How can individual contributors in PMM position themselves for a lead PMM role?

As with products you sell, positioning yourself successfully has to be led by actual value creation. 

10 tips to position yourself for a PMM lead role by delivering expanded value:

1. Increase your role’s scope by offering or asking to take on additional features or product pods. This gives you broader exposure to the overall business and to different leaders across the organization.

2. Enhance the depth of your understanding in at least one area. Become the go-to expert for either an audience, a set of features/products, a part of your funnel, or something that gives you domain authority. This is built on research and experience driving GTM work in that area.

3. Sharpen your PMM super power. Then use it, and share out about those wins much more often. Reputations are built on reps. Are you a great writer? Lean in hard on copy testing and share the results. Strong at synthesizing insights? Take on some new research projects and educate your colleagues.

4. Ask to lead or coordinate a larger marketing moment outside of launches that you own. Figure out how to be a great facilitator across the rest of your marketing org to bring a bigger campaign vision to life.

5. Build relationships with Director level and above leaders in other functions like product, design, sales, engineering, and data science. Even just casually keeping these folks in the loop on the outputs of your work goes a long way to increasing your visibility. 

6. Take a more active role in setting and proactively sharing progress on OKRs. The more ownership you take of metrics and reporting, the better.

7. Ask great questions of your peers and leaders in meetings. Show you are looking to more deeply understand people’s thinking, even if it’s not an area you are a decision-maker on.

8. Relatedly, read the room in meetings to learn the delicate balance of when your inputs are going to be a value add vs. extra noise. You need to be seen as someone who can pick up on these nuances and ultimately make sure the collective agenda is advanced over your own.

9. Notice opportunities to improve cross-functional collaboration. Then, take initiative and set up working groups to develop shared solutions to the challenges you are all facing. There are often gaps in how orgs are set up, but PMM can help stitch those gaps together to make sure you are presenting a more unified product experience.

10. Think of subtle ways you can drive process efficiencies or work quality for your overall PMM team. If you are staying on top of the latest industry benchmarks, AI tools, and thought leadership, you can propose small updates to how the team works that make everyone’s life easier.

11. Bonus idea (when it’s an option): Offer to cover work for a colleague who goes on leave. This can be a quick way to expand your understanding and your scope in a short period of time without stepping on toes.