What level of hard/technical skills should someone aim to develop to thrive in product marketing?

I’m a huge proponent of Jobs To Be Done, both for building products and for marketing products – in product marketing, though, you don’t necessarily have to be able to do the job of your audience, but you most definitely have to get it. I often joke that I’m just a good enough programmer to know I shouldn’t be one. What this really means (aside from being a really bad joke) is that I can write about *it* and hold a conversation about *it*, so I can be an effective marketer to those who do *it*. ...Read More

Great PMM teams have balance, across the dimensions of positioning & messaging, communication, industry depth, and technical expertise. It's rare to find the "unicorn" PMM that is outstanding accross all 4 dimensions. Most organizations build PMM teams so that they have a mix of expertise in order to get the best coverage accross all dimensions. You want to figure out what your "superpower" is, and continue to hone it. But if technical skills is an area of weakness, it's something that you s ...Read More

I’ve only sold in B2B tech, so speaking from that POV I would say hard skills should include The tools your marketing peers use—Marketo, Demandbase, 6Sense, etc, particularly those used for lead enrichment since that’s where the fruits of your ICP analysis bloom, and campaign orchestration and tracking tools since that’s how your content and messaging reaches your target audience. the tools your sales team uses (beyond the above)—Salesforce, Outreach, Gong since that’s how you’ll measure effecti ...Read More

I don't believe that any technical skills are required in product marketing. However there are a few caveats to that blanket statement. You should be as technically proficient as your target customer. So if you sell to developers, then you should have enough technical background to speak intelligently to those professionals. This doesn't mean you actually need to be a great developer, just that you understand the needs of great developers. If your company is highly data-driven and does not have ...Read More

As a product marketer, you should strive to have the same degree of functional understanding and empathy as a product manager and the same ability to contextualy step through/use the product as any technical pre-sales role (like an SE). This, in my experience, is necessary (but not sufficient) to thrive as a product marketer. Especially when you're new to the role, put the time in to do both formal training, like Sales Engineer (SE) certification, and to use your product (and ideally, competitor ...Read More