What does a product marketing career path look like and what are the core TRANSFERABLE competencies that are required for each level as your career advances?

Careers in product marketing can be really varied, but I’ve noticed a few commonalities in successful PMMs’ stories. (Caveat: This is a simplification of a linear career path, but most people's paths aren't actually like this the whole way through!)

1. Establish marketing experience in one or a few channels early in your career to learn how to create great campaigns, bring messages to like through copy and creative, and test and learn via experimentation. Learn the ins and outs of your channel and take ownership over the nuances of your campaigns’ performance. 

2. Show your user empathy. Get to know your target audience better than anyone. Volunteer to help with research projects, ask if you can listen to qualitative interviews either live or recorded, and take your “study” of the user seriously. Pull insights from what you hear and start injecting that into your campaigns and GTM work. Rep the user in meetings whenever it is appropriate and additive.

3. Raise your hand for a PMM role or apply to one at another company. Depending on your level of experience, sometimes a lateral transfer is an easier way to “break in” to PMM.

4. Lean hard into your PMM role. Figure out what success looks like at your company and determine how you can deliver a lot of value to cross-functional partners as quickly as possible.

5. As you get more launch cycles and research reps you should be growing your influence and strategy chops, and you should pursue opportunities to get promoted to the next level(s).

6. Establish a solid track record of success and collaboration and eventually, become a PMM lead, Group PMM, and/or Director of PMM. 

7. Continue to specialize and move towards VP of Product Marketing, or go for a Head of Marketing role (Head, VP, CMO). This comes with experience and developing out a solid career story over time that shows how you’ve not only challenged yourself, but how you’ve also made a large impact at companies you’ve worked at.
   

You can always take a very different path, like into product, or into consulting, and not all careers need to be linear. It’s much more common to have a mix of lateral and upward moves. Plus, occasionally for the right company or based on life factors, you may consider a step “back.” There are no real “rules” and I find that a "ladder" is too restrictive a metaphor for the world we live in today.

The five skill areas that I tend to emphasize with my own team include:

1. Research & Audience Understanding

2. Product Partnership & Business Understanding

3. Positioning & Messaging

4. GTM: Launches & Adoption Drives

5. Leadership & Strategic Influence
   

These might be slightly different in wording across B2B and B2C and depending on how much emphasis your company needs from PMM on inbound vs. outbound product marketing. But at the end of the day, a well-rounded PMM will know how to deliver value across any of these areas. 

Research & Audience Understanding: PMM needs to serve as a strategic anchor for the rest of the marketing org (and often the product org as well), when it comes to representing what customers and prospective customers care about. Even if User Research has its own org or if product research is heavily driven by product and design, PMM needs to conduct at least a few forms of regular research to keep a pulse on the market and the customer experience. This may be in the form of ongoing surveys and brand trackers, in product surveys, qualitative research and interviews with specific audience segments, or one-time market surveys to help you establish a baseline understanding of how your audience is and isn't getting their needs met. 

Product Partnership & Business Understanding: Understanding your audience and their needs and wants is not enough. To offer up valuable solutions, you need to deeply understand your current product and business model. Understanding what metrics and levers are crucial to driving company success is essential to being able to filter your ideas. It will also help you establish a strong basis of mutual alignment and understanding with your product partners, which is crucial to getting anything done!

Positioning & Messaging: This is table stakes as a product marketer. Good positioning and messaging can be challenging to align on and put into practice. Make sure your understanding of the overall solution landscape is comprehensive and that you feel close enough to both your customers' pains and aspirations, and to the unique ways your product addresses those challenges. Then, you have to distill all of this into a simple point of view that describes how you are the ideal solution. You develop relevant messages that illustrate specific benefits that relate to your point of view. Lastly, these messages have to be broadly adopted throughout your marketing so that they are repeated enough times to be effective. Realistically, you might not strike the right copy variants immediately, so you need to be able to test-and-learn. You need to have a mix of well-researched conviction in a point of view on the market, and the tenacity to test your way into the right ways of bringing that POV to life. This is very challenging work that extends end-to-end from corporate strategy down to specific ad units and landing pages. You also have an opportunity to flex your storytelling and brand marketing muscles here. 

GTM Launches & Adoption Drives: As a product marketer, your work does not end with delivering a blueprint for the marketing messages you need to get to market. You need to play an active role in shaping how those messages get to market. To do this, you need to learn as much as you can about all the marketing channels you have at your disposal and build relationships with your various channel partners. GTM planning requires a lot of collaboration and leadership to align on an approach, budgets, timelines, and roles and responsibilities. And it often requires a lot of cross-functional coordination to ensure all the pieces keep moving to deliver on time. Some advice here: make sure you have some direct ownership over a few channels to make sure you have “skin in the game” and that you’re empathizing with your channel partners’ execution-orientation. Like positioning and messaging, your learning and development in this area are never “done,” because how we reach customers is endlessly changing.

Leadership & Strategic Influence: No matter what level PMM you are, you likely need to play certain “glue” functions across your organization. While this cross-functional coordination can sometimes be draining, it also gives you a clear pathway to building influence in your organization. When you deeply understand your stakeholders and their goals, you can help bring everyone together to make sure you deliver value to the market. In order to do this well, you need to constantly work on your communication and collaboration skills. And as you rise in the ranks, you also need to make sure people see you as a key voice to have in the room. This happens when you learn to be an astute contributor, how to sharpen other’s thinking for the better, and how to call out needs for alignment or action.