AMA: Sprinklr Senior Director of Product Marketing, Kavya Nath on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

The most successful product marketers are ones who lead with empathy and take on the customer point of view. I actually wouldn't separate out high-level GTM strategy from product/feature specific launches. The skills you've listed as high-level overall GTM (messaging, positioning, pricing, packaging, etc.) are the fundamentals to be able to launch any product or feature. Tactically all PMMs should be able to write, and present, and analyze data to make decisions that help grow revenue and support customer adoption. The ways in which you get it done, however, are through fostering cross-funcational relationships within your organization, understanding the goals and objectives of other teams, and working to help bridge gaps that will ultimately impact how your customers experience your products. 

Building trust is the key component here and I think you get there by taking the time to listen and learn. With the product team specifically, it’s educating them on your role and how you’re ultimately aligned to the same thing --> amplifying the value of the product they’re building and to grow revenue and adoption. That said, there are many cross-functional teams product marketing works with and the best way to build trust is to know your products, your market, and your customers. If you can come to the table with that knowledge and expertise the value of what you have to offer will clearly be seen through the quality of work you produce and how you can parter and work together moving forward.

This is a great question and something I’ve also used when interviewing candidates. I completely see how it can be daunting and spans varying levels of expectations. Personally, the thing I try to emphasize as part of this task is that I’m not looking for a perfect deck or designed project plan. But what I’m interested in seeing is how you strategize and think through a GTM approach. From research on market and competitors, to aligning internal stakeholders around packaging, pricing, positioning, internal/sales enablement, collateral creation through to campaign execution. If you’re able to talk through a GTM using a framework in which you see yourself strategizing and executing against that’s a win in my book. I would also highly recommend asking questions of the interviewer/hiring manager on what level of detail they’re expecting to see and use information gathered in the interview process to formalize your plan. For example, If a company is clearly focused on user adoption as a huge initiative include that in your launch plan, etc.

What is your superpower?! This one is great because it gives you insight into how a candidate perceives themselves. There's a self-awareness that comes through with the responses that allows for you to getting a sense of who they are an individuals and how they work in a team. The best example of this was someone who told me their super power was being able to make silos disappear.

My advice would be to come right out and state that this is what you’re looking for in terms of career growth and next steps. If you have 1:1’s with your manager that is a great place for this conversation. As a manager, it’s my job to understand what my teams’ careers aspirations are and work to give them the opportunities where they can grow and learn the skills that will take them to the next level. But that starts with the intent being made clear on what your goals are so they can help get you there. If possible, coupling this conversation with a yearly review or 360-review would help set the stage. It’s also important to come to the table with examples of projects you’ve taken the lead on, initiatives you’ve owned, and what the results were to show that you’re ready for the next step. If there are skills that they would like you to focus and work on they should then be able to identify and provide you opportunities to do so.

This to me depends on your company and the products you sell and will vary based on the composition of your solution set. A larger platform solution might have a VP or Director that’s overseeing platform level messaging and responsibilities related to the solution set as a whole while having a team that is aligned to specific product areas within the platform. A single point solution might have roles mapped to features that support the one product, etc. The most important thing especially in smaller teams is for leaders to be both a player and a coach with a balance between both manager and DR in handling strategy and tactical execution. This helps leaders stay in touch with tactical skills while also allowing directs to gain the skills to grow as product marketers and understand how to take on more strategic initiatives.

I would start by taking a hard look at all the things I felt I accomplished over those two years (writing a list helps!). Next start bucketing them into categories of skills (positioning, GTM, content writing, etc.), then have a little retrospective of how well you felt you did on the things you accomplished. I think you’ll naturally start to see areas where you yourself (given the time to reflect) feel like you knocked it out of the park or could maybe take a different approach or do things a bit differently. Understanding the latter will give you the ability to reach out and find resources, mentors, colleagues that can help bolster the skills you want to focus on learn new ways to approach projects than you have in the past.