When you were mid-level in your PMM career (~10 years of experience), how did you think about your career development? What goals did you have at that time?

At about 7-9 years into my career when I was mid-level, I knew I was at a crossroads and it was an important time to assess what I wanted to do next. I made a strategic decision to work at a different type of organization than I had before. -->

Up to that point, I had worked in news, PR, online media/marketing, and customer success, then finally PMM, and decided I liked Product Marketing the best. However, I was mainly self-taught as a PMM, doing it at smaller companies. I wanted to see how expert PMMs did it, at scale. I wanted to get my "masters in PMM" so to speak.

So, I spoke with a mentor/senior leader I respected, and asked him what I should do. He told me I should work at a larger company for awhile, so I could learn how PMM is designed across a large org, and how deep it goes. Get a playbook so to speak. This was great advice, and was why I made the jump from working at startups to working at GoDaddy. I had to take a "step down" from a Director level for a while to get my foot in the door (I started as a Senior Manager), but it was completely worth it. GoDaddy was a company that had been around a long time, but had interesting new market opportunities. They also had a well-established Product Marketing organization. Luckily, I learned how to deepen my skills in nearly every area of the craft (from messaging to pricing), from who I still think are some of the best product marketers out there. This is all because I had a hunch, trusted myself, stayed humble, and made the leap. (I also leveraged my network to get my application seen.)