What advice do you have for a current product marketing manager who's looking to grow his/her career in product marketing?

6 answers

Head of Global Product Marketing at Asana

Every product marketing org is different, but there are typically three big areas that may or may not be included in a product marketing org including, inbound (working more closely with Product), outbound (or GTM, working more closely with Sales), and compete (often supports competitive needs of Sales or Marketing). On top of that, Product Marketers can often be called upon to support many other functions across Marketing such as demand generation or acquisitions.

If you want to run a Product Marketing team someday, you definitely need some form of experience in all three areas of Product Marketing. I also recommend getting broader marketing experience if possible (e.g., demand gen, acquisitions). If you have a broad set of skills and experiences to draw upon, you will be better equipped to be an effective Product Marketing leader.

Laura Jones

Head of Marketing at Instacart

Featured In Pragmatic Institute

Once you've established deep expertise and credibility in the field, the transition to leading a Product Marketing team will depend largely on finding the right opportunity. This can happen with your current org if there are internal transitions or scope expansions that open up leadership roles, ...more

Sharadhi (Gadagkar) Patel

Director, Product and Solutions Marketing at Hopin

Product Marketing has so many different specialties that it’s almost impossible to be a master of all of them. My advice is to pick a product marketing swimlane and develop a strategy or project that you can completely own and run with. This way, you become the go-to person at the company for mes...more

Leandro Margulis

Head of Product Marketing at Prove

Product Marketing is an evolving role and can mean slightly different things at different companies, from sales enablement to competitive analysis and everything in between. Hence, I would suggest this product manager to define what product marketing means to them and find / build a place most al...more

Indy Sen

VP Marketing at PopSQL | Formerly Matterport, WeWork, Google, Mulesoft, Box, Salesforce

See my answer here in terms of what can help you personally grow as a PMM. In terms of moving up the ranks, the journey is probably similar to other marketing roles where beyond a certain level, you need to go from being an IC (individual contributor) to being a manager. To grow as an IC, and...more

Horacio Zambrano

CMO, TruU.ai ; B2B GTM/PMM Advisor at Truu, Inc.

I think showing a promotion within an organization signals something a bit more special than a title change across organizations, so that is a way to motivate someone to stay on longer if an opportunity will open up for them. Start-ups offer a much broader scope of responsibility but may lack the...more