AMA: You.com Director, Product Marketing, Ben Geller on Developing your Product Marketing Career

One of the biggest struggles I've seen for PMMs is explaining the role and the value we create to team members who have never worked with PMM before. If you encounter this challenge, here's a simple framework I've found helpful: Elevator pitch: Product Marketing’s superpower is being the “Voice of Customers to Product and the Voice of the Product to Customers”: * Voice of Customers to the Product (Inbound) * Audience Strategy (Segmentation, Targeting) * Consumer Insights (Unmet Needs) * Positioning (How does the product solve unmet needs) * Pricing/Packaging * Voice of Product to the Customers (Outbound) * Messaging * GTM Strategy (including channel plans, launch) * Product Launch

In hiring PMMs, typically, there's a specific problem I'm looking to hire for, and I want someone who is an expert in solving that type of challenge who can bring best practices to the table (i.e., a specialist vs. a generalist). For example: in one of my most recent openings, I was looking for an expert in consumer segmentation and audience strategy, and ended up hiring someone with deep experience that came from a strategy background (who was incredible). In addition to domain-specific experience, I'm also looking for: * Executive Presence & Communication: Can this individual lead with the takeaway, and present a recommendation in a clear, concise, and compelling way. * Strategic Thinking: Can this individual take an ambiguous/unstructured problem, and define a clear framework to systematically solve. * Analytical Skills: Can this individual be a smart consumer of data, and understand how to 'think in SQL' so that they * XFN Leadership: Can this individual manage a complex project with diverse stakeholders. With this in mind, I highly recommend that PMMs that are on the market create a narrative around where they specialize, and run a focused search for companies that need your particular experience/expertise. When prepping for interviews, spend time researching how your specific skillset can solve the team's most urgent problems.

For candidates who are early in their careers, there's a huge benefit to getting experience with a more formal organizational structure. Larger companies tend to have well-thought-out best practices, and a deep bench of resources and mentors to tap. On the other hand, startup experience can be more challenging for an early hire, where you have to learn by hustling and have access to fewer resources/mentorship on the team. This can create bad habits and blind spots around what best practices should look like. There are definitely exceptions to the rule, but in my experience this has generally been the case.

When I think about foundational skill-sets and areas of focus for a PMM, I tend to think about Inbound vs. Outbound skills. * For inbound: * Get as much experience as possible running customer research, and then using those insights to drive changes in the product roadmap. Especially as a junior PMM, your superpower is getting in front of customers, and delivering feedback to the organization in an actionable way. * If there aren't any immediate opportunities here, raise your hand to help get customer feedback for a new product launch or an idea the team is investigating, and you'll quickly earn your seat at the table, and show the value of PMM. Or, offer to do some foundational JTBD research to help understand the challenges your customers are solving. * For outbound: * In order to establish skills and competency, there's no substitute for running an end-to-end campaign. From this experience, you'll quickly learn what work is 'nice to have' vs. what drives meaningful impact. * If you aren't able to own a campaign end-to-end, then getting involved with an existing campaign, and offering help on voice of customer to refine the creative is a great way to get a seat at the table. For example, offer to to do root cause analysis on what the customer is looking to solve using 'the five whys', and use these findings to inform the messaging.

Many of the best PMMs and marketers I've worked with are extremely analytical and/or have deep experience in advertising. If you're unable to land a dream PMM/marketing job directly, roles that give you experience working with data or advertising can be a great stepping stone. Some possible career paths to consider include: * Consulting: Many of the top-tier consulting firms have great new-grad programs, and will give you a lot of experience relevant to PMM. * Data Analyst: Working as an analyst will give you first-hand experience with large datasets, and deepen your analytical rigor. There's no better superpower than being able to pull your own data. * Marketing/Brand Agency: You'll get a breadth of experience working across different types of campaigns and advertisers and build up an understanding of what types of strategies are most effective, as well as what kinds of industries are the best fit with your interests.

For landing Sr. PMM Interviews, here is a six-step approach (thanks to Coach Erika, for the framework): 1. Hone your online profile/resume * Know what’s out there (about you or authored by you): this could be your LinkedIn profile, Medium, Twitter, Github, etc * Assess whether it fits how you’d like to present yourself * Modify as needed to represent yourself as you’d prefer 2. Walk down memory lane: * Pick three to five recent major projects in your careers, and then remember every single detail they can recall about those projects 3. Translate your experience to a great story, using Lew Lin's DIGS method: * Dramatize the situation * Indicate the alternatives * Go through what you did * Summarize your impact 4. Map the role * Paste the job description into a doc, then highlight keywords and concepts. * Put the keywords/concepts into a table (one row). Then add a column to the right. * In the right column, write down parts of your experience that map to that concept. * In the interview, when you talk about your experience (right column), use their language (left column) to explain what you did. 5. Know your (strategic and compelling) reasons for wanting this role: Stick to reasons that: * Convey what you bring to the role * Explain how this role will accelerate your career 6. Formulate high-signal questions (to get interviewers thinking) * Spend a couple of hours researching the company and competitive landscape. Focus on consulting firm white papers, VC thought-leadership, the company’s website/blog/newsroom, Yahoo Finance, App store reviews and review sites like G2 and Capterra. * Use this research to formulate questions that highlight that you’ve done your homework and that give you the signal you want In addition to these steps, I highly recommend finding a job search buddy and formalizing how you want to collaborate. This can be helpful in both tactical ways (i.e., honing an assignment, or prepping for an upcoming interviews), and also morale -- search can be isolating, it's nice to feel support from a friend, and know that you're not in it alone.

The best strategy that I've seen in pushing for a raise/promotion is demonstrating a bottom-line impact on the business. Why is this? * As you become more senior, it's not entirely up to your manager whether you'll receive a raise/promotion -- they will likely need to pitch you to a broader promotion committee, and build conviction. * This promotion committee may not be intimately familiar with the day-to-day function, and what excellence looks like (e.g., the head of finance might not deeply understand the role). * To empower your manager to make the strongest possible business case, it's best to speak directly to the value you added to the business, and the outcomes you drove. * If you can't yet make this business case yet, it may be worth shifting your priorities or taking on stretch work that can get you closer to having a more direct impact on company KPIs.