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

Category creation is bloody hard. I’ve tried it multiple times, and the only time it worked was when three things happened: 1. There was a clear market problem. 2. The problem was big enough that users felt the pain. 3. 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 rallying the right audience around it. Examples from our industry: * Marketo – Early on, they didn’t sell “marketing automation.” They sold the idea that marketers needed a system of record—a way to prove their worth, measure contribution, and scale campaigns in an email-driven world. The category followed. * Pinecone – They didn’t just push “vector databases.” They made the case that a model alone doesn’t make a great AI system. AI needs long-term memory to prevent hallucinations, and that memory must scale—hence, a purpose-built vector database was necessary. Where to start with category creation: 1. Start with the pain. What problem is urgent, unsolved, and growing? 2. Make the pain undeniable. Find the right narrative, show how it impacts users, and make it clear why existing solutions fall short. 3. Gather a community around that problem. Thought leadership, meetups, Slack groups, open-source contributions—whatever fits your audience. Let users be part of the conversation. 4. Let the category emerge naturally. If you do the first three things right, your customers may even name it for you. Category creation isn’t about forcing a new term into the market. It’s about making the problem so obvious that the solution needs a new name. Get the problem right, and the category follows. This process is especially works for technical audiences.

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 embedded within the product function. Here’s my hot take: PMMs are going to become outbound PMs, bringing product marketing back to its roots. We’ll see the PM org split into two distinct groups: 1. Inbound PMs – The PMs we know today, driving product strategy, working with engineering, and shaping requirements. 2. Outbound PMs – PMMs in disguise, but sitting within product. They’ll be responsible for translating product strategy into commercialization programs, working closely with marketing and sales to ensure product adoption, differentiation, and revenue growth. This shift won’t happen everywhere. But in industries where understanding the user’s workflow is just as important as understanding the product—like developer tools, infrastructure, and AI platforms—it makes sense. Positioning and commercialization will no longer be an afterthought; they’ll be built into the product process itself. If you look at product marketing today, it feels like product management 15–20 years ago—somewhat undefined, varying across companies, and still finding its place. Over the next five years, I see product marketing becoming more specialized and embedded within product teams, especially for technical markets where PMMs are as much product strategists as they are marketers. Again this hot take is mainly for developer tools or highly technical product.

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 consumerization of the internet—specifically, that search was the gateway to monetization. Google recognized this, understanding that intent-driven advertising was the real opportunity. Yahoo built a media company; Google built a search-first ecosystem. Both choices led to completely different industries, competitive landscapes, product strategies, and more importantly, very different positioning. That’s why the top two skills I’d focus on as a PMM are: 1. Understanding Market Context – Knowing what game you’re really playing, what’s shifting in your market, and how to frame the problem you’re solving. 2. Translating Context into Positioning – Once you get the framing right, the positioning becomes clear. The message, differentiation, and strategy naturally follow. If you master these two, everything else—messaging, GTM strategy, campaign execution—flows from there. If you're looking for a positioning framework, April Dunford’s is still the best one out there. And these skills are more analytical art than true science so practice helps.

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 chasing learning. What actually drove my growth wasn’t setting rigid career milestones, but constantly building new skills. Instead of saying, I want to be a Director by X year, I started framing it differently: * I want to lead a core group within PMM. * I want to take on a high-impact, strategic project that shapes company direction. * I want to master a skill—whether it’s positioning, market analysis, or GTM strategy. When you focus on stacking skills instead of titles, the results speak for themselves. Your work gets noticed. And if you’re vocal about both your work and lifting others up, leadership roles come naturally. So if you’re mid-level in your PMM career, my advice is simple: optimize for learning, not just progression. The skills you build today are what make you ready for the next big step—whether that’s leadership, specialization, or something entirely unexpected. I hope this helps.

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—market research, strategy, positioning—still shape how I approach product marketing today. From there, I pivoted into consulting and market research, thinking maybe my strength was in helping companies find their answers. I didn’t land at a top management consulting firm—post-2008, they weren’t hiring. Instead, I ended up at a boutique consulting and market research firm by accident. And that accident turned out to be the best thing that could’ve happened. The firm was small, which meant I had the chance to grow fast. I rose to become a global practice area leader, leading a 100-person team focused on tech. More importantly, it’s where I met my first mentor in product and product marketing. That mentor pulled me into a startup, and that’s how I found my way into this field. That same sense of curiosity is what led me into developer marketing. Before I joined Pinecone, I knew nothing about distributed systems or machine learning. But part of what I love about this job is that to market something well, you have to know your users deeply—not just why they’d use your product, but their entire workflow. My tenacity led me to market a vector database when no one had before. The result? We grew Pinecone from low seven figures to very high eight figures. Looking back, my path was anything but linear. But that’s exactly how I ended up here. I realized what I love most is learning. New products, new markets, new challenges—every launch is something different. So if you’re asking about mistakes, failures, or challenges, I’d say life throws a lot at you. You won’t always see the path clearly in the moment. But if you stay curious, keep learning, and make the best of each opportunity, it will work out. It always does.

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 customers, their willingness to pay, and triangulate using multiple sources. Fast, directional, good enough to decide if a market is worth chasing. For a mid-size or scaling company, you get more structured: layering in proprietary data, segmenting customers, and refining assumptions with surveys or sales insights. You move beyond just TAM and into SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) and SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) to focus on what’s actually within reach. For an enterprise, it’s full-scale research. Market dynamics, competitive landscapes, and economic trends shape multi-year strategy. This is where financial modeling meets qualitative insights—talking to customers, analyzing adoption curves, and stress-testing assumptions. For across company sizes, you will want to partner with someone in data and/or rev ops to help you get the right data to do the analysis. But the real unlock isn’t just how big the market is—it’s whether the right company profiles exist in enough volume to sustain growth. - Who are they? - What problem do they need solved? - How do you serve them better than alternatives? - Where do you sit within the competitive and ecosystem dynamic? - And crucially—at what point does the market saturate for you? Market sizing is a means to an end. The real goal is framing not just the opportunity but the path to capturing it, ensuring you don’t just play in a big market, but actually win in it. Importantly, you're presenting or some executive will leverage it in presentation for decision making, you want to make sure you're providing insights and not just data.