What are the most important soft and hard skills Product Marketing Managers can build to become successful in their field going forward?

Everyone’s definition of soft and hard skills differs, but here are the nine skills that I think are the most important for a product marketer to have. I've used these skills as a compass to help me grow in my own career and have turned them into a success guide for my team at Envoy to use: Soft skills: Cross-functional excellence: As a PMM, you have the opportunity to lead without being a manager of people. A strong product marketer is someone who takes others along with them, rather than telli ...Read More

The number one skill is influencing without authority. More specifically, influencing authority in a matrixed organization. By design, product marketing sits at the intersection of a multitude of functions, each with their individual KPIs. Your job is to balance the needs of your various stakeholders to drive revenue and adoption for your product(s). If your company has one product, then this task may be fairly straight forward. If your company has multiple products or multiple portfolios, then ...Read More

Hard skills may vary by company, but I think there are two that are critical: Insights. Know the difference between an anecdote and an insight. This is especially critical when you work on a service at scale. Your best (and sometimes most challenging) users tend to be the loudest, so make sure that you're helping the team hear from a diverse array of customer voices. I find that one of the most important parts of any study is the recruit/target audience. Spend time getting the team aligned on wh ...Read More

Strong PMMs are good writers, know their product inside and out, experts of the competitive landscape, messaging geniuses and storytellers, BFFs with the sales team, GTM architects and excellent project managers. I like to think about a good PMM as a: A psychologist who can develop a deep understanding of the fears, aspirations, hopes, and dreams of buyers and target personas. An explorer seeking to learn more, discover more, and do more; bringing curiosity and some risk taking to product messag ...Read More

Top 3 Soft skills Be collaborative: Be open to new ideas, raise your hand to help, lean in to new areas, and have fun while doing it.   Build strong relationships: Invest in your cross functional partners, get to know them personally and professionally, know what is most important to them.  Develop a point of view, clearly communicate your point of view, and influence others with your point of view Top 3 Hard skills Analytical <-> Creative: Navigate this spectrum to be both analytical and ...Read More

PMMs are (and need to be) masters at many things but if I had to pick the most important: (Soft) Cross-functional Collaboration: PMM is a highly cross-functional role. On any given project, you’ll work with Product, Design, Engineering, Research, Marketing Channel Experts, Operations, Legal… and the list goes on. A product campaign can’t get done without many partnerships. So you have to be great at working across different teams and getting them to share in your goals.   (Hard) Data Driven: Pro ...Read More

Messaging and storytelling: this continues to be the hallmark of a great PMM. In particular, really leaning in on differentiation and value to the customer (not speeds and feeds) while also simplifying concepts down in a memorable way that makes it easy for sales to land, marketing to build copy and content, and ultimately, the customer to understand. I sometimes joke that PMMs like ALL the words...but we don't need to use them ALL the time. Being able to really tell a compelling story that conn ...Read More

This is an interesting question. In my experience, the most important soft skills needed for PMMs are influence management, and public speaking skills.   Influence management would be getting people from outside of your department or team to work on your project. Good influence management is not just asking people to help, but making sure they understand the value of the work they're doing. If someone says they can't help, going to their manager to help with priorities needs to be done with a so ...Read More

I talked about soft skills in another question, so let's laser focus on the hard skills needed to succeed in PMM here. Here are 3 hard skills you can focus on right now:   1. Data-Driven Decision Making: I actually teach a dedicated course on this topic at Loyola Chicago because I believe in it so much! Data helps with identifying and speaking to your target audience, defining the value of your product and ROI, market sizing, predicting buyer behavior, validating success in the market, and so mu ...Read More

Successful product marketers are both right and left brained. Thus, in addition to the hard skills, they must possess soft skills to rally teams behind their ideas. There are five fundamental soft skills that product marketers must demonstrate: Passion Adaptability Cross-functional leadership Prioritization Executive presence I wrote a blog post about these key PMM soft skills here. For Hard Skills, from my experience the most important skills are: 1. Market Sizing - Total Addressable Market (TA ...Read More

If I had to pick just one then it is (customer) empathy. PMM becomes strategic and business-critical when we harness this soft skill to generate breakthrough insights (hard skill) that helps the company not chase the taillights of competition but leapfrog them. For example, winning strategic narratives (in B2B SaaS especially) first attack the old game—your audience’s orthodox, status quo approach to winning—by credibly showing how it’s now unwinnable. Then they name the new game that winners ar ...Read More

Required Hard (Functional) Skills: Analytical — both quantitative and qualitative. From financial modeling to behavioral analysis to awareness campaign tracking to focus group findings, you’re going to need to be able to dissect data, interpret it, and figure out what the implications are. Strong communicator — can clearly explain rationale for decisions as well as tell stories to persuade Able to influence — can shift mindsets in peers as well as senior leadership. This includes peers and leade ...Read More

Required Hard (Functional) Skills: Analytical — both quantitative and qualitative. From financial modeling to behavioral analysis to awareness campaign tracking to focus group findings, you’re going to need to be able to dissect data, interpret it, and figure out what the implications are. Strong communicator — can clearly explain rationale for decisions as well as tell stories to persuade Able to influence — can shift mindsets in peers as well as senior leadership. This includes peers and leade ...Read More