What kind of product marketing types are there? What does a "full stack" product marketer look like to you?

I personally don't see product marketing to be of different types. However, as you setup a product marketing function you need to develop work streams that are led by experts. 

These foundational work streams can include: 

1. Developing GTM messaging
2. Coming up with pricing methodology
3. Developing sales playbooks
4. Managing product launches
5. Churning out content with a regular cadence
6. Developing competitive outtakes
7. Managing relationships with industry analysts 

I don't see one person being an expert at all of this. As a product marketer, you need to align yourself with certain foundational components of product marketing and try to become an expert in it.

For me, a full-stack product marketer is someone who is proficient in both inbound and outbound PMM. You can work with key stakeholders like sales, customer success, product, marketing peers, and even the executive leadership team (PMM is, after all, directly tied to strategy). You’re a Swiss Army Knife when it comes to being the voice of the product and can solve problems no matter what is thrown your way. In most cases, you’ll flex different skill sets up and down depending on the product itself, the company’s maturity, and the strengths and weaknesses of the key stakeholders.

While the role of product marketing varies a bit by company, I think that all product marketers should work to become "full stack" in their capabilities. A full stack product marketer should have the functional skills and organizational savvy to drive both the core outbound and core inbound parts of the job effectively. The core outbound parts of the job are:

• Messaging - It all starts with messaging. Strong messaging effectively communicates the value of your products and services, giving customers and prospects an understanding of how your company's products and services can solve their specific problems. Great messaging also provides strategic guidance to the rest of the company to ensure that a single story lands through coherence and repetition. Great messaging is the hymnal from which everyone can sing.

• Launches - Running product launches is a high stakes, high visibility job for which PMMs are most known. Running a launch requires you to be a strategist, a writer, a project manager, a cheerleader, a coach and a lightning rod. There are a ton of places you can learn about how to run a launch effectively (like here on Sharebird), so do your homework before it's your turn to helm the ship.

• Sales Enablement - You might think that the key to successful sales enablement is strong messaging and content, but it's not. Those things are necessary but not sufficient. Successful Sales Enablement is all about building strong relationships with direct sellers, channel partners - whomever is on the front lines with customers. You need to gain empathy and build trust if you're going to have the influence needed to actually get sellers using your materials. Without it, your perfectly good sales decks and battlecards will gather digital dust on virtual shelves, as is the fate of petabytes of this stuff every year.

In some organizations, PMM is a purely outbound GTM function and PM takes all inbound roles from market sizing to customer feedback. However, if you're at a company where PMM shares those responsibilities with PM, the core inbound parts of the job are:

• Market Opportunity Analysis (MOA) - This is the highest level of company and product strategy. Developing hypotheses around "where can our company play and win?", "what problems can we solve in a way that differentiated, defensible and profitable?" and "who are our target customers (down to department, role, etc)?" involves market research, competitive analysis, extensive customer research and assessment of internal assets and capabilities. This is where you build out the big acronyms: TAM, SAM, SOM, SWOT, etc. You won't always have a seat at the table here, but if you do make the most of it.

• Product planning - This is the next click down from a MOA. Once you have a general sense of the category you're playing in, the use cases to solve and the budgets to go after, you have to figure out what kind of mousetrap to build, the priority of the problems that it solves and when it's going to be available based on resources and other constraints. At the most atomic level, this could be fleshing out a feature. At the broadest level, this is ensuring that there's a coherent, fleshed-out product roadmap that can be shared internally and externally as a north star. This can definitely bleed into traditional PM work, but if it's on your plate dig in and do it well.

• Pricing and packaging - Even more detailed work that's very data and research-driven. If your company has trained, skilled market researchers (who have genuine statistics and data science skills), be sure to make them your best friends. Be prepared to produce very crisp, clear options and get ready for a whirlwind of opinions and criticism. Pricing is, without a doubt, the thing I've found to be the most contentious and agitating part of what companies offer. You're never going to make everyone happy, just be sure to land somewhere that customers can live with while not curbing revenue opportunities as you grow.

Finally, the last skill you need to be a full stack PMM is competency, if not mastery, over the products you're marketing. Unless you really live in the product you'll never really understand the strengths, weaknesses, quirks, frustrations and "a-ha" moments that your customers experience as they use your product (or something like it) to do their jobs.