AMA: Timescale Head of Product Marketing, Hien Phan on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

I think the future of product marketing depends on the type of product and persona you’re selling to. But for developer tools—especially highly technical ones—I have a strong bet: PMMs will shift from marketing to the product org. Why? The technical nature of these products demands that the people responsible for commercializing them be tightly aligned with those building them. Deep product understanding, positioning, and go-to-market execution can’t be siloed away in marketing—it has to be embe ...Read More

Market sizing is about speed and precision in balance—getting a quick, reliable number when needed or going deep when you are required to. But while market sizing helps you understand the opportunity at hand, what truly matters is understanding who buys from you and why. For a startup, it’s often about quick sizing: TAM (Total Addressable Market) back-of-the-envelope calculations using industry benchmarks, competitor data, and first-principles thinking. You estimate the number of potential custo ...Read More

As I’ve grown in my career, I’ve realized that the hardest, and most important skill in product marketing is truly understanding market context and using that to shape positioning. It’s easy to state the obvious about your market. The real challenge is seeing what others missed—framing the problem in a way that unlocks the right strategy. Take Yahoo in its early days. It framed its market as competing with traditional media companies. But in hindsight, the real market context was the consumeriza ...Read More

So I messed up answering another question, but it is similar to this question. The question was around how did I get to my career stage, what were the things I planned for. Below is my answer for the other question that also applies to this question. Early in my career, I chased titles and money. I thought climbing the ladder faster meant I was successful. But if you’ve read my career journey elsewhere, you’ll know I eventually realized it wasn’t about chasing a specific title—it was about chasi ...Read More

Category creation is bloody hard. I’ve tried it multiple times, and the only time it worked was when three things happened: There was a clear market problem. The problem was big enough that users felt the pain. I built a community around that pain. Too often, companies start with a category name and try to force it onto the market. That almost never work. Users don’t care about category names—they care about their pain. Instead of focusing on coining a new term, focus on selling the problem and ...Read More

I spent much of my career searching for something I couldn’t quite put into words. At first, I thought it was money, which led me to finance. And while finance gave me exactly that—money—it didn’t give me fulfillment. In fact, I burned out early. The 2008 recession was a turning point, forcing me to realize that money alone wasn’t enough. I wouldn’t call this a mistake; it was something I had to go through. And I don’t regret it. The skills I built during my time as an investment professional—ma ...Read More