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.