Product Marketing Soft and Hard Skills

I’d have to see your assignment response to make recommendations! And I probably shouldn’t print my recommendations here publicly, as this company probably wants to keep the assignment confidential. Feel free to befriend me on LinkedIn, and I'll take a look at your assignment and give you feedback. 

One of the main skills I see to success in PMM im Empathy. Empathy in the sense of being able to to put yourself in other people's shoes. You are the customer and market advocate internallt and the product advocate externally, so understanding those different perspectives can help a LOT in any PMM materials you are developing, from slides to demos to websites to campaigns.

Its important to have a maanger who believes in you and supports your career. I'd break the meetings apart into weekly tactical conversations about what needs to be done, blockers, etc. Monthly convos around areas for improvement and then quarterly convos regarding career development. If you have a manager who's not willing to support you, there's plenty of others out there who are actively hiring and will help you develop your career. Hang in there!

Having a culture of openness and transparency across the team. Strong support in the development and alignment with each individual PMMs career & skill development roadmap. Finally, you offer interesting and stretching projectsthat spike passions and, as a manager, give your team the guardrails to operate and then, get out of their way!

I think you have to remember that people typically stay with an organization when 5 things exist:

1. A great culture that they believe in
2. Sticky relationships with their peers
3. Good pay & benefits
4. They're appreciated and can see how they can grow their careers
5. Good work/life balance

Focusing on balancing those 5 things and keeping your finger on the pulse of them is key to retaining great talent. If one or more of these aren't addressed, it can be really challenging for your team to want to stay and for you to keep them. 

I think that list is correct and you should prioritize this list depending on your business. In addition to the above, I would advise getting a tool like Chorus.ai or Gong.io. Chorus or Gong will help you scale as your team scales in getting customer feedback both on the new business side as well as current business. In reality, you can't be on all the great calls as that is physically impossible.  

A few other things to consider:

• Your team's research needs (qual and/or quant) 
• Any analyst-related spent (either for research reports or to engage w/ analysts)
• Content-related needs -- always a good idea to work with a good content agency to flex your capacity when needed
• And perhaps most important - a team-building/fun budget for your team :)

Love what you have already! Do you have budget for qual research incentives? This is a huge gift if you can offer $100 to target personas to provide feedback on messaging, or to prospects for win/loss interviews, etc. Also consider a recruiting tool like Respondent.io if you are running out of low-hanging fruit from networking / site pop-ups / LinkedIn recruiting.  

The ideal candidate will have both but that’s often not possible. For me personally, I think the soft skills are far more important. Especially at the more junior and even mid-management levels, the hard skills can be taught. The soft skills are much more difficult to teach.

As an executive, you should really be proficient in both.

A lot depends on the type of role. In general hard skills is where a lot of hiring managers would edge towards as it ensures the technicality of the role can be carried out. Soft skills are also vitally important and shouldn't be ignored. For soft skills, in a cross-functional role, it's virtually important but is also an area, with the support of a good manager, can be coached and developed. 

I think it depends ultimately on what the team needs. In a highly technical area, I'd value industry and product knowledge highly, as long as the person is then coachable and open to learn on other areas within the PMM world. In a not so technical area, I'd prioritize PMM skillsets over other areas. Soft skills should be part of the package either way, aligned with the value of your team and company.

Ultimately the goal is to find the right balance and bring different perspectives so the team can learn from each other as well.

Messaging is the ability to communicate pains and solutions for a specific persona using the written word. PMM writing is unique because it’s all about distilling a message down to it’s essence and packaging words in a way that will be accepted by a specific group of people. A PMM should write with very little fat.

Practice writing. Test your messages with your sales team, SDRs, A/B test marketing campaigns. Listen to how your sales team pitches. Listen to how your customers talk. 

Practice, practice, practice! Get as many reps in as you can, and have a marketer you admire give you very candid feedback. Bonus points if you can do a working session with someone who’s skilled in messaging — build a messaging framework together, live, so you can get a front-row seat to watch how they think and how they approach it in a real-life situation.

As others have mentioned, practice. It's hard to find the extra time, so here are some ideas:

• Try different frameworks to refresh on basics
• Find reasons to tag-team a refresh. I've used it as part of onboarding new marketing folks
• Compare with PMMs at other companies. I'm grateful to have coworkers and friends to talk shop (plus kudos to Sharebird!)
• Read fiction. Sounds corny, but it non-work related way to tap that empathy muscle

Messaging for me is both an art and a science. I've seen very good narrative building frameworks and courses around that can you help you nail basic concepts (e.g how to structure a well written value prop) but it needs constant practice and iteration.

As an immigrant whose first language is not English, I have also found general writing courses and workshops very helpful.

Bring your behaviours into your answers. The relationships you've built, the challenging people you've persuaded etc. It's important to be clear on the activity and the task, but ensure, within the STAR framework, you're not only answering the "what" you did but the "how" you did it. 

As an interviewer the "how" means more to me, as it's a signal not only to your ability to succeed in the role but your ability to be the best you can be within the culture of the organisation. 

• High growth mindset / hunger to continuously improve.
• Great negotiators. We sit at the intersection of a lot of teams and needs! PMMs need to be skilled not just at bringing value, but negotiating priorities.
• Great collaborators. PMMs can't drive impact if they can't collaborate.
• Can't emphasize enough the importance of empathy, especially when it comes to XFN work!