What are the required vs nice to have hard and soft skills for PMM roles in big SaaS companies compared to hard and soft skills for PMM roles in small start-ups/scale-ups in the tech space?

While I believe all the hard/soft skills I mentioned in my previous answer are must-haves for any PMM, my answer here depends most on the level of ambiguity at the company and how specialized the PMM role/scope is.

-Start-ups-

The ambiguity for a PMM at a start-up will be much higher than that of a large established SaaS company. At a start-up, you're likely working with a lot of rapidly evolving/changing functions, a continuous stream of new hires, lack of processes, and you may even be the first PMM hire. Product marketing tends to be added to the organization well after product/eng/other marketing functions have already been established - so not only are you trying to figure out how to deliver value as a PMM, you're likely also trying to educate other teams on what product marketing is and explaining to them why they should work with you. In this situation, the ability to navigate ambiguity is an absolute requirement as you will spend a lot of time trying to sort out the chaos so that you can properly launch products, drive alignment on user insights, etc. A key complementary hard skill is project/process management - in this environment you will be trying to create new processes to help improve company outcomes. Having the ability to manage these projects/processes along with designing them in a way that fits your company will be crucial to product marketing's success.

-Big SaaS companies-

Big SaaS companies are more likely to have very specialized and well defined PMM functions due to the maturity of the organization and the large amount of resources available. You likely have lots of PMMs available on your team to whom you can ask questions, learn from, and work together with. Cross-functional partners have probably worked with your role before, and will come to you asking for specific deliverables. Your environment is conducive to quickly learning what is expected of you and how you are supposed to deliver value. While your ability to navigate ambiguity is still important, it's not quite as critical as the start-up example, because you have a structured role in place.

The PMM function at this large SaaS company could also be specialized by GTM vs. Usage, Inbound vs. Outbound, Competitor or industry Specialists, Sales Enablement vs. Content, features vs solutions, etc. Given that there are a lot of specialized roles, the hard skills required really depend on the role you're targeting (or where you want to take your career). That being said big B2B SaaS company PMMs tend to have very very close partnerships with sales, so having the sales flavor of hard skills never hurts in these situations (B2B messaging/content creation like pitch decks/battlecards, knowing how to analyze forecasting/pipeline, competitive analysis, enablement, win/loss, etc.).