What differentiates a technical Product Marketer vs nontechnical/traditional Product Marketers?

Good question – it can depend on a few things. In many companies, you’ll have to wear both hats... I know I sure have. 

As Product Marketing teams grow, where it starts to break out into dedicated roles is at the target persona level – your more traditional PMM may focus more on the executive personas/solution marketing/business value route, while your more technical PMM may focus more on the practitioner personas/example use cases/how to guides route.

If you're trying to figure out your own path here, one could either look to double down on one area or improve in others to gain broader coverage. More tech-centric PMMs have a lot of depth, but may lack the big picture, so it's beneficial to spend more time with folks on the strategy/GTM side of the house. More traditional PMMs know the fundamentals well, but may lack depth, so it's beneficial to spend time with folks on the product/Eng side of the house.

Techncial Product Marketers have a higher degree of industry knowledge and technical expertise. In a team, they are specialized in the areas of:

• Competitive intelligence: owning the maintenance of battlecards, and acts as SMEs when going head-to-head in a late-stage opportunity
• Technical enablement (SE, Professional Services): may entail building hands-on labs, creating technical content (e.g. reference architectures, demo environment + demo scripts, technical white papers)
• Running betas / "dogfooding" product early-on: some companies have PMs run betas, others deploy technical product marketers to build the early onboarding materials / guide early customer deployments

Building a PMM team does not dictate that Technical Product Marketers are required. In a lean PMM team, oftentimes the most technical leaning PMMs have regular day-to-day PMM responsibilites (e.g. aligned with a product line), but are also tasked with the areas listed above in a part-time capacity.

I think it’s important to note that when selling to technical audiences, ALL product marketers need to be technical. Insofar as all need to be able to confidently demo their product, understand their audience’s jobs/pains/gains, and alternatives. That’s pretty tough to do if you don’t understand core frameworks and relevant technologies.

Beyond that, a TPMM is distinguished by what they focus on—which in my opinion is deep research followed by the ability to turn that research into positioning, messaging, enablement, sales tools, demos, and other [mostly] bottom-funnel content. The most valuable thing a TPMM can do is dig deep into a competitor product, extend a demo environment for a new use case, write a white paper on model differentiation—all activities requiring more than topical search to make a meaningful difference to technical buyers.

On that note, when hiring TPMMs I so often hear, “but I can learn xyz.” That might be true, to a point. But context is much harder to collect on a short time horizon. The question becomes, how much effort will it take you to learn not just a new technology, but enough about it to see something our sales engineers can’t—enough to form an opinion about it—enough to produce something that teaches our audience something. My most effective TPMMs were practitioners, architects, product managers, and sales engineers first.