What are the top three skills you would focus on for development as a PMM?

I'm going to cheat a bit on my answer to this great question. Let me break this down into two parts that I've found crucial for PMM success - foundational capabilities and core skills that power them.

First, the three essential PMM capabilities:

1. Positioning, messaging, and strategic narrative development: This is where you shape how your product lives in the market and in customers' minds. It's both art and science. It requires deep understanding of your market and competitive landscape, your customer's wants and needs, and the solution you bring to market.

2. Audience and market research: It's all about insights. Having command of this capability makes you invaluable to stakeholders across the organization.

3. Product launch orchestration: Think of this as where everything comes together. It's strategic, highly visible work that directly impacts your company's success. And, as PMM, you are at the center of it.

But here's what I've learned really makes these capabilities shine - three fundamental skills:

1. Writing: See my answer above. Every PMM deliverable hinges on clear, compelling communication.

2. Active listening: There's an old saying I love - we have two ears and one mouth for a reason, so listen twice as much as you talk. The best insights often come from truly hearing what customers, our teammates, and the markets are telling us.

3. Collaboration: PMM is team sport. Success isn't about being the smartest person in the room - it's about bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

In my experience, focusing on these areas creates a strong foundation for growth and impact as a PMM

• Product Positioning - This is the most important skill you can possess/understand as a PMM. It drives everything else, and nothing else works when this is wrong.

• Messaging Development & Storytelling - I don't think you can be a great PMM without being a good storyteller. You need to learn a repeatable process for arriving at good messaging, and understand basic storytelling strategies/skills in order to create results as a PMM. This skill can carry you into any area of Marketing.

• Go-to-market Strategy - You need to know all the pieces that go into creating a GTM strategy, and I don't just mean a product launch plan. I mean, what should the business do in order to drive growth for their product/solution, even post-launch? This skill is a business skill and will serve you well no matter where you go or what you do.
  
  Also, I personally think it's important to get a mix of experience at different types of companies. Whether they are different industries, B2B vs. B2C, or sizes, all of those differences will make you a stronger business strategist and PMM. Getting stuck in the same formula ultimately will not help anyone grow.

I'll share 4 instead of 3! Here are the 4 things I would focus on developing:

1. Strong command of key metrics, and ability to use them to tell a clear story

2. Ability to distill a complex idea into a simple, customer facing story or value prop

3. Understanding of and focus on customer needs

4. Ability to collaborate with diverse peers and partners

There are four areas of competencies as a PMM / PMM leader. It is usually good to focus on one of these as your unique "strength" and keep the rest going so that you are functional. As you advance into a management position, you can hire those strong in areas where you're weak.

• Strategic Thinking - the ability to break down complex problems into achievable questions / topics. The ability to identify opportunities that result in significant growth for the company, and well-structured communication (written and verbal) to convey this in executive forums.

• Data & Analytics - the ability to analyze complex and nuanced data to identify customer and product trends that help the company make the right decisions.

• Positioning & Messaging - the ability to identify customer's true motivations through research / data and create compelling messaging. Messaging is where some level of innate talent comes in, and not everyone has this (or needs to have this in order to advance in their PMM career).

• People Leadership - the ability to motivate and guide a team, tailoring communication / management style based on the individual. Strong problem-solving skills and creating strong influence in an organization to remove roadblocks for the team.

As I’ve grown in my career, I’ve realized that the hardest, and most important skill in product marketing is truly understanding market context and using that to shape positioning. It’s easy to state the obvious about your market. The real challenge is seeing what others missed—framing the problem in a way that unlocks the right strategy.

Take Yahoo in its early days. It framed its market as competing with traditional media companies. But in hindsight, the real market context was the consumerization of the internet—specifically, that search was the gateway to monetization. Google recognized this, understanding that intent-driven advertising was the real opportunity. Yahoo built a media company; Google built a search-first ecosystem. Both choices led to completely different industries, competitive landscapes, product strategies, and more importantly, very different positioning.

That’s why the top two skills I’d focus on as a PMM are:

1. Understanding Market Context – Knowing what game you’re really playing, what’s shifting in your market, and how to frame the problem you’re solving.

2. Translating Context into Positioning – Once you get the framing right, the positioning becomes clear. The message, differentiation, and strategy naturally follow.

If you master these two, everything else—messaging, GTM strategy, campaign execution—flows from there. If you're looking for a positioning framework, April Dunford’s is still the best one out there. And these skills are more analytical art than true science so practice helps.