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

The top three qualities of star PMMs are: 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 ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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 y ...Read More

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 custom ...Read More

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: You're moving over to PMM from another related function (Product Management, Content Marketing, Sales Engineering, etc) at the same company You're an experienced PMM somewhere ...Read More

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 kn ...Read More