What are the most important soft skills to have as a product marketing professional?

Here are the biggest 2 - communication and teamwork. 

PMMs are one of the most cross functional roles in marketing / most companies. You have to be able to bring teams together and create momentum where none exists. This is hard to do if you're not a good collaborater / teammate. Skills like empathy, low ego, enthusiasm, transparency, and more come in real handy here. 

The other big one is communication. Maybe it's controversial but PMM is a communications job. A huge part of our value is taking product updates and packaging and positioing them so they are easier to understand and sell or market. You have to be a great communicator. That includes hard skills like writing, and presenting. But also just interpersonally your ability to connect with others and communicate clearly and directly with them is huge. Empathy, clear thinking, EQ, storytelling technices are your friend here. 

Product Marketers are experts in soft skills, and there is a never-ending array of skills I see in the most Successful PMMs. Let's boil it down to a few:

1. Communication: One of the defining attributes of a successful product marketer is strong communication skills. PMMs need to be able to articulate complex thoughts in a clear and concise way - both in written and verbal formats - and have the ability to present those ideas thoughtfully.

2. Emotional Intelligence: To be successful, you need to be able to build strong relationships with Product Management, Sales, Enablement, Engineering, Design, and so many more - and have the ability to influence and prioritize across an org. You will rely on these relationships day in and day out, so having the EQ to build and maintain is key

3. Adaptability: Now more than ever before we as marketers need to be willing and able to adapt to whatever is thrown our way. Whether that is a changing marketplace, organizational changes, or product launches, enhancements, or sunsets - we need to be ready to understand, adapt, and course-correct accordingly.

Soft skills define how successful PMM will be in communication and collaboration with other teams. From my POV the most critical soft skills are:

• Hight empathy (towards other teams and users)
• Love for cross-functional collaboration (natural desire to collaborate not compete)
• Adapting to changes and bias toward speed (priorities change, so we need to be adaptive) 
• Skill to build a structure from chaos (we deal with many inputs from other teams, as well as many last-minute requests)
• Ability to learn new fast (we need to be product experts and be able to grasp new concepts fast) 

Curiosity, influence, prioritization, and perserverance. 

PMMs must be able to go deep and dig in to answer the most important question of all time - why?

PMMs must be able to drive cross-functional change and influence in all directions.

PMMs must be able to say no to protect their yes. 

PMMs must be able to perservere in the face of challenges and find creative ways to thrive.

For me personally, it's really straightforward: 1) high EQ, 2) strong written and verbal communication skills, 3) empathy. As product marketer, you are constantly working with 5 core audiences (executives, customers, sales, marketing, product management) and you need to be able to connect with all of them, albeit in somewhat different ways. Developing those 3 capabilities listed above will allow you to do that.

Empathy here to me means not just the ability to listen, but taking it to the next level, which is the ability to understand others’ perspectives. Empathy allows one to think creatively when the seemingly obvious path is blocked. It will allow you to come up with alternative solutions. You know who’s really good at this? Your corporate lawyers who are regularly negotiating contracts with customers. We may not typically think of lawyers as empathetic but I’ve seen time and again how they come up with masterful out-of-the-box alternatives when a customer balks at certain terms and conditions during contract negotiations. It’s because they stop to understand why the customer says no. Funny to think that product marketing should learn lessons from lawyers. But they really are the best at negotiating complex challenges by seeing the customer’s point of view.