What skills do you think are crucial for influencing without authority, and how did you develop them?

I think the most crucial skills for growing your influence are relationship building, curiosity, data-centricity, knowledge of senior leadership, open collaboration, defining clear roles, and delivering marketing impact. All these things contribute tangible value to your peers.

• Relationship building: This can’t really be taught, it needs to be practiced and the work is never done on this skill. It’s about putting people first, being empathetic, and staying aware of give-and-take dynamics.

  • How well do you listen? How well do you follow up? How present are you to the problems your stakeholders are raising? Do you take things lightly rather than personally? Are you at least a little bit fun to work with?

  • The soft skills of relationship building are quite possibly the biggest differentiator between those that advance in PMM and those who plateau. 

• Curiosity: Asking good questions is easily one of the fastest tracks to building stronger influence. When you ask incisive and relevant questions, you help sharpen your stakeholders’ thinking.

  • The better you get at helping others pressure test their plans, the more you’ll be invited to give input.

  • Questions can also be a great way to communicate your perspectives or intuitions in a way that’s less formal and more "in the flow" of day-to-day work. 

• Data-centricity: At the end of the day, numbers can be a strong tool to bring disparate parties and functions to closer alignment.

  • Provided your source data is well documented, data helps you center your argument, opportunity, or area of concern in common language.

  • Better yet, if you can size the opportunity or problem and provide some lightweight validation of that sizing, it will be much easier for your partners to make the tradeoffs and decisions you are hoping for. 

• Knowledge of senior leadership: Who are your stakeholders’ managers? The better you understand the execs and senior leaders your peers report to, the better you can empathize and tailor solutions to their concerns.

  • Understand who really makes the calls.

  • Also, is there a “clean escalation” flow your company uses? Make sure PMM has some power to initiate those in the rare instances when it’s necessary.

  • Outside of that, make sure the important leaders know you. The more you build clout with leadership, the more your peers will slow down to listen to what you have to say.

  • The best way to do this is to prep well whenever you present to execs and show you can be someone who is both clear in perspective and open minded enough to flex in light of competing views or information. 

• Collaborative planning: This is perhaps more tactical. Be someone who lets your peers in on your marketing plans before they are finalized.

  • If you open your thinking and planning for commentary and input, your peers will typically be willing to reciprocate. 

• Take responsibility for improving cross-functional operations: Help the group reflect on what’s working and what is not.

  • Postmortems can be great for this. If you can own up to the areas where you can better grease the wheels and avoid slowdowns, you’ll earn respect for putting the interests of the broader group first. 

• Agreeing on clear roles and responsibilities: Product marketing can overlap a bit with other functions.

  • Befriend the DACI model and rigorously apply it to make sure you’re avoiding duplicative work, gaps, and unnecessary collisions. 

• Deliver strong results and clear learnings in your domain area: This should be a given but bears mentioning. If you put all your focus on your peers and fail to carve out the right amount of time to do work that is impactful, you are not going to be taken as seriously, and worse you may be wasting people’s time.

  • What can a PMM differentially deliver to your team and customers?

  • Your peers will look for a track record of wins and learnings to trust that you know what you’re doing and are playing your part.