I currently work in marketing (GTM) and want to move into a product marketing role, but my manager is intentionally making it difficult for me because he doesn't want me promoted out from under him... Any advice?

First of all – you have to make sure you are being very explicit with them about your goal to grow into a product marketing role. Ask them if they’d be willing to help you build a short one page career growth document where you can align on high value activities that suit the company’s needs and your own aspirations for growth. When framed this way, it’s very hard for a manager to say no to laying out ideas and having a conversation. 

Three approaches to consider (and you can mix them):

1. Ask for stretch projects on top of your GTM workload

2. Look for opportunities to mentor others on some of your GTM work to help show that you are thinking ahead for who can grow into your current role and workload

3. Build stronger relationships with PMs
   

For the first one, to assuage your manager’s concerns, first make sure you are doing your current job really well. Then once you feel sure of that, ask to take on some “10% time” projects to stretch into more of the product marketing work that you’d like to grow into. If you’re currently doing GTM work, you may want to spend more time on inbound product marketing like customer and market research. 

The easiest way would be to initiate some research projects that are related to your existing GTM work. Can you conduct more interviews prior to running A/B tests to learn why certain messages, designs, and features seem to resonate with users? Or, if a launch underperforms against expectations, can you generate hypotheses and conduct market research to see what the barriers were? I would imagine you don’t need too much “permission” for this category of work. The next thing would be to ask explicitly to help do some product discovery work, or to sit in with colleagues who are doing that and offer to help them take notes and discuss insights. 

For the second idea, we’re still trying to make sure your manager can find some peace with your aspirations to grow beyond your GTM role. Look around at your broader marketing team. Who might be interested in stepping up and into some of the work you currently do? How can you show a spirit of mentorship in sharing your load with someone who is looking to expand their scope to a role like yours? If you can show that there is a potential long term path to “replacing” you, you might meet more acceptance from your manager, who is probably just stressed about getting all the work covered.

Lastly, internal moves are built on much more than just your manager. Find ways to start to build stronger relationships with specific PMs and product leaders who you already know. As you meet more regularly with some of those folks, you may be able to ask them directly how you can help augment the product marketing support they are already getting. Make sure to touch base with any directors of product marketing, too, as you don’t want to be perceived as going rogue. But at the end of the day, if you have more people in the product org and other cross-functional orgs like sales, design, and analytics in your corner, you’ll be much more likely to chart a path into PMM successfully.