What objectives did you set for yourself to help develop your career as a PMM?

I wanted to develop mastery across PMM core competencies — inbound and outbound. At some companies, they split up product marketing into inbound or outbound teams, but I find that the most successful PMMs are those that can do both. 

• Inbound, i.e. the research that dictates what features and products to build for your target audience. This includes a strong understanding of your customer, competitors, and their market. Earlier in my career, I focused on taking on increasingly more challenging inbound projects, like leading a customer segmentation or a customer immersion that I could use to inform the product roadmap. 

• Outbound, i.e. the strategy and tactics to successfully bring a product to market. This includes quarterbacking all the work that eventually is customer-facing — positioning and pricing, messaging, sales enablement, gtm channels, launch objectives, run-of-shows, etc. While PMM may not be personally executing on every detail, they’re quarterbacking the GTM effort and are the main POC on project updates. Throughout my career, I’ve worked on different types of products to become a better outbound marketer. Some examples: B2B vs B2C, 0-1 vs scaling, free vs paid, U.S. only vs global, etc.   

And then beyond the hard skills, there are soft skills like team leadership and XFN influence. Before I started directly hiring and managing a team, I looked for many ways to demonstrate leadership on my broader marketing team. For example, I volunteered to manage an intern, I proposed a new launch prioritization framework to improve our team’s ways of working, and I started mentoring more junior members of the team.