What did you wish you knew at the very beginning of your product marketing career as a Product Marketing Manager?

I wish I understood how product marketing ideally works. Based on my experience, here's how product marketing teams should work together: A Product marketing lead identifes a goal. The three goals are usually to create pipe, mature pipe, or close deals. The PMM will select a target based off what the business needs. They can double down on a region/segment/geo that is working, or try to lift a poor performing area.  They'll create a positioning statement and messaging hierarchy that will be used ...Read More

Salespeople are NOT your customers, they are team members: This will change how you look at your marketing strategy and deliverables. It is fair to say that the content product marketers develop will be consumed, used and delivered by sales. However, the content should resonate with your prospects and customers. Invest resources in thought leadership content: Thought leadership may not yield pipeline right away. However, if you invest in thought leadership consistently, you will see it impacting ...Read More

Everything! But really...I was pretty clueless. I wish I knew how product marketing works with sales, customer success, product, and core marketing to be successful. I wish I knew to spend time asking questions and getting as much information as possible before starting a project. I wish I knew how to use storytelling not just in external decks but also in internal meetings to influence strategy. I wish I knew how lucky I was to have a boss that wanted me to succeed and made it his mission to op ...Read More

I probably didn't realize how many different flavors of product marketing there are out there in the world, it turns out PMM means different things to different employers. In some companies (usually large ones) a PMM is the head of a line of business and owns the P&L. In start ups, the role is much more narrowly scoped as the key partner to product in bringing products to market. In some companies PMMs are leaders, in other companies PMMs are more passive and tend to follow. It makes it real ...Read More

Over my years in product marketing, I've learned that the most important skill is not related to how much product knowledge I have, or how good my writing is, or even how well I tell a story. It's how good I am at managing across an organization. To me, product marketing has always been the octopus of an organization, with at least 8 tentacles reaching out to all the different departments like product management, sales, marketing, customer success, etc and outside the organization to customers, ...Read More

Some random thoughts in no particular order:  The importance of prioritization and how to say no: you will be under constant barrage for requests from all angles: the ceo, sales, CMO etc... These requests will range from the silly to the idiotic and you will never be effective if you don't have the ability to figure out how to TACTFULLY push back on requests and make clear prioritizations Spending more time with customers: However much time you're spending with customers, it's not enough.  How t ...Read More

I was lucky at the beginning of my PMM career, because I got into a pretty solid group that understood exactly what PMM did and didn't do. But I think my advice to people would be to really understand and grasp the craft of product marketing. We're not just writers - if we wanted to do that, we would have been writiers. Be a product marketer! This is someone who understands the target market (segments, buyers, changes, competitors), understands how people purchase your product in that market (al ...Read More

This is an interesting question. It really depends on the size of the company where you join. I switched to product marketing after almost 9 yrs in engineering including a MS in computer Engg. I had spent lot of time in the labs in Cisco to the point I think my hearing is partially damaged because of sitting too close to fans. After a few classes at Berkeley and then an MBA from Cornell, when I started in product marketing, the skills which were most useful were my writing skills. I was a good w ...Read More

Love this question! It's always better to learn from someone else mistakes :) Always run user research. Back in 2015, we released our first product which dramatically failed. We spent one year of development without proper user research, without defining the customer journey, or even having personas. That taught me the importance of knowing your users and their needs. Keep conducting competitive analysis. Somewhere in 2018 a competitor copied our features and added them as their offering (which ...Read More

Two things I wish I knew: The importance of building trust and establishing good relationships My unique capabilities/value as a PMM and how to communicate that to my partners In the beginning of my career, I think I over-indexed on producing a good work product and tried to influence through having the best ideas or strongest case. In hindsight, I realized that the first thing you should do as a PMM is establish trust and invest in building good relationships with your partners because if you d ...Read More