When considering a candidate, how much weight do former titles hold?

2 answers

All related (31)

Sr Director Product Marketing, Zendesk • January 26

If you're chasing titles, you might want to be concerned. I prefer to think about the long term plan and look for opportunities that further my career ambitions. Its ok to take a short term hit on title if you're going to be on a team where you earn lots of experience, credibility and get to work with some strong PMMs. In the long run this will set you up for the rest of your career.

From a hiring managers perspective, if there's a recruiter screening resumes, you might get filtered out by title. I prefer to go through the resumes personally to avoid missing strong candidates who might have misaligned titles. Usually a hiring manager will be aware of leveling across the industry.

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Lisa Dziuba

Head of Product Marketing, LottieFiles | Formerly WeLoveNoCode (made $3.6M ARR), Abstract, Flawless App (sold) • July 26

Titles can be adjusted "to fit the role" but the real achievements are something harder to trick. That's why I always look for what the candidate achieved, why, and how. Those achievements can come under different from PMM title.

For example, marketing managers could be responding to GTMs, and content marketers for preparing customers' stories, case-study, and sales enablement. While growth managers/growth marketers could be doing funnel optimization for landing page, onboarding, and other stages of the customer journey. If I'm hiring for those tasks, I will be happy to consider candidates who successfully have done it before (even without a PMM title).

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Carrie Zhang

Product Lead (fmr Head of Product Marketing), Square

Covered this a bit in another question. PMM can bring a very strong customer perspective when it comes to product development. To have a seat at the table though, you have to do the work. This is what we do to bring customers perspective to our product teams: * Visit, shadow, do work at our customers. No research can compare to the insights you get by actually being in the shoes of our customers - in our case, small businesses * Talk to customer facing teams (Sales, Account Management, Support) and synthesize feedback. They are on the frontline all the time. You will be surpr...

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Christy Roach

Head of Portfolio & Engagement Product Marketing, Airtable

The most important thing to keep in mind is this: having the product marketing title doesn’t automatically mean you get to influence the roadmap. You have to put in the work and show your value to get a seat at the table. There are three big levers to pull here to help you shift the way product marketing works from a team that’s just responsible for the launch of a product to one that’s involved in the entire product process. 1. Create a partnership with your PM: When you’re thinking about how to influence, you’re probably thinking about managing up and influencing people who are more se...

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LeTisha Shaw

Director, Product Marketing, UserTesting

Yes, this is a pretty standard PMM interview question. When I ask, I am typically looking to see if the candidate understands product launch and go-to-market fundamentals. I'm also interested in which parts of the launch they led (i.e. was it a specific marketing channel or soup-to-nuts?). I also like to ask different variations of this question, like "tell me about a product launch that did not go well and you had to get back on track" because let's be honest, not every launch goes exactly the way we plan :)

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Ross Overline

Senior Manager, Product Marketing, Fivestars

Asking for a raise is tricky. Ultimately, you need to be driving value, right? That can be broken down quantitatively, but also qualitatively. Quant: What impact are you having on funnels? Run A/B tests to prove that your strategies are driving impact. How have NPS and sentiment changed? Qual: Do you have strong relationships with stakeholders? Are you driving value through strategy, creative, and channel partnerships? I would also recommend using your companies job ladder as a tool, or if you don't have one, job descriptions for other similar roles. If you're a PMM and the expe...

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Leandro Margulis

Head of Product Marketing, Prove

Well, the question of "What is Product Marketing" Could mean different things at different companies, but my answer is that we provide the voice of the market and the voice of the customer internally to the product manager so we can build products that resonate with our audience, and we are the voice of the product externally providing the appropriate messaging and positioning to go to market.

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Lindsay Bayuk

CMO, Pluralsight

Great question! This is so important. Because product marketing is often the "glue", it’s easy to miss how critical it is to driving company alignment and growth. Make sure that you have a regular cadence of updates and clear/measurable metrics reported to your CMO and Executive team. Being proactive about advocating for your function is part of being a great marketer!

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