For individuals who have an account management background looking to pivot into product marketing, do you have tips on how one should navigate technical questions during the interview knowing that one has not had hands-on experience in their current / past roles?

You're actually in a good position if you are moving from a B2B account management role into a B2B product marketing role because you have knowledge of the audience you're serving and a deep understanding of the product. This is a chance to turn a bug into a feature.

This whole pivot is actually a chance to practice your product marketing skills, except you are your product. Focus on what the interview question is getting at - what is the core need of the audience? - and then speak to how you are uniquely qualified to do it. Own the perspective that you have and it might even help you differentiate from your competition for the role.

Example of a question you might get: Tell me about a time when you launched a product. 

• While you may never have launched a product, you have probably faced a situation where you had to get lots of stakeholders together to agree on a decision, made some kind of asset, delivered it, and then saw if it worked or not. 
• Reframe your experience - perhaps a sales pitch you put together - to show how you have the skills, just not in the same context.

Tactically, I would make a list of questions, sourced from product marketers, and then map your experiences against them. If you have some time between now and your pivot, I would also think through the gaps in your resume and see if you can fill it with side projects or deeper involvement in activities that show the same skills.

Regardless of your background, you should always be looking in an interview to help bridge the gap between your own experience and the role you're interviewing for. If you know the role you're interviewing for requires some technical knowledge that you don't have, showcasing how you've solved similar types of challenges for customers before or how you've learned something you didn't know in order to help your customer can help to demonstrate how you'd face the challenge as a product marketer.

I think account managers have an inherent advantage over product marketing candidates during the interview - they know the customer really well. In many cases, product marketers, who are supposed to be the voice of the customer, never even interact with them. So use that to your advantage to convince the hiring manager that you will be able to truly represent the voice of the customer. Did you take customer feedback/input/criticism back to product management in the past and get them to enhance the product? Did you influence marketing to drive different campaigns or update their messaging based on how you saw the customer react? And what were the results? Those are essentially the things that product marketers should be doing (but often don’t.)

About navigating technical questions, there are a few that tend to come up time and again: 

• What are the elements of a marketing plan? 
• How do you launch a product? 
• Show me an example of a good and a bad product launch
• How do you develop messaging? 
• How do you influence sales/product management/executives? 

My advice is to learn all the elements of a launch plan and study examples of great launches and complete failures. Then tie them back to what product marketing did / didn’t do correctly.