What's a typical career path for a Technical Product Marketer?

Technical Product Marketers have a variety of career paths. Should they choose to stay in the PMM org, some more organizations offer management roles for Technical Product Marketing teams, which at some point roll up into broader product marketing leadership roles. Some choose to pick up more of the business / GTM strategy skillset and switch over to a "traditional" PMM.

Others move into the SE, or professional services organizations. For code literate technical product marketers, dev advocacy is another option.

Leaving TPMM I most often see folks move into:

• Head of Product Marketing

• Head of Solution Marketing

• VP Marketing

• VP Product

Coming into TPMM, I most often see folks coming from:

• Sales engineering

• Solutions architecture

• Product management

• Customer engineering/support

• Practitioner (formerly in the role you’re selling to— engineer, data scientist, infra specialist, etc)

I've been fortunate enough to work with some amazing Technical Product Marketers, and I've found two extremely strong backgrounds are technical pre & post sales (SE, services, etc) and practioner, meaning a role in which their job was to use your or similar products everyday to do their job. Both backgrounds ground a TPMM (or TMM) in credible, hands-on skill and domain expertise which is key to the role. If a PMM's job is storytelling, then (through demos, videos, guided tours), a Technical Product Marketers job is to tell the story through the product. Pre & post-sales folks have had great experience both selling and standing up customers which will prove invaluable as a Technical Product Marketer while someone woth a practioner background knows firsthand what it's like as a user and can cut through vendor BS like a hot knife through butter.