AMA: SoundCloud Former Vice President of Product Marketing, Ryan Goldman on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

Tricky question! To be honest, OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) are HIGHLY context- and business-specific, so there isn't such thing as "good OKRs for Product Marketing" in the abstract. You should be aligning PMM OKRs to the OKRs at the company level. And keep in mind that they are all about business transformation, not keeping the lights on. So they will involve stretch goals and should intersect and overlap with the OKRs of other teams across the org, not be strictly unique. On the other h ...Read More

My favorite question to ask is something along the lines of "Here's a big initiative we're planning to roll out, and whoever gets this job will own at least part of the planning and execution. How would you go about making the initiative successful?" A great answer always includes something like "Before I get into the tactical details, let me just first check that I understand why this initiative is so important. Please tell me where I'm mistaken, but I assume the objectives are..." And the best ...Read More

As a candidate, you're never expected by the interviewer to have all the context. So it's an impossible expectation to put on yourself (unless you're an internal candidate or have an insider hookup). So you should re-frame the exercise as less about arriving at the right answer and more about demonstrating your abilities as a problem-solver and effective planner. Here are the biggest tricks to getting this right: Start by clearly articulating the actual, often underlying, business objective Crea ...Read More

To be honest, you shouldn't assume years of experience or tenure influence promotion. Promotion, especially at earlier-stage companies, is super aligned to where you create value for the company and being able to align that value to the highest-level corporate goals. This is especially true in PMM, where the metrics and KPIs are not nearly as straightforward as Growth or Demand Generation, for example. So, don't only be your own advocate, but, more importantly, advocate to develop and work on pr ...Read More

The biggest attributes that indicate PMM leadership potential are:  Comfort with ambiguity Ability to articulate a thematic narrative Planning, delegation, and execution skills in tandem Ambiguity is a fact of life, especially when it comes to product roadmaps, timelines, and resources. A great PMM leader will help others see that the ambiguity isn't an absence of playing field, but a more frictionless path towards whichever endzone they choose. Thematic narratives are key to setting the PMM vis ...Read More