What are some things you wish you knew in your first few years of Product Marketing, that you have learnt since?

I spent a lot of time in my early career worrying about getting to the next promotion and how I was progressing versus my peers. Looking back now, this was all wasted energy. I wish I had been more focused on learning and picking up as many skills and experiences as possible. I also wish I had been less worried about making mistakes. I think I would have been able to take more risks and push myself to try new things that would have ultimately helped me to build more skills. I also wish I knew ho ...Read More

I came from a background in brand and so my natural instincts served me most well on the outbound side of product marketing. I had my fair share of imposter syndrom in the early days when I looked at my peers and realized that I'd never done the traditional inbound work of a PMM. I spent more time than I should have in those early days being afraid to ask for fear of not being able to meet the bar. It took building a relationship with a peer whose work I admired to admit that I was really learni ...Read More

One thing I wish I learned earlier is the most powerful product marketing you can do is always centered on a shared human truth. When I look back on my very early PMM GTM work, I focused primarily on communicating about the product and the benefit derived from the features themselves. But the product features, however innovative, were only half the story. Connecting the Product to the Customer Need is where the true magic lies. Find the truth we all share (an experience, an emotion) and connect ...Read More

Don't box yourself, ever!  Don't always stick to how things are always done.  And ask questions more.  And observe and take notes.  And don't pretend to know it all!  Here's the thing: When you are early in your career, you are often embarrassed to ask questions or ask "why?" But asking those questions more would help you understand things wayyyyy better. Some of my best learnings have come from asking questions to understand things better. Think about it — if you can't understand a feature as a ...Read More

There is one key learning: Actively plan & manage your development. Here is what is involved: Know the menu: Since Product Marketing is such a broad discipline, its important to understand the various functional competenices that comprise it. This way, you can assess where you have strengths and where you want to develop. These competenices span target segmentation definition, messaging & positioning, content development, sales enablement, pricing/packaging, PR/AR and more, they are quit ...Read More

When you're starting out your career as a PMM, it is very important to remember that your value promise is to customers and not internal stakeholders. I don't mean to say that internal alignment and buy-in isn't important but it should never take priority over serving your customers. In my early days, I spend 80% of my time trying to understand what were the needs of my internal stakeholders and ensuring I was supporting them fully, leaving little focus on the customer. The moment I started prio ...Read More

The ability to effectively build cross-functional relationships is really important in product marketing and understanding the role that each functional area plays in making a product successful. I'd put into this bucket knowing how each team measures their contribution (KPI's), what their processes and pain points are, as well as who and what their stakeholders care most about. I'd also include investing the time to learn their communication style. Just as a pmm spends time getting to understan ...Read More

As someone with a tech background and self-education in marketing, I learn everything in practice. I wish I knew more about the importance of user research and CI at the beginning of my PMM journey: - User research: back in 2015, we released our first startup product which dramatically failed. We spent one year of development without proper user research, without defining the customer journey, or even having personas. That taught me the importance of knowing your users and their needs :) - Const ...Read More

You are not here to market products. That's the main thing I wish I knew. Would have saved me countless hours and tears. The number one mistake PMMs make is to start from the product. They organize weekly calls with the Product Manager. They devise elaborate to tell the world about this product. And they then they start fighting with Product Teams, having long debates on the overlap of responsibilities between PM and PMM, getting frustrated when the rest of the organization doesn't support their ...Read More

When I started as a PMM, I wish I'd known that it does not matter how sharp your messaging is, how impactful your sales decks are, or how well your collateral converts if you can't activate people around it. Working as a PMM in four different companies, the work has varied significantly, but the thing that has remained constant is the importance of building relationships with all the key stakeholders. Getting different parts of the business onside with what PMM is doing starts with finding out w ...Read More

I wish I knew these things when I first started in product marketing in 2008: Relationships matter. Make connections with different teams, including those that you may not have a direct impact on (or vice versa). Benefits include: Reduce redundancies. I've managed to streamline different projects & opportunities into one workstream. Direct customer interaction is important - don't just depend on your internal stakeholders for information. Take the time to join events and roadshows, and speak ...Read More

The list of things I wish I had known is long, but I'll try to highlight some of the more important ones. (I really wish I had a resource like Sharebird when I was starting out. There was nothing like it back then.) Lead To Products, Don't Lead With Products: As a PMM it's really easy to get enamoured with the thing you're marketing, especially when Product is telling you it's revolutionary. I've got news for you... Nobody cares about how it works unless they know what problem it solves for them ...Read More