What are your top 3 tips for someone looking to break into their first Product Marketing role? How do you gain experience without actually holding the title first?

You very rarely will start your marketing career as a PMM, so you should look for roles that help you learn a lot about the business and the customer and give you opportunities to work cross-functionally. Once you land that role, you may find opportunities to step in or help out a product marketing team, which gives you some of those more specialized skills that set you up for success as a PMM. In my opinion, the three skills you want to build are:

• Messaging, positioning, and storytelling: Product marketers connect current and prospective customers to the value and magic of the product. It's not about specific features or functionalities, it's about the value they provide and how they can help your target customer. It's critical that a PMM can create strong messaging frameworks that get to the "why" behind a feature or product - and strong writing skills are invaluable here. Look for a role that helps you become a better writer and hone your storytelling skills. 
• Cross-functional expertise: A PMM needs to be able to work with different stakeholders and different types of personalities across the company, get their input and effectively rally them all around a shared plan. Look to build experience working with stakeholders across the company, figuring out how other teams work, and helping them succeed. Most roles will give you some exposure to this, and then it’s up to you to seek that work out to continue to grow this skillset. 
• Strong planning and project management skills: Lots of things go into a product launch and a PMM needs to be able to put together a clear project plan, be thoughtful about what needs to happen to get work over the finish line and can keep things organized as work gets underway. Look for opportunities to build your process and project management skills and you’ll be a huge asset to a product marketing team.

1. Use your expertise and unique knowledge to partner with Product Marketing on a project, any project! When I was a CSM on a new product, I started by working with customers to solve their specific problems. Because I was good at that, sales began bringing me into pre-sales conversations to pitch prospects, I then started creating content for my pre and post-sales engagements. It was easy to take that work and partner with the PMM team to codify and scale my work. That was me moonlighting in PMM and helped prepare me for a full-time PMM gig.

2. Step in and help other departments solve their problems. Product Marketing is pulled in SO many directions. There are very few departments we don't work with and often it is to help solve specific problems. So if you want to get into Product Marketing, get experience working with other teams and help them solve their problems.

3. Find ways to document and share your knowledge. Much of Product Marketing's work is gathering and synthesizing information. Then distilling it into impactful content (PPTs, talk tracks, web pages, enablement sessions, etc) that the field teams can use to drive more revenue. You probably have knowledge or information like this, practice getting it into the right format and sharing it with the teams.

And of course, the best thing to do is take informational interviews with as many PMMs as possible. Ask them this question, ask them how you can help them, and ask them for more introductions.

Traditionally, both product marketing and product management roles vary widely depending on the organization's size, product offerings, and strategies. Going to the fundamentals, I like the definition of a product marketer as a "storyteller who can champion a product's value and a strategist who can act on a company's biggest need". Based on this definition, there are 3 skills you can develop to position yourself as a product marketer even though you do not hold the title:

1/ Storytelling: Develop the art of crafting a compelling narrative for your product. Start to identify product value propositions you like and try to understand "why" you liked them. This will force you put yourself in the shoes of a user, explain value prop in simple language, and build compelling messaging/positioning.

2/ Strategist: Start understand the product distribution channel. Break it down into stages like - awareness, consideration, adoption, and retention - to understand where you not are doing well. Then try to drill down into the user journey to understand what is missing.

3/ Collaborator: Find opportunities where you can influence cross functional teams across sales, partners, marketing, and product on different projects. Develop the knack of identifying shared goals and proactively partner with teams on projects.