AMA: Square Global Product Marketing Lead, Add On Products, Kevin Zentmeyer on Product Marketing Interviews

I think landing your first interview and subsequently your first job as a PMM is made easier if you target some level of specialization either within the role or the company. Many PMM roles, especially more junior ones, are specialized or weighted towards particular areas like sales enablement or pricing for example. For someone with a sales or finance background in those cases, that can be a way in. Practically everyone in product marketing started their career in something else because there are very few product marketing specialist and that intersection of skills between their past work experience and PMM is often their superpower once in the role. It's critical that product marketers know their customers and know them well. If you work in an industry or a role today that is the industry or buyer persona for another company that is hiring a product marketer, then you have a big advantage in getting that role. You have unique value that other, even experienced PMMs don't. Make sure the recruiter or hiring manager knows about it. Spell it out in the intro section of your resume and your cover letter if you use one. Don't be shy about leveraging your network to reach out to people in that PMM team, a hiring manager, or someone else at the company, but you need to rely on more than just knowing someone to have an "in." In addition to making you a better candidate, specialized skills and industry background give that person within the company a tangible reason to reach out to the hiring manager and raise your name as a candidate.

To showcase your work without actually showing your work, you can instead show your process. Any messaging work will have a before and after, even if the prior state was an unlaunched product. 1. Describe what you were given. What was the new product/feature or existing messaging? 2. What was your process for determining the new messaging? 3. Were there any disagreements or misalignments about your new messaging? How did you get alignment to launch your new messaging through sales and marketing assets? 4. What was the result? How did you measure results to know whether it worked? Spend most of your time on describing your process. The hiring manager isn't hiring you for the specific messaging or results that you produced in your past role. They're hiring you because you have a repeatable, but flexible process or playbook to create effective messaging. Use the messaging you created as an example of that process and spend your time on that instead.

The best product marketers have the following traits in common: 1) They are type A. All of them. 2) They have a growth mindset. There is no finished product product marketer. This role requires constant learning to succeed day-to-day and only people who enjoy the treadmill of non-stop skill building will last. 3) They are sharp. If the candidate isn't incredibly sharp, I won't trust them, and this cannot be micromanaged. 4) They are "tactfully pushy" which is my term for people who can convince people to change their opinion or roadmap etc. without ruffling feathers. Passive doesn't work. Jerks don't either. 5) They're already good at something and succeeding in their current role. Entry level PMM roles are something that you are promoted into, not fall back into. This is also what you will build around from a training perspective.

One tactical way to get better at interviews is practice using the following method: 1) Search Glassdoor for product marketing interview questions. 2) Google "product marketing interview questions. 3) Copy paste all of them into one document. 4) Scan the document for any questions that you could answer in your sleep and delete them. 5) De-duplicated the remaining questions. 6) Write answers for each of those questions. 7) For repetitions, you can either re-read your answers to these questions or delete your answers and write fresh ones to take yourself through the thought process with a fresh pass at it. This method takes a long time, but getting better at most things requires a significant time investment in deliberate practice. So if you want to get better, this will help.

Mock GTM plans are typically done two ways in PMM interviews. One is a live question in the interview and the other is a project typically in the form of a PowerPoint. If it is a project, you should recognize this as an opportunity. If you want this role, and you should if you are applying, then this is a high leverage moment to achieve or obtain what you want at the next stage your career. You should go get it. Consider whatever the recruiter or hiring manager indicates is the amount of time that you "should" spend on the project as a lowball offer. You need to beat all of the other candidates to get this role and many of them will spend the amount of time that they've been told to spend on it - which is great for the hiring manager, but not for you. Hiring managers want a fair way to evaluate candidates. You don't want fair. You want to win! Spend as much time as you need to have insightful answers to their prompts in your presentation and understand their business well enough to make clever and relevant suggestions. I have done three interview projects and have gotten all three jobs. Do the work so you can get what you want. If it's a straight interview format where the interviewer gives you some details about a product or feature and asks you to create a GTM question, then your problem will be limited time. It's important to establish expectations for how much of the interview session will be spent on this prompt and if they have any follow up questions so you know how long to talk - and how long you can take to think, before you start talking - which is absolutely something you should do. This question is a trap that some people fall into by talking before they know what they want to say and then they're brain needs to multi-task and catch up. Take at least a few seconds first! Now that we've mastered the format of the question, the way to handle the meat of it is to 1) ask questions to understand what problems this product solves 2) who the target market is and 3) what is unique about this one. If you know these things, then you can run your standard GTM playbook with modifications to account for how the three questions are answered.