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

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 * Create a framework or skeletal outline that has as little detail as possible * Write down all your assumptions and risks Briefly, the underlying business objective is the outcome the company as a whole wants to achieve by taking something to market. Understanding this is really key! Is it acquring a specific type of user? Retaining the users you have? Increasing conversion to paid? Preventing churn? Upselling to a higher tier? Cross-selling existing customers to a value-added product? And, to answer your specific question about dealing with the ambiguity of the question, lean into assumptions! You have to make some leaps of faith in order to move forward. But as you make those leaps, clearly capture what the assumptions are, why you made them, and what challenges they may create for you later.

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 answer also includes something that sounds like "Wow, this is really interesting. We faced a similar objective in one of my past roles. Here's how we approached it then, and here's how this sounds a little different..."

The trifecta of short-form published writing, long-form writing, and enablement materials always does the trick for me. If I can see the candidate has written a great feature-related blog post or one-pager, a positioning and differentiation narrative, and slides that cue up best practices, then I'm a happy hiring manager.

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 vision because they break free of the highly biased inside-out view of what the product or feature is and how it was engineered or designed, and, instead, focuses on why it matters (and for whom it matters) through the outside-in lens of the market's pain points, objectives, and practices that already exist. This has the added benefit of seeing and understanding competition and ecosystem dependencies in context. And go-to-market is all about not just the positioning and messaging strategy, but, also, how the positioning and messaging come to life for the audience. So being able to partner across teams to drive tactic and channel ownership is really key to delivering outcomes from the GTM plan. And, even at the most senior levels, owning some part of execution so that you can model what good practices and assets look like is important, especialy in companies where PMM is a newer function.

Part 1: Don't let being right stand in the way of understanding what's most important to your stakeholder. Part 2: "Take your talents to South Beach." Meaning, if your stakeholder is C-level, and they say out loud that they don't want or need you, GET OUT! Do as LeBron did when he announced his first departure from the Cavs. Chances are, they'll only figure it out after you're gone, and they'll sooner than later want someone like you to come back.

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 projects that lead to big, transformative outcomes. Show that you understand the strategic opportunity of the company and that you have a plan for how you, your team, and your partners can drive a meaningful play, even in the presence of internal challenges.

Adopt a mentality that focuses on the market first, not the product. That way, you can serve your partners in Product, Engineering, Demand Generation, Revenue, Growth, Sales, Customer Success, etc. in ways that they wouldn't be able to serve themselves. And use that mentalithy to get things done -- create artifacts, not just strategies.

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 hand, there are plenty of good KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for PMM to track. For B2B and SaaS, my favorite PMM KPIs are: * MQL-to-SAL conversion rate * Sales win rate * Contribution margin for newly targeted segments * Adoption rate within the first 48 hours after launch For B2C and marketplaces, my favorite PMM KPIs are: * Adoption rate within the first 48 hours after launch * User survey respondents' preference for your differentiated features * Segment-specific retention rate