How did you start your career in product marketing?

You can say that I fell into product marketing fortuitously.

I started my career at Intel as a Technical Marketing Engineer (TME) role because I wanted to be customer-facing but my education was in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. I took this TME role because I am very extroverted and love to figure out what motivates others. When I graduated, I was offered a Product Manager role (had no idea what that was at the time or how “hot” it would become) because of my degree and I really enjoyed the roadmap innovation, product planning and defining the features aspects of my role. However, what I enjoyed above all else was talking to customers about their pain points, presenting and demoing my product at industry events, and pitching the product in creative ways to specific customer types (what is known today as solutions marketing and industry marketing).

I started my career in consulting -- one of those "I'm not exactly sure what I want to do after college so I'll do consulting" type of scenarios. Consulting gave me a breadth of experience in business across industries and functions. Based on my projects, I discovered that the projects I liked most were related to marketing and go-to-market strategy (where do we play, how do we win, what are the capabilities and channels). From there I did some research on what roles had similar type of work and Product Marketing came up. I continued to learn more about PMM by reaching out to folks on LinkedIn and hearing about their jobs. After I decided that the role was a good fit to my skill set and interests, the next step was actually landing a PMM role. I talk more about my journey into PMM and how to land a PMM role in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ALkhINj3mw