Retaining good talent for high demand roles in a competitive market is, obviously, tough. But I think it's also easy to overthink it. Not to oversimplify, but two things I always try to keep in mind are:
- Continuously providing new opportunities: It's easy to get stuck in a rut if you feel you've been "assigned" to support a specific product or product area and all you do is manage launches and releases. There is so much more to the commercialization of product straetgy (which is how I would define product marketing in a nutshell). Giving your PMMs a chance to go deep on things like pricing strategy, market research, branding and naming exercises, and even seemingly negative things like sunsetting a product or facilitating a sticky change management release—these are all ways to keep the work interesting.
- Make them feel valued: This is (hopefully) obvious, but it's so incredibly important. Oftentimes I feel that Product Marketing can be a thankless job. In some ways, once you get past the initial straetgy building aspect, our role is to ensure that nothing goes wrong with the release. Finding ways to celebrate the seemingly little moments and efforts is important. Call out when your PMM finds a way to communicate a partciularly tricky release in an understandable way, or when they propose a name or word choice change that aligns better with the product value or user experience.