In your opinion, what distinguishes a IC PMM from the leader of a PMM org, besides people management skills? How did you grow from IC to a leader?

This is a great question and I’ll share an answer, but it’s a topic I’d encourage you to discuss with your manager if you’re looking to grow from an individual contributor into a people manager role.

In addition to having advanced knowledge or mastery of domain-specific skills, I look for the following core competencies:

• Problem solving & decision-making: You can take a high-level business goal, identify the problem, and come up with a strategy across multiple functions and the resources needed to succeed. 

• Influence & collaboration: You collaborate with key partners to influence outcomes and achieve team goals. You are trusted and regularly sought to help make or inform decisions for partners across the company. You drive planning at an inter-team level and are able to effectively involve all relevant teams and stakeholders.

• Management (forward looking): 

  • You could create an inclusive environment that builds trust in your team.

  • You could regularly provide feedback, set goals, discuss day-to-day challenges and career development on a regular cadence with your direct reports.

  • You understand the company’s people processes and could uphold expectations around performance evaluations and compensation conversations.

  • You would take full accountability for your team’s impact and well-being and ensure people can be proud of their work. You would enable your team to operate at a high-performing level.

The other thing strong leaders I know have in common is that they prioritize the company first, then their team, and then themselves.

In terms of my (abbreviated) story, I started my career in marketing as an individual contributor. At SurveyMonkey, joined as an IC Demand Generation Manager. I started “dotted-line” managing an employee who wanted to move into Demand Generation, and about 3-6 months later, I was formally promoted to manage that employee and build out and lead the Demand Generation team. When I transitioned into Product Marketing at SurveyMonkey, I went back to being an IC at first (although I informally led a cross-functional team focused on our personalization initiatives), before taking a position at Brex that would allow me to build out a team. I was the founding Product Marketer at Brex and built the team from one to 10 people in my time there. I’m most proud not of the team size but of its performance and engagement: our engagement and retention scores on quarterly pulse surveys were consistently above the company average, and the team members were high performers who genuinely enjoyed working together and built each other up to collectively do our best work.