AMA: Strava Former Product Marketing Lead, Lauren B. Parker, MBA on Consumer Product Marketing

In my experience, the best way to prepare for the interview is to be knowledgeable about the industry that you’re working in and how you can bring the customer’s needs and voice to the table in a way that only you can. Whether that means doing a little research into the industry so that you can understand the consumer or deep diving into how the product currently comes to life for consumers. When I was interviewing with Strava, I started my subscription and got familiar with the product so I cou ...Read More

I’m a big believer in learning from others and real-life case studies that are current, so I use Reforge and PMA for workflow examples and heavily utilize their Slack communities. Reforge has been helpful for knowledge sharing, making content readily available and downloadable. Reforge and PMA slack channels also make it accessible to talk to the people who created those workflows to understand the thought process behind them. It’s easy to go to these sites and try to make them fit your use case ...Read More

I’ve been noticing a shift towards brand marketing and campaign management in the PMM space. More joint titles, more case studies around the brand being product and product as the brand. Another shift I’ve noticed is that everything is B2C. Who your C is changes but B2B isn’t just about internal sales teams, there seems to be a turn to reach the end user more. At the core of marketing is the market, so staying up to speed on what is happening on the macro economic levels and noticing those trend ...Read More

I’ve been under both the product org and the marketing org and there are pros and cons to each one. In my experience, the pros of being in the product org are that you are deeply embedded into the product team, can get more insights into the planning process of the roadmap and how and why new initiatives are prioritized, UX research is more readily available, and sometimes you get a more direct line of influence as the ‘voice of the customer.’ The cons are that you are sometimes relegated to spe ...Read More

What a great question! I’ve seen more of the transition from PMM to PM, so I would love to ask you, what is driving you to look at the marketing side of the product coin? There are definitely transferable skills between the two, and depending on the company you’re interested in the PM technical skills can be an incredible win for the team. As for the marketing skills needed for the transition, it’s all about the flywheel. Nothing is linear in marketing so understanding the various levers and tou ...Read More