What soft skills are must-haves for product marketers in your experience apart from diplomacy, curiosity, and empathy?

Answer

9 Answers

Self-Serve Product Marketing Product Marketing Soft and Hard Skills Product Marketing Skills Stakeholder Management

Christy Roach

AirOps CMO • 5y

I'm going to admit upfront that I answered this in a previous AMA, so I'll copy and paste that same answer here. A year later, I can truly say that these continue to be the things I think are most important for a PMM to have. Almost all hard PMM skills can be taught, but these soft skills are much more valuable to me because they come from the PMM themselves. I can model the behavior, but each individual is responsible for whether or not they exhibit these traits. Cross-functional excellence: A ...Read More

3,164 Views
Valerie Angelkos

Howl VP of Product Marketing | Formerly Google • 4y

A couple of others that come to mind: 1. Excellent communication skills and the ability to adapt these to the right audience - whether that's for consumers at scale, customers, or internal stakeholders. 2. Cross-functional influence - PMMs sit in between customers/consumers, Sales, Marketing, Product and even more functions depending on the organization. The ability to rally folks towards a common goal and bring everyone along is critical. 3. Related to curiosity - that constant need to understa ...Read More

1,177 Views
Gregg Miller

PandaDoc VP of Product Marketing & Brand • 4y

Communication: You simply must be a good communicator to be a stellar product marketer. So much of our discipline requires strong communication in order to provide clarity (both externally and internally) and develop and exercise influence. Strong communication to me spans written skills, presentation creation skills, public speaking skills, and executive presence. Adaptability: The potential list of things you might work on as a product marketer is so incredibly long and diverse! Someone who i ...Read More

593 Views
Kelly Kipkalov

Carta Vice President Product Marketing • 2y
There's another question I fielded about soft skills, so take a look at that one in the feed. The soft skills I listed there:
- Clear and confident written and verbal communication
- Ability to influence others (particularly product)
- Strong drive for results/taking initiative
There's one more I'd add:
- Bias for action
817 Views
Alina Fu

Microsoft Director, M365 Copilot for storytelling and narratives, sales enablement, and compete • 4y

Because Product Marketing is at the cross-section between Marketing, Product and Sales, there are times when they are barely treading water to keep up with all the product launches, become a “catch all” function or have multiple conflicting stakeholder priorities. Thus, I think these additional other soft skills are must-haves to succeed in product marketing. Takes Initiative: Acts ahead of need/anticipates problems, proactively sees things through, steps up to challenges even when things are no ...Read More

690 Views
Aurelia Solomon

Salesforce Senior Director, Product Marketing • 3y
- Communication
- Leadership
- Strategic Thinking (ability to think and see big picture but also dive into the details and problem solve). For example, can this person go deep into researching a competitor, distill their findings, and add the context of their own business, to deliver concise and defensible talking points to arm the sales and customer success teams with.
- Stakeholder Management
864 Views
Stacey Wang

Kodex Head of Marketing & Government Relations • 5y
- High growth mindset / hunger to continuously improve.
- Great negotiators. We sit at the intersection of a lot of teams and needs! PMMs need to be skilled not just at bringing value, but negotiating priorities.
- Great collaborators. PMMs can't drive impact if they can't collaborate.
- Can't emphasize enough the importance of empathy, especially when it comes to XFN work!
409 Views
Jane Reynolds

Upstart Product Marketing Director, New Products • 3y

A collaborative attitude is a must. Product marketing is one of the most cross-functional roles in any company, so the ability to work well with colleagues in every vertical of the business is vital. Hand in hand with this is strong communication skills. Product marketers drive both internal and external messaging, so being able to communicate succinctly and effectively is key.

540 Views
Lisa Dziuba

Lemon.io Head of Growth Product Marketing | Formerly LottieFiles, WeLoveNoCode (made $3.6M ARR), Abstract, Flawless App (sold) • 3y

As I spend a decade working in product marketing at high-growth startups, I'll focus on must-have soft skills for PMM in a fast-growing startup: Hight user empathy: PMM should absolutely love talking to users. In most startups, personas, ICPs, value props, messaging, product features need to be constantly improved. This is normal to search for the best users to provide your features, with the best value prop and messaging. That's the essence of working in startups: build, learn, iterate. And it' ...Read More

330 Views