AMA: Unity Vice President Product Marketing, Jon Rooney on Product Marketing Skills

This is a paradox of career advancement: as you move up in your career, the skills that got you promoted aren't always the skills you need to be successful at the next level. The good news is that you'll need all the IC PMM knowledge and skills you've developed when you become a leader. No doubt you'll be training and helping earlier career PMM's get up to speed and grow, you'll need to know what needs to get done to make sure the most important work stays on track and invariably you'll have to roll up your sleeves and write messaging, drive a launch BOM or create an enablement deck from time to time despite your new title. As a leader, the skills you'll need to build are more related to communications, influence and clear prioritization. You'll have to tailor your communications to your audience more, starting with getting really concise when presenting information to more senior audiences (VP+ or maybe even Director+ if it's a huge company). No one's going to read a 20 page document or go through a 10 slide deck at that level. You'll need to boil down the most important information to brief talking points and make it clear if you're consulting for a decision, simply informing people or seeking approval. Don't do an info dump and leave it up to senior folks to sort through it for you. How you influence will also shift from being hyper execution-focused to more directional. You'll have to weigh your words more carefully, as questions and observations can be more readily received as orders as you get more senior. Be thoughtful about not accidentally randomizing, confusing or creating churn with your new title. Finally, as you become more senior your team will require more precision and clarity around what's most important, what they should be doing and what not to be distracted by. Clear prioritization is key for both consistent execution as well as building trust inside your team and across the org. Don't dabble or give vague, fuzzy guidance. Be crisp and concise to set your teams up for success.

While the role of product marketing varies a bit by company, I think that all product marketers should work to become "full stack" in their capabilities. A full stack product marketer should have the functional skills and organizational savvy to drive both the core outbound and core inbound parts of the job effectively. The core outbound parts of the job are: * Messaging - It all starts with messaging. Strong messaging effectively communicates the value of your products and services, giving customers and prospects an understanding of how your company's products and services can solve their specific problems. Great messaging also provides strategic guidance to the rest of the company to ensure that a single story lands through coherence and repetition. Great messaging is the hymnal from which everyone can sing. * Launches - Running product launches is a high stakes, high visibility job for which PMMs are most known. Running a launch requires you to be a strategist, a writer, a project manager, a cheerleader, a coach and a lightning rod. There are a ton of places you can learn about how to run a launch effectively (like here on Sharebird), so do your homework before it's your turn to helm the ship. * Sales Enablement - You might think that the key to successful sales enablement is strong messaging and content, but it's not. Those things are necessary but not sufficient. Successful Sales Enablement is all about building strong relationships with direct sellers, channel partners - whomever is on the front lines with customers. You need to gain empathy and build trust if you're going to have the influence needed to actually get sellers using your materials. Without it, your perfectly good sales decks and battlecards will gather digital dust on virtual shelves, as is the fate of petabytes of this stuff every year. In some organizations, PMM is a purely outbound GTM function and PM takes all inbound roles from market sizing to customer feedback. However, if you're at a company where PMM shares those responsibilities with PM, the core inbound parts of the job are: * Market Opportunity Analysis (MOA) - This is the highest level of company and product strategy. Developing hypotheses around "where can our company play and win?", "what problems can we solve in a way that differentiated, defensible and profitable?" and "who are our target customers (down to department, role, etc)?" involves market research, competitive analysis, extensive customer research and assessment of internal assets and capabilities. This is where you build out the big acronyms: TAM, SAM, SOM, SWOT, etc. You won't always have a seat at the table here, but if you do make the most of it. * Product planning - This is the next click down from a MOA. Once you have a general sense of the category you're playing in, the use cases to solve and the budgets to go after, you have to figure out what kind of mousetrap to build, the priority of the problems that it solves and when it's going to be available based on resources and other constraints. At the most atomic level, this could be fleshing out a feature. At the broadest level, this is ensuring that there's a coherent, fleshed-out product roadmap that can be shared internally and externally as a north star. This can definitely bleed into traditional PM work, but if it's on your plate dig in and do it well. * Pricing and packaging - Even more detailed work that's very data and research-driven. If your company has trained, skilled market researchers (who have genuine statistics and data science skills), be sure to make them your best friends. Be prepared to produce very crisp, clear options and get ready for a whirlwind of opinions and criticism. Pricing is, without a doubt, the thing I've found to be the most contentious and agitating part of what companies offer. You're never going to make everyone happy, just be sure to land somewhere that customers can live with while not curbing revenue opportunities as you grow. Finally, the last skill you need to be a full stack PMM is competency, if not mastery, over the products you're marketing. Unless you really live in the product you'll never really understand the strengths, weaknesses, quirks, frustrations and "a-ha" moments that your customers experience as they use your product (or something like it) to do their jobs.

The best way to balance research, content and GTM needs is to make sure you're not pursuing any area (research and content, in particular) for it's own sake - it's sometimes super easy to fall into a task sinkhole and lose sight of the larger goal. Make sure you have a mental model where the activities all nest under a couple of top-level goals, you have to keep that hierarchy and parent-child relationship in mind so as to not get lost in the flurry of work. If you're doing research, make sure you have a clear decision point that will be informed by that research that unlocks downstream execution like messaging or campaign delivery. If you're creating content, make sure it's definitely needed as part of a growth campaign, for onboarding, for sales enablement, etc. Don't do this type of work for it's own sake or as a nice-to-have, make sure you know how this work drives the bigger goals and you'll be alright.

The top three qualities of star PMMs are: 1. An inherent bias for action. Great PMMs GSD, it's a defining part of what we do and who we are. It's difficult to build trust and nurture partnership across a company of any size by opining on other people's work or being someone who may "know" stuff but isn't counted on to actually "do" the right stuff the right way. Great PMMs are driven to "do" stuff and are relied upon by partners across marketing, product, sales, etc. to deliver every time. We're no ombudsmen, we're PMMs. 2. The ability to boil complex concepts and details into simple, approachable ideas. This is, unfortunately, one of the hardest things to teach someone (read good writing of all sorts for a couple of decades?) but, in my experience, it's the single biggest differentiator for star PMMs. Enterprise tech companies, in particular, are great at building complicated, dense product offerings that require way more work and attention to understand than anyone not paid to work at said company would ever do. That's where great PMM's come in. You have to consume all of that gnarly mass of information (while getting your hands on the product per the next point) so you can digest it and churn out "big animal pictures" that a busy prospect or customer can glance at and understand. Analogies are your friends, let them help you help others understand what's most important. 3. A drive to get deeply hands-on with whatever products or services you're marketing (as well as competing products or services) to really understand what your customers are going through. It's surprisingly easy to spot messaging written by someone who's never really used the product being marketed and really doesn't understand the audience they're trying to reach. It's like when an actor in a film speaks in a different language by reading out the lines phonetically vs. actually having some fluency in that language. Don't be that PMM. When you join a new company or move teams, get the same product certification that a sales engineer (or similar technical pre-sales role) would get. When you show up in meetings with PM and Engineering, make sure you've done your homework and gotten enough hands-on experience with the product to earn a seat at the table. Check out competing products and see what it's like to do the same core things in those products as a customer would do in your product. And keep it up, block out an hour or two a week to keep your skills sharp. The "Product" in Product Marketing isn't decorative.

Assuming you're most interested in switching locations (India to the US) rather than changing industries, the fact that you're a PMM today at your current company gives you an advantage in pursuing opportunities at US-based companies. There are 2 primary ways to get hired into a non entry-level PMM role at a given company: 1. You're moving over to PMM from another related function (Product Management, Content Marketing, Sales Engineering, etc) at the same company 2. You're an experienced PMM somewhere else and you get hired into the PMM team from another company The vast majority of PMMs I've hired over the years have fallen into the 2nd category, so you're in good shape. If you know you're ready to make a move and have targeted a handful of companies that are related to your current employer, then I'd focus on work samples and your "story" for interviews rather than skill-based requirements. PMM certifications are helpful, but are very new and not generally expected by employers while MBAs, in my experience, don't hold the same weight (at least in US tech) as they did much earlier in my career. Work samples, particularly ones that are publicly accessible, are critical. People need to see examples of your writing, your strategic thinking and, in many cases, your presentation skills. Catalog any blog posts, whitepapers, web pages, etc where you can claim sole or primary authorship. Also, take every opportunity you can to present to people externally, whether that's on a podcast or at a vendor conference or even at an informal local meet-up. Having a YouTube clip of you presenting or discussing a related topic could give you a strong advantage. Finally, think about your own career story - what you're most proud of, what you've learned, how you'd describe your strengths and weaknesses - so you can go into interviews prepared and ready to put your best foot forward. Good luck!

A technical product marketer should, first and foremost, have the same level of hands-on technical acumen with the product (and others in the category) as roles like Sales Engineering, Product Management, Developer Advocate and, in some cases, even Engineer. Some of the best technical PMMs I've worked with were former practitioners/customers with more real-life experience than the PMs curating the backlog. So from a tools/skills standpoint, deep technical expertise is at the heart of what you know. So if you weren't a user or practitioner before becoming a Technical PMM, invest heavily in the skill building through tutorials, certifications and just spending time doing things in the product. Which dovetails into the other major tools/skills are for a Technical PMM: the "show" part of the job. To me, a regular PMM tells the product story through words & visuals while the Technical PMM tells the product story through the product itself. That's the "marketing" part of it all. There's real art and storytelling prowess to building a compelling, durable demo that lots of people can both give and understand. Just like messaging is job one for PMMs, demos is often job one for Technical PMMs so spend a lot of time critically evaluating other demos. Pour through YouTube, GitHub and places like StackOverflow and Reddit to find technical demos than pick them apart to find out what works, what doesn't and why. Then build your own demos based on the messaging and value props the PMMs built until you have a companion piece that can bring the "so what?" to life for customers.