive deeper into the data or key anecdotal evidence that backs up our recommendations.

The short answer here is (unsatisfyingly): it depends. I believe that a successful community-driven product launch is likely not marked by a traditional "pop" in metrics. If you really want a product to succeed long-term and drive growth in your community, it needs to develop over time so that it becomes a part of the community's fabric. I've seen products launch with a ton of fanfare, lots of marketing, and even a strong uptick in community engagement—only to fall off quickly because there was no true community-level fit for the product. At Reddit, Community Product Marketing does inbound work that helps our product team build products that enhance our user and moderator experiences and outbound work that ensures our community understands the product's true value. It's a bit of a cliché, but it's true—oftentimes, the best marketing is not marketing. Instead, we want to see the community talking and advocating for our products amongst themselves and then watching for an upward trend in the key associated metrics over time that prove the product is successful. While I recommend giving community-driven products time to find their footing, you do need to know when a product is not showing any signs of PMF, and it may be better to cut your losses and move on.

I mentioned this in another answer, but I think a big one is community stability. At Reddit, our platform is entirely dependent on our community. In order for our users to have a good experience with every visit to Reddit, they need to trust that the community is secure and stable. In fact, they need to trust it so much that it never crosses their minds. If a product rollout has an adverse impact on the community, it doesn't just affect the success of that product launch; it can undermine the integrity of the entire community infrastructure. I always want my team to consider community stability as the bedrock for any of their go-to-market plans.

I love this question. In no small part because I've had to do this a lot. Here are some of my top tips: * Don't run away from crises or say when you're wrong. It's PR 101, but addressing the problem head-on and honestly is always going to be better than trying to sugarcoat it and pretend it's something it's not * Listen to your community, and don't gaslight * Wherever you can, adjust course based on community feedback and reference that feedback in your new messaging * If you feel confident in your path forward, eventually, the community will be too

I believe that product marketing is increasingly just marketing—especially for B2C marketing. Consumers are more savvy and informed than ever, and their opinions of a brand are more likely to be formed by the summation of small opinions formed by the value that the brand offers them via its products than by one overarching broad message. At Reddit, we pioneer an "outside-in" or "inverted funnel" approach to community marketing. This means we're always starting with our core audience and thinking about what really matters to them. I believe (and hope) this will become more standard practice because it helps not only deliver effective marketing campaigns but better products that truly add value to the most important users.

Community Product Marketing puts the community at the center of everything we do (duh). The main difference is that you have to think about your audience both as individuals and as a collective community. What motivates an individual can be (and often is) very different than what motivates the entire community. An example from Reddit was when we launched a new product, "Images in Comments." This product gave individual commenters the ability to upload images in addition to text in their comment submissions. At first glance, this seems like something you would want to market to those individual commenters. However, due to the community nature of Reddit and our products, Images in Comments was something that we needed entire communities and their moderators to buy into and get excited about. Our job as Community PMM was to make sure that community members and moderators saw the value of adding this new layer of engagement to their subreddits and understood that it could unlock more vibrant comments and introduce an entirely new type of engagement for community members. Thus, our go-to-market campaign for this product focused on ensuring that relevant communities were well-educated on the product's value, had the tools they needed to moderate this new type of engagement, and continued to showcase good examples to other communities to encourage them to adopt the feature.