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What are 3 most important hard skills that a product marketing needs? Hard skills for example: coding, data analytics, communication, etc

Alina Fu
Alina Fu
Microsoft Director, Copilot for Microsoft 365January 24

If I could only pick 3, it would be:

  • Storytelling
  • Competitive insights
  • Customer-obsessed

Telling a story isn’t just filling out a messaging and positioning framework but about being able to pitch a narrative on why status quo is broken, paint what that world would look like, and why your product will address the need. Layer in competitive insights in your analysis about the market, trends, and competitors to highlight your product’s differentiators and you can go even farther. Finally, doing all of that while being customer-obsessed and putting imaging how, when, and why they would choose your product and how to create a great product experience for them will help you reach that next level.

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Jason Sage, MBA, CPMM
Jason Sage, MBA, CPMM
Ready to work Senior Product Marketing Manager | Formerly Google (2x), Intuit, GoDaddy PaymentsFebruary 6

Product Marketing often gets confused with "Marketing". With that the three hard skills would be the following:  

  1. Insight Development - need to know what your customers and marketplace are thinking. 
  2. Competitive Analysis - need to know what your competitors in the market are doing.  
  3. Technical Acumen - a PMM needs to know how the "guts" of the product work and is capable of understanding a YouTube video on the technology underpinnings. They should be able to be the "backup quarterback" in case the PM leaves the project. This is the key differentiator between a PMM and a Marketing Manager. A PMM has to be able to play well with Product/ Engineering and understand their constraints and way of thinking. I've worked with too many PMM's that were better suited as Marketing Managers, as they lacked the hard skill of understanding how the product worked. 
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