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Consumer Product Marketing
Consumer Product Marketing
11 answers
Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing at Airtable
Featured In Pragmatic Institute
Everyone’s definition of soft and hard skills differs, but here are the nine
skills that I think are the most important for a product marketer to have. I've
used these skills as a compass to help me grow in my own career and have turned
them into a success guide for my team at Envoy to use:
Soft skills:
* Cross-functional excellence: As a PMM, you have the opportunity to lead
without being a manager of people. A strong product marketer is someone who
takes others along with them, rather than telling people exactly what they
want them to do. They’re able to create strong relation...more
Vice President, Product Marketing at Braze
The number one skill is influencing without authority. More specifically,
influencing authority in a matrixed organization. By design, product marketing
sits at the intersection of a multitude of functions, each with their individual
KPIs. Your job is to balance the needs of your various stakeholders to drive
revenue and adoption for your product(s). If your company has one product, then
this task may be fairly straight forward. If your company has multiple products
or multiple portfolios, then the task becomes exponentially harder.
The most important hard skills are positioning and mess...more
Sr. Director, Head of Product Marketing at DoorDash
Hard skills may vary by company, but I think there are two that are critical:
* Insights. Know the difference between an anecdote and an insight. This is
especially critical when you work on a service at scale. Your best (and
sometimes most challenging) users tend to be the loudest, so make sure that
you're helping the team hear from a diverse array of customer voices. I find
that one of the most important parts of any study is the recruit/target
audience. Spend time getting the team aligned on who you're going to hear
from.
* Analytics. Spend time not just understandin...more
Head of Product Marketing at Nextdoor
Top 3 Soft skills
* Be collaborative: Be open to new ideas, raise your hand to help, lean in to
new areas, and have fun while doing it.
* Build strong relationships: Invest in your cross functional partners, get to
know them personally and professionally, know what is most important to
them.
* Develop a point of view, clearly communicate your point of view, and
influence others with your point of view
Top 3 Hard skills
* Analytical <-> Creative: Navigate this spectrum to be both analytical and
creative in your problem solving, go to markets, and develop recommendati...more
VP of Product Marketing at Observe.AI | Formerly Clari, Vendavo, Amdocs
Strong PMMs are good writers, know their product inside and out, experts of the
competitive landscape, messaging geniuses and storytellers, BFFs with the sales
team, GTM architects and excellent project managers. I like to think about a
good PMM as a:
* A psychologist who can develop a deep understanding of the fears,
aspirations, hopes, and dreams of buyers and target personas.
* An explorer seeking to learn more, discover more, and do more; bringing
curiosity and some risk taking to product messaging and positioning.
* A teacher who can inspire an audience with subject matter k...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Instacart
PMMs are (and need to be) masters at many things but if I had to pick the most
important:
1. (Soft) Cross-functional Collaboration: PMM is a highly cross-functional
role. On any given project, you’ll work with Product, Design, Engineering,
Research, Marketing Channel Experts, Operations, Legal… and the list goes
on. A product campaign can’t get done without many partnerships. So you have
to be great at working across different teams and getting them to share in
your goals.
2. (Hard) Data Driven: Product and business decisions are most times made based
on quanti...more
VP of Marketing at Blueocean.ai
1. Messaging and storytelling: this continues to be the hallmark of a great
PMM. In particular, really leaning in on differentiation and value to the
customer (not speeds and feeds) while also simplifying concepts down in a
memorable way that makes it easy for sales to land, marketing to build copy
and content, and ultimately, the customer to understand. I sometimes joke
that PMMs like ALL the words...but we don't need to use them ALL the time.
Being able to really tell a compelling story that connects with the
customer, and romances the product in the way that ...more
Head of Product Marketing at Prove
One of the main skills I see to success in PMM im Empathy. Empathy in the sense of being able to to put yourself in other people's shoes. You are the customer and market advocate internallt and the product advocate externally, so understanding those different perspectives can help a LOT in any PMM materials you are developing, from slides to demos to websites to campaigns.
Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies
Successful product marketers are both right and left brained. Thus, in addition
to the hard skills, they must possess soft skills to rally teams behind their
ideas.
There are five fundamental soft skills that product marketers must demonstrate:
* Passion
* Adaptability
* Cross-functional leadership
* Prioritization
* Executive presence
I wrote a blog post about these key PMM soft skills here.
For Hard Skills, from my experience the most important skills are:
1. Market Sizing - Total Addressable Market (TAM)
2. Customer Segmentation
3. Narrative Design
4. Go-to-Market Strategy...more
Director, Product Marketing at Gong | Formerly Salesforce, GE
I talked about soft skills in another question, so let's laser focus on the hard
skills needed to succeed in PMM here. Here are 3 hard skills you can focus on
right now:
1. Data-Driven Decision Making: I actually teach a dedicated course on this
topic at Loyola Chicago because I believe in it so much! Data helps with
identifying and speaking to your target audience, defining the value of your
product and ROI, market sizing, predicting buyer behavior, validating success in
the market, and so much more. Even if you don't fancy yourself a "numbers
person" - it is important to get into eno...more
Director Product Marketing at SAP
This is an interesting question. In my experience, the most important soft
skills needed for PMMs are influence management, and public speaking skills.
Influence management would be getting people from outside of your department or
team to work on your project. Good influence management is not just asking
people to help, but making sure they understand the value of the work they're
doing. If someone says they can't help, going to their manager to help with
priorities needs to be done with a soft touch. Being a tyrant to get your
projects done won't get you far in the long term.
Pu...more
3 answers
Head of Product Marketing at Nextdoor
It’s difficult to define growth by titles since titles vary greatly by company
and company maturity. Also, more and more companies are shying away from title
heavy culture. When you consider growth and trajectory, I encourage you to
evaluate it based on your goals, what you want to learn, and what you want to do
next vs. a title. Focusing on obtaining a title can be short sighted and may
result on you being lost after you achieve it.
That said, with career progression top of mind, here are some tips:
* Perform at the next level: Companies want to see that you can demonstrate
perfor...more
Head of Consumer Product Marketing at Nextdoor
Moving up the ladder from an IC or manager role into a director role is
typically dependent on a few factors, some of which individual PMMs are very
much in control of, some of which they are not unfortunately. At a high level,
some of the requirements needed to progress include the following:
* Clearly defining your team's purpose and strategy and clearly articulating
how your strategy aligns with the overarching company objectives. I will
start by saying I am fully in the camp that the words 'strategy' and
'strategic' are often overused and serve as a default term to describe, ...more
Director of Product Marketing & Development at hims & hers
This varies across every organization, but if you’re looking to move up from
your current role, I’d recommend bringing it up with your direct manager in your
1:1 even if you think the leveling up is a ways away. Starting the conversation
will allow you both to focus on the skills you need to work on in order to get
there. In most medium or larger sized organizations there is a competency
framework that is used for calibrating levels which has requirements for each
role.
More broadly speaking, the more senior you get the more broad the scope becomes.
That can mean a bigger area of respons...more
1 answer
Director of Product Marketing & Development at hims & hers
There is definitely overlap between brand strategy/account management and product marketing especially because the two roles operate slightly differently at every organization. Brand strategy can translate really well to product positioning, messaging and storytelling while account management can translate well to go-to-market planning and roadmaps. I answered another question above on how to break into the PMM field including a helpful storytelling exercise to build out your PMM oriented resume.
1 answer
Director of Product Marketing & Development at hims & hers
Having identified what type of role you want next and why, already puts you
ahead of the game and lets you hone your experience more and more towards the
field. I would first explore to see how you can get (or maybe already have)
actual working experience even if it’s project based.
* If you’re in a non-product marketing role currently, try to identify if
you’re working on projects or doing anything that are core PMM skills and see
if you could take on more of that type of work to build up your resume with
examples.
* Explore if there are cross functional projects in your org ...more
5 answers
VP Marketing at Cameo | Formerly Uber, Fivestars, Electronic Arts
In general, I don't really think "background" is that important. To me,
background does not = skills. I hire for signal on skill and not for whether or
not somebody has done something before.
We have some absolutely incredible PMMs on Eats and almost all of them came from
a background that was not Product Marketing.
Because the function and the role is growing so quickly, you rarely find
somebody who's spent 5 years in Consumer PMM for example. Instead, hone your
skills.
Uncover great insights, run a bunch of research and get really good at
understanding customers, competition a...more
Sr. Director, Head of Product Marketing at DoorDash
I myself come from a less than traditional path to PMM after spending the first
half of my career on the brand side of the house. I may be biased, but I think
less than traditional backgrounds are really valuable in a PMM and I typically
look for a couple of key characteristics:
Trust Building
I look at roles this person has had before and ask about the stakeholders
they've had to work with. So much of PMM is being at the center of a wheel where
you need to operate without top-down automony. I look for stories of times where
they were able to use the trust they built to execute beyond t...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Instacart
If someone is new to PMM, there are two skills I look for:
- Strategic thinking: Can you demonstrate an ability to take an intentional, rational thought process when solving problems? Can you get creative about solving a problem while also never losing sight of the end goal? Can you solve a problem as it develops / as you receive new information?
- Ability to prioritize and execute: Can you cut through noise and narrow in on what’s most critically important? Once you have a plan, can you make that plan a reality?
Head of Consumer Product Marketing at Nextdoor
Whether you are an experienced or aspiring product marketer, these are the
qualities I look for in product marketing hires:
* Customer obsessed. Product marketing is the voice of the customer and a
successful product marketer is one that is customer obsessed and keeps the
consumer at the core of all that they do. Product marketing's role is to help
inform the product roadmap and market new products and features to consumers.
If we don't have a deep understanding of who our customers are and what they
care about we simply cannot do our job well.
* Analytical. Marketing is...more
Director of Product Marketing & Development at hims & hers
It all depends on the role I am hiring for and what stage a company is at, but
on a general note, I would look for transferable experience and skills that
could work well for the role. Crafting messaging/positioning, identifying user
insights and translating them into strategy, influencing product/technical
roadmaps, understanding market behaviors and trends, project managing projects
from start to finish, Go-to-market campaigns (integrated or channel based),
product development & packaging is all experience that is super valuable for
consumer product marketing
For example if you have be...more
1 answer
Director of Product Marketing & Development at hims & hers
Great question! This highly depends on the role, what stage the company is at
and what the requirements are in the job description - Product marketing can be
so different at different companies
With that said my recommendation is to think about your resume as an opportunity
to product market yourself and your experience! Think of it less as a list of
everything you’ve done, and instead use it as an opportunity to tell the story
of how your experience makes you an excellent candidate to take on the role
you’re applying for. Identify what matters to your customer, the hiring manager
(look ...more
1 answer
Director of Product Marketing & Development at hims & hers
In general I think there is a lot of overlap in the fundamental skill set needed
between the two roles even though they operate differently. In consumer product
marketing you’re targeting the end-user with your offering/product. In B2B
you’re targeting other companies with your offering/product which then helps
them solve a problem for the end-user. I love the consumer landscape and most of
my roles have been with brands that target the end-consumer so take my answer
with that caveat, but I’ll highlight two areas that can impact how you think
about market behavior and product launches diffe...more
4 answers
VP of Marketing (previously Head of Product Marketing) at Thanx
- It's all about being able to tell a story about how your previous experience
tracks to what you want to do
- B2B and B2C are converging a bit so I think the skills are definitely
transferrable. It might be hard to move from the far end of the spectrum all the
way to the other far end
- What determines fit for a position isn’t just about B2B vs. B2C. It is also
about:
- How well defined the product is
- What stage of life the company is in
- How well supported the role will be
- Whether or it is a big brand vs. nascent brand
- All of the above contribute to the kind of product marketing yo...more
VP Marketing at Cameo | Formerly Uber, Fivestars, Electronic Arts
I touched on this a bit above - I started my career in B2B and learned really
valuable lessons before moving more deeply into B2C.
I think Marketing is evolving so quickly that you can learn extremely valuable
skills in either the B2B or the B2C world that are applicable across both, so
wouldn't say strictly focusing on just one for the next 10-years is absolutely
the right (or wrong choice.) It's more the growth mindset and defining and
understanding what your career goals and ambitions are.
When hiring somebody, it's extremely context specific. For a Consumer Growth PMM
for exampl...more
Head of Product Marketing at Ethos | Formerly Meta, Microsoft
I've thought about this a lot as I've worked across both B2B and B2C and
wondered if it makes sense to specialize and how transferrable skills are. This
is also something I've asked many leaders and mentors. The overwhelming advice
I've gotten is to focus on being a good marketer and not focus on B2B vs. B2C -
instead, think about the types of problems you're interested in solving, the day
to day work that most engages and challenges you, and how much you'll learn in a
certain job. Additionally, marketing leadership roles often span both B2B and
B2C, so having a good knowledge of both can b...more
Director of Product Marketing & Development at hims & hers
There are multiple factors you could use to determine where to build a deeper
focus but I don’t necessarily think that you have to make such a firm pick.
There are definitely nuances between the two roles, but skills are also
transferable. Crafting messaging/positioning, translating user insights into
strategy, influencing product/technical roadmaps, and understanding market
behaviors are all skills which at the core are the same across both B2B and B2C.
It might be harder to cross over between the two if you have only been in one or
the other for an extended period of time. Not impossib...more
8 answers
Product Lead (fmr Head of Product Marketing) at Square
Great question. I always tell my team that as product marketers we are the
bridge between product development and the broader marketing & sales teams. We
focus relationship building and collaboration in 3 areas:
1. Product (development) team. At Square PMMs are embedded within the product
teams so this is technically our home. Where we add value is bringing in the
customers' voice when it comes to product strategy and roadmap. My team does
a lot of work visiting customers, conducting qual/ quant
research, collecting feedback from Sales, Account Management,
Support, thr...more
Senior Product Marketing Manager at Square
This is a great question. A fair amount has been written about where Product
Marketing should exist within the broader company structure—just Google "where
should Product Marketing report" and you'll find a bunch of articles on the
topic. During my time at Sprout Social, we spent more than 3 years as part of
the Product Team and nearly 2 reporting within Maketing, which is where we
currently sit. All of this is to say, being thoughtful about how you position
your product marketing team within the company, regardless of where you
officially report, is paramount to earning trust and establish...more
Director, Product Marketing at Datadog | Formerly Mparticle
Within a large marketing team I have always positioned the Product Marketing
team as the experts who are the go-to people for any product question and I make
sure we indeed are. One of my personal reasons for moving into Product Marketing
from Product Management was to alleviate the lack of technical know-how within
our marketing team that contributed towards unclear messaging.
One of the biggest challenges that PMM's face is that they have to influence
other people's work. Sales Enablement, Marketing and Customer Success for
example rely on the PMM for delivering the product trainings,...more
VP Marketing at Cameo | Formerly Uber, Fivestars, Electronic Arts
Love this question and something I had to do a ton when I first got to Eats and
everybody was like - hold on, what is Product Marketing?
I talk a lot about internal marketing and say you have to Product Market,
Product Marketing...This starts with a very clear and differentiated
articulation of our value. For example, I made it very clear from Day 1 that PMM
is the primary POC to Product within the Marketing organization and built teams,
hired people, and reinforced with KPIs that story. Over time, that continued to
build and we eventually built up a reputation (a brand!) that we were t...more
Vice President, Product Marketing at AlertMedia | Formerly TrustRadius, Levelset, Walmart
Product marketing's biggest challenge (no matter anywhere I go) is defining the
scope and sticking to it. Anything under the sun that is not Demand Gen or SEO
tends to be seen as a job for product marketing. If we don't get a handle and
drive the definition of role as product marketers and clearly write down what we
own, and just as important what we don't own, we will be working against the
grain. You may be doing a lot of great work, but that is always relative to
expectations. In a nutshell, setting expectations is everything.
And it's not just with your boss and the exec team. It's ...more
Sr. Director and Head of Product Marketing at Gem
I’ve found that most companies want the most capable people doing the most
important work. If you prove your value as a PMM by making the team and company
successful, bigger and better projects will naturally come your way.
When it comes to positioning the PMM team within marketing, it ultimately comes
down to influencing the head of marketing. They want nothing more than for the
marketing team to produce great work and achieve its goals. Whether marketing
metrics are tied to pipeline, LTV, brand awareness, or all of the above, if the
numbers aren’t going up, it reflects poorly on the whol...more
Director, PMM - Support & Platform at Intercom
* Being clear about what PMM's role and mission is, and ensuring other
marketing leaders understand what your team does and doesn't do. Have open
discussions about where there might be overlap between teams, and agree on
how you'll handle it.
* Building relationships with others across the marketing org - both leaders
but also at the IC level - and communicating openly, sharing your goals and
plans, developing processes together, and getting buy-in as you plan
* Having a clear framework for prioritising requests that come in to the team,
so others know how and why we p...more
VP of Marketing at Privy
Great question. Yes, been there & struggled there before. Think ultimately the more you can make product marketing a group of strategic thinkers and enablement gurus to marketing, the more clout your team will build. If demand gen wants to parnter with PMM to understand how to market features for a campaign, if content looks to product marketing for competitive intel or market insights to build content, those are all signs you've built a PMM with real value to the marketing org.
5 answers
Sr. Director, Head of Product Marketing at DoorDash
I came from a background in brand and so my natural instincts served me most
well on the outbound side of product marketing. I had my fair share of imposter
syndrom in the early days when I looked at my peers and realized that I'd never
done the traditional inbound work of a PMM.
I spent more time than I should have in those early days being afraid to ask for
fear of not being able to meet the bar. It took building a relationship with a
peer whose work I admired to admit that I was really learning on the fly and to
my surprise, they were too!
We all have strengths and areas where we ...more
Head of Talent Acquisition, Strategy & Operations at Asana
I spent a lot of time in my early career worrying about getting to the next
promotion and how I was progressing versus my peers. Looking back now, this was
all wasted energy. I wish I had been more focused on learning and picking up as
many skills and experiences as possible. I also wish I had been less worried
about making mistakes. I think I would have been able to take more risks and
push myself to try new things that would have ultimately helped me to build more
skills.
I also wish I knew how to prioritize better early in my career. I worked a lot
of late nights and weekends in my earl...more
Senior Director, Product Marketing at Instacart
One thing I wish I learned earlier is the most powerful product marketing you
can do is always centered on a shared human truth. When I look back on my very
early PMM GTM work, I focused primarily on communicating about the product and
the benefit derived from the features themselves. But the product features,
however innovative, were only half the story. Connecting the Product to the
Customer Need is where the true magic lies. Find the truth we all share (an
experience, an emotion) and connect that to the new experience the product
provides -- that’s where your message takes on real meanin...more
Chief Marketing Officer at Zeplin
There is one key learning: Actively plan & manage your development.
Here is what is involved:
* Know the menu: Since Product Marketing is such a broad discipline, its
important to understand the various functional competenices that comprise it.
This way, you can assess where you have strengths and where you want to
develop. These competenices span target segmentation definition, messaging &
positioning, content development, sales enablement, pricing/packaging, PR/AR
and more, they are quite different and require different skills.
* The market will evolve: There are als...more
Vice President of Marketing at Albertsons Companies
When you're starting out your career as a PMM, it is very important to remember
that your value promise is to customers and not internal stakeholders. I don't
mean to say that internal alignment and buy-in isn't important but it should
never take priority over serving your customers. In my early days, I spend 80%
of my time trying to understand what were the needs of my internal stakeholders
and ensuring I was supporting them fully, leaving little focus on the customer.
The moment I started prioritizing customer needs over internal stakeholder
needs, when I started to champion customers int...more