What new skills will product marketers need to succeed in an AI-powered marketing landscape? (e.g., Data analysis, understanding AI capabilities and limitations)

Every PMM needs to become AI-literate. If you're an IC, you need to think about how to use AI to help you scale. If you're a manager, you need to think about how it can help your team scale. If you're a senior leader, you need to think about how it can help your company scale - and even transform your industry.

Today most of the top martech platforms are building generative AI tools into their functionality, but that's not enough. PMMs should always be reading about how the tech works, how it's evolving, and think about ways to apply it to their work. IT review and procurement processes don't move fast enough to keep up so you need to stay ahead of the game.

Prompt engineering is a critical skill that is going to help PMMs accelerate their work. I think PMMs are naturally adept at this as it requires consideration of the audience (GPT) to get the desired outcome. Starter prompt templates for various PMM tasks are all over the internet. But they aren't great and you'll need to tune these to get them to spit out relevant, quality content.

It's also to ensure you're up to date on the limitations of the tech. It's not a replacement for PMM work. It's assistive. Be wary of hallucinations and always double-check the outputs. And also be careful that you aren't putting your company's IP into the public sphere. That could get you into deep water with your legal team!

Helpful Tip and Resources

• Follow Andrew Ng on LinkedIn for thought leadership on the tech

• Subscribe to the TLDR newsletters for Marketing and AI

• Podcast: The Artificial Intelligence Show

• Watch events and read the blogs of the top players in the space (OpenAI, Google, AWS, Microsoft, Nvidia, IBM, Anthropic)

• Use AI to master AI - chat with ChatGPT and ask questions like, "Explain RAG to me like I'm in high school" or "Give me 10 ways to use generative AI for [insert use case]

LinkedIn Learning Courses

LinkedIn Learning has a couple of courses on offer. these are great to get a baseline, but remember, the tech is changing so don't expect them to be up-to-date:

• Securing the Use of Generative AI in Your Organization

• Introduction to Prompt Engineering

• Introduction to Large Language Models

• Getting Hands-on with GPT 4

AI will evolve the traditional PMM skill set, making soft skills, creativity, and critical thinking even more important, especially as AI automates repetitive work. Here are some skills I think that PMMs will need to develop or adapt:  

• AI fluency: Understanding AI trends and tools is crucial, and creating great prompts will become a foundational skill as language models gain even more applications. This will require not just abstract knowledge but also actively integrating AI into daily tasks such as data analysis, narrative development, and strategy building. The key is to view AI as a collaborator, combining its analytical and text-generation power with your expertise and strategic thinking. 

• Agility: As AI accelerates product development cycles and makes it easier to ship faster, marketers need to keep up. This means more frequent product updates and more agile and modular marketing strategies. PMMs need to think about how to maintain coherent narratives when underlying products constantly change. And cross-functional relationships become more important as moving faster requires seamless collaboration.

• Mastering new pricing models: In an AI-driven world, PMMs will increasingly need to adjust pricing strategies to focus more on usage and outcomes rather than the classic subscription models. This means honing a deep understanding of how customers get value to develop flexible pricing that aligns to those outcomes. 

• Data literacy: As AI provides better insights, PMMs must become skilled at acting on data and using data to tell compelling stories. This involves translating insights into actionable strategies, such as using AI to identify key audience segments and predict customer behavior. It also means leveraging data to communicate the value of your products, with approaches like solution selling using concrete use cases and tools like ROI calculators.

• Originality: We’ve all seen the explosion of AI-generated content in recent times. More companies are going to market with eerily similar messages and marketing. In this landscape, the marketing that stands out is original and authentic. Great PMMs will continue to develop outstanding marketing by grounding what they say in real customer needs and getting even more creative and innovative with the stories they tell.