The Top 100 Product Marketing Mentors To Learn From And Work For - 2022
View the most recent year here: 2024
Overview
The way we acquire job knowledge has changed. We learn more from each other than we do at school. The Product Marketing Mentor List shows you the top 100 product marketing practitioners to learn from to develop your career. All of these leaders have contributed content that Sharebird users find helpful.
Methodology
Sharebird's algorithm ranks contributors based on how helpful our users perceive their product marketing - related content to be. We do not handpick people. To be considered for this list, mentors need to be current product marketing practitioners and in a leadership role. We look at the following factors with Sharebird content: views, saves, and followers. We then apply a proprietary algorithm to calculate content credibility and helpfulness. Views show us content relevancy, saves show us content quality, and followers show us content credibility.
Sharebird does not accept payment to be included on this list, which allows us to maintain objectivity and independence. We update this list every year. For any questions about this list, please contact [email protected].
About Sharebird
Sharebird is where leading executives answer your questions. Get easily digestible tips and insights from leaders at the fastest-growing companies, so that you can solve your hardest work challenges and reach your career potential.
In Alphabetical Order by Company:
Eileen Buenviaje Reyes
1Password VP, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: In building marketing programs, it is easy to become enamored with the "shiny object" of a new product or feature. Don't underestimate the value of existing "old" products, features, and benefits (e.g. trusted brand, easy-to-use, etc.). Tying the "new" in with the "old" builds consistency and continuity for customers who won't distinguish as easily between the two.
Katharine Gregorio
Adobe Sr Director of Product Marketing, Creative Cloud
Career Path Tip: Be competitor aware, but customer obsessed. Nobody anywhere wakes up and says they want to buy your product, ever. They wake up and say they need to do xyz, which your product may or may not be able to do better, faster or easier than their current approach or solution. By becoming the expert on your user's real needs and sharing these with your cross functional peers, you will be able to drive the business forward against any goal.
Mary Sheehan
Adobe Head of Lightroom Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: 10% of your time should be communicating what you do internally. That includes launch plans, strategy, learnings, and more. This helps you establish relationships, build confidence with stakeholders, and also be someone they can see as an expert. This can be a great way to help your long term success!
Kevin Wu
Airtable Former Sr Director Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Product Marketing is a broad field of work with many specializations, but to me the foundational skill set is communication—can this PMM tell a compelling story? Focus on honing the three parts of good communication: written, visual, and verbal.
Francisco M. T. Bram
Albertsons Companies Vice President of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Fight for your customers. A lot of times, PMMs will face the dilemma of supporting internal goals vs meeting external customer needs. No matter what, always represent your customer interests, be their voice internally. It may make you feel uncomfortable, possibly even create some short-term friction with peers but this won’t go unnoticed and overtime you will build a credible reputation for championing customers.
Harsha Kalapala
AlertMedia Vice President Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Storytelling is most common and powerful in written form. Writing compelling copy is the most important (probably the hardest) skill you can develop to differentiate yourself at any level of product marketing. This is not a skill you can master overnight. To be a great writer, you first have to be a prolific reader. Read copywriting and storytelling books as much as you can, and ABC... Always Be Copywriting.
Andrew Stinger
Amazon Sr. PMM, Outbound Communications
Career Path Tip: Your job communicating isn't done until you've been understood.
Kevin Garcia
Anthropic Product Marketing Leader
Career Path Tip: Prioritize customers. Speaking to customers and building real relationships with them can be your unfair advantage to grow your career and improve as a marketer. Don't underestimate the power of being the most customer-informed person in the room.
Victoria J. Chin
Asana Chief of Staff, Product
Career Path Tip: It’s never too early to connect with your customers. Shadow sales calls, join user interviews, host a customer council, read support tickets, etc - leading with customer insights will put you in a stronger position to inform the product roadmap and tell stories that resonate.
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Getting internal alignment is hard, and it's also a huge part of succeeding in this job. Remember that your competition is outside the building, and the people you work with all want your company and customers to be successful as much as you do. If you focus less on getting the "buy-in" or "sign off" on a plan you created on your own and more on getting input and understanding from your partner teams to create a plan that solves for the needs of your customers and the business, your teammates will start to see you as a leader they want to work with.
JD Prater
AssemblyAI Head Of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: When evaluating a new opportunity use the 4 Ps framework. 1) Problem - do you understand the fundamental problem the company is solving? 2) Product - is the product capable of solving the problem? 3) People - do they have the right team and founders to solve the problem and build the product? 4) Personal growth - can you grow in this position and with the company?
Daniel Kuperman
Atlassian Head of Core Product Marketing & GTM, ITSM Solutions
Career Path Tip: Always ask yourself and others "what is the impact" and "can this scale"? It is common for product marketers to get pulled in to solve all kinds of problems and involved in projects with very different teams. In some cases you will get bogged down by an 'urgent request' and will have to prioritize things. When this happens it is always good to get these questions answered. Ask "great, we can definitely do that, but first can we align on what we expect the impact to be?". This question forces everyone to agree to expected results. You'd be surprised how many times the team working on a project has different expectations. The best follow-up to the answer is then to ask "will this approach scale, and if not, what do we need to change?". This is because if you spend time working on something that cannot be replicated at scale or handle more (traffic, requests, people, etc) then you will eventually have to work on it again at some point. Create meaningful and scalable solutions and your work will survive the test of time!
Evelyn Watts
Briza Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Your career success hinges on your ability to lead without authority. The key to building influence and trust is a deep understanding of the customer and market and sharing the essential context others need to make informed decisions. Never underestimate your context's value and how often you need to communicate it.
Jeff Hardison
Calendly VP of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Product marketing should be the glue between departments that don't always get along, 24/7, in every company: marketing, sales, customer success, and product management. Therefore, a big part of maturing in the product marketing role is learning how to help people empathize with each other for the good of customers and one another. If you don't enjoy improving at diplomacy, you'll eventually not enjoy product marketing.
Charlotte Norman
Canva Head Of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: The way to be productive is to ensure you're working on the right thing. How do you know if you're working on the right thing? By deeply understanding your customer, their needs, wants and pain points. Any work you're completing which doesn't help solve or seize sizeable customer opportunities should be removed from your to-do list.
Indy Sen
Canva Ecosystem Marketing Leader
Career Path Tip: If you’re debating between joining a large company or a startup, know that product marketing will end up looking and feeling the same at both. The difference is what you will get out of the experience personally. At large companies you typically join a company to build a team. At startups, you’re joining a team to build a company. Both are great learning experiences, but knowing that going in should help set the right expectations.
Grace Kuo
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Influence through empathy. Since PMM is so cross functional, it helps to put yourself in the shoes of your GTM partners, stakeholders, and even customers. The more you understand their roles/objectives and perspectives, the more credible, influential and impactful your leadership can be.
Grant Shirk
Cisco Head of Product Marketing, Cisco Campus Network Experiences
Career Path Tip: Product marketers are often counseled to learn more about their customers, to gain that deep understanding of the market. That will help you excel in your current role. But you can accelerate your growth as a marketer by learning as much as you can about your own business. Teach yourself to think like a marketer (not just a product marketer), a sales leader, a customer success professional. Learn the ins and outs of your financial model and where your operations teams really excel. That context will give you more empathy, ideas, and context than anything else, and will open up countless doors.
April Rassa
Clari VP, Solutions Marketing
Career Path Tip: Don't be afraid to try new things. Get out of your comfort zone, it will be key to getting ready for your next role. Remember, sometimes the ride may be bumpy, and you might not get it perfectly the first time, but that's the process of learning and growing.
Julien Sauvage
Clari VP, Brand, Content and Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Early in your career, go for the rocketship. Moving fast is the best way to learn fast, I'd say. Best way to learn all the facets of GTM, get your hands dirty, influence key strategic initiatives, show impact, etc. - that'll follow you for the rest of your career!
Francis Larkin
Clockwise Vice President of Marketing
Career Path Tip: If you're at a point in your career where you're really trying to hone specialized skills and learn from other people who are really great at their disciplines, mid-stage or late-stage company might be a better fit for you. But if you're at a point where you're trying to go broad and see your fingerprints all over the work, then an early stage could be a great fit.
Kacy Boone
Clockwise Head of Growth Marketing
Career Path Tip: Your future self will thank you for the investments made in relationships today. Whether you're looking to make the next big jump or hire your first team member, the relationships you build throughout your career will always pay off dividends. We're humans, after all. And we remember how it felt to work with someone far more than we remember what they were able to accomplish.
Adam Weigand
Coinbase Director, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Lean into becoming a T-shaped marketer by forming habits and developing expertise around disciplines you're passionate about. You don't need to master every channel to be successful, but discovering your marketing "superpower" is a great way to differentiate yourself.
Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: PMM checklists make work faster, but learning to start from the right questions makes work valuable. Why aren’t users converting? What does a customer need to know during their trial? Why do they upgrade? Before you create anything, ask what *real* user questions it will answer.
Dave Gerhardt
DGMG Founder
Career Path Tip: Do the job you want before you actually have it. If you want to jump from associate to product marketing manager, start taking on some manager-level tasks. It’s great to excel in your current role and hope for a promotion – it’s better to excel in your current role and actively WORK towards a promotion.
Mike Polner
Discord Head of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Always be looking and defining your differentiated value proposition - both within Product Marketing and also within your organization. Figure out what unique and differentiated value you create, deliver it, and reinforce it.
Alissa Lydon
Dovetail Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Find ways to bring your cross-functional partners into your world and recruit them to augment your efforts. The fact of the matter is that everyone at your company is already doing product marketing, they just don't know it yet! Educate on how they can best participate in building world-class product marketing, and more importantly how it can help them achieve their goals, and your sphere of impact will quickly expand.
Christiana Rattazzi
Dropbox VP, Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: No matter where you are in your career - but especially early on - take time to build relationships with your major stakeholders and internal customers. There is huge value in being the one who escalates and owns an opportunity or specific problem to be solved based on conversations with the field or product teams. Good product marketing never happened from an iron tower.
Jameelah Calhoun
Eventbrite VP, Global Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Identify your superpower PMM skill and ensure that leveraging that competency is a critical component of success in your next role. Every PMM role is different, so playing to your strengths will not only make you more likely to get the job and feel motivated, but also enable you to drive forward quick wins while you are learning the market and/or building out your team.
Andrew Forbes
Figma Director, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: The most important thing you can do is spend more time listening to your customers. At the end of the day, their success with your products is your success. Listen to them, share your thoughts, share your plans and their insights will help you do everything better.
Becky Trevino
Flexera Chief Product Officer
Career Path Tip: Talk like your customer. It's the only way your message will get noticed. Learn to do this by spending time speaking to people who buy and use your product. This is easier said than done. PMM is not a customer-facing organization. You need to make the effort to weave customer interactions into your ways of working. It won't happen organically.
Lindsay Bayuk
FullStory CMO
Career Path Tip: The fastest path to mastery is by cultivating collective experience. Gather as much expertise as you can without having to learn the hard way (doing it on your own). Do informational interviews. Ask for help. Find a mentor (even if you meet once or infrequently).
Sophia (Fox) Le
Glassdoor Director, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Hone your strengths as a way to differentiate yourself as a leader! I've been reminded recently that identifying and honing your strengths is just as powerful as honing your areas for improvement, if not more. I encourage you to take the time to do this practice regularly as a means to constantly grow both as a human and as a professional. If you oversee a team, empower and uplift your people to do the same.
Madeline Ng
Google Global Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform
Career Path Tip: Never be the smartest person in the room. Your growth comes from being surrounded by people stronger than you. Hire them, work for them, and seek them out for guidance.
Natala Menezes
Grammarly Global Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Elevate your people. Get to know what makes them excited and how they operate in a flow state. Understand their strengths and lean into them. Figure out how to clear a path so that they can do their best work. It is so much more fun when you can win as a team.
Axel Kirstetter
Guidewire Software VP Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Get out of the office! Speak to customers, listen to prospects engage with non-customers. Make a point every quarter to join Sales pitches, listen in on BDR/SDR calls and read/listen to customer success interactions.
Leah Brite
Gusto Head of Product Marketing, Employers
Career Path Tip: Never underestimate the power of being data-driven and impact focused. Become fluent on the metrics that matter for your company's performance, prioritize your OKRs to make the biggest impact, and track and report results to demonstrate the value of your contributions.
Diana Smith
Hashi Senior Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: I believe product marketers, at minimum, need to be good at writing long-form content. It’s not only fine but common to ask for help tightening up messaging for short-form like headlines, which is an art in itself.
Liz Tassey (she/her)
Highspot Vice President Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Don’t shy away from holding yourself and your team to a higher bar - whether it’s quality of work, accountability to business results, going above and beyond to fill a gap, or creating a diverse and inclusive culture. Not only will you drive results you are proud of, but by virtue of product marketing’s cross functional nature, you can have an exponential effect by collectively raising the bar across the company.
Jessica Webb Kennedy
Hummingbirds Head Of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Make genuine connections. Take the time to meet people in your network and stay in touch. You never know when they may need your support and you may need theirs. Authentic networking is about building symbiotic relationships. Don't be the person who is always asking for favors and offering nothing in return.
Natalie Louie
ICONIQ Capital Product & Content Marketing
Career Path Tip: If you are early in your Product Marketing career - interview the company as much as they are interviewing you. Focus on showcasing what you bring to the table AND look for a manager or team that will develop your gaps -- then you can emerge as a full-stack PMM with Swiss Army knife skills, ready to take on any strategic GTM project!
Lauren Barraco
Inscribe VP, Marketing
Career Path Tip: Career paths don't have to be linear. Don't be afraid to try new things and take risks. Having a well-rounded understanding of the business will help you to better empathize with your stakeholders and customers. This is key to building and executing a successful go-to-market strategy.
Laura Jones
Instacart Chief Marketing Officer
Career Path Tip: Own the narrative, own the results. As a product marketer, it is critical to be right-brained and left-brained. Owning the narrative is about compelling storytelling and owning the results is about proving impact with data. This applies both to the daily work as PMM and to the task of developing your own career.
Katherine Kelly
Instructure Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Never assume the people you're working with on any project know what you know - product marketing benefits from being included in so many cross-functional conversations and plans that you often bring a uniquely diverse perspective to any group. Use your voice, share what you know, ask for the "why" behind the task, ask how it connects to another initiative. You'll help to elevate the conversation and be a valued expert in your organization.
Jasmine Jaume
Intercom Director, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: When you're starting your PMM career, try to get experience across all the different areas of product marketing. This will help you build your core PMM skills but will also help you learn which parts you most enjoy and are strongest at. Then when looking for future roles, you can look for ones that lean more towards the areas you enjoy. PMM roles vary a lot at different companies, so be sure to ask what you'll be spending your time doing!
Stacey Wang
Ironclad, Inc. Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: If you want to be an exceptional product marketer who always has a seat at the table, it's not enough to be an expert in the product, the market, and the customer; you need to take advantage of the unique cross-functional vantage point PMMs have and become the expert at making sense of the whole picture. This will allow you to exert true influence as a cross-functional linchpin: someone who can drive priorities across altitudes, teams, and disciplines.
Tamara Grominsky
Kajabi VP Product Marketing & Lifecycle
Career Path Tip: Follow your curiosity, and don't get too consumed by achieving a specific title or role. If you get too focused on one outcome, you might miss out on other exciting opportunities. Instead, ask questions, shadow others in roles you find interesting, and constantly build your skill set. The right role will come to you, and it will probably be better than you could have ever imagined.
Mandy Schafer
Mastercard Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Don't be afraid to try something out of your comfort zone, whether it's a different kind of company (bigger/smaller), a new geographical location, working with a new customer base, etc. You may stumble at first, even face failure, but you will always learn something new, and that is key. I like to think of it as "collecting" new learnings; the more I have, the stronger I become, even if it was a win or a failure.
Alex Lobert
Meta Product Marketing Lead, Facebook for Business & Commerce
Career Path Tip: Find mentors and sponsors. Mentors provide you with valuable insight into how to handle problems and situations that are new to you. Sponsors advocate for you to get new roles and promotions. I recommend making a conscious effort to find mentors and sponsors that will help you achieve your career goals.
Kavya Nath
Meta Product Marketing, Reality Labs
Career Path Tip: The most successful product marketers are ones who lead with empathy and take on the customer point of view.
Raman Kalyan
Microsoft Director of Product Marketing, Microsoft 365 Security
Career Path Tip: Product marketing should bring to the table customer insights, market research, analyst insights, competitive landscape and business model implications to ensure that what gets built will allow you to maximize the opportunities identified.
Susan "Spark" Park
Monzo Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: If you're not feeling a little afraid, are you really pushing yourself? Look for areas to push yourself and couple it with a strong manager or team that will support you to keep growing in your career.
Yannick Kpodar
Natixis Chief Marketing Officer, Dalenys & Xpollens Payment Solutions
Career Path Tip: Whether you're an individual contributor, a manager, or a director - the more you can think like an executive, the faster you will move up in your career. Learn how to think in terms of product-market fit, growth and conversion rates, customer experience, and P&L. If you understand how the business works and how you contribute to the most important KPIs, you'll be moon shots ahead from your average product marketer.
Thomas Dong
NetSpring VP of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: I daresay none of us grew up dreaming of one day becoming a product marketer, and there certainly was no clear academic path that brought us into this role. We probably gravitated here based on a unique blend of business acumen and technical competence. So embrace the diverse career paths that brought us here and continue to evolve our function while building cross-functional appreciation for product marketing (more CMOs are now coming from PMM as a result). Leverage the wisdom from past experiences in field marketing, product management, presales, consulting, or support to better empathize with customers, satisfy the needs of sales, address engineering requests, and innovate GTM with game-changing creativity.
Pallavi Vanacharla
New Relic VP, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: PMMs need to act as the CEO’s of their product. Everything is your business and everybody’s business is your business.
Brianne Shally
Nextdoor Ex-Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Here's my advice based on Dr. Seuss: "Oh, the places you'll go... You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go.
Own your career and dream BIG! Be intentional in investing in your own learning, development, and goals. This Playbook includes: setting goals and sharing them with others, scheduling quarterly career development chats with your manager, asking for feedback including sending a quarterly feedback survey to cross functional teammates, and developing a dream BIG action plan.
LaShaun Williams
Observable VP, Marketing
Career Path Tip: Listen carefully and learn to speak the language of your audience. Listening helps you understand who your audience is, and speaking their language back to them is how you meet them where they are and foster connection. As a PMM, understanding audiences and knowing how to build relationships is key to crafting the right stories at the right time for the right people — externally and internally.
Gregg Miller
PandaDoc VP of Product Marketing & Brand
Career Path Tip: Be vocal when you see the business missing an opportunity, a product that doesn't have a clear audience, a competitive dynamic that isn't taken seriously enough, or any other PMM light bulb moment. Product Marketers often have a unique breadth and depth of context across the business, product, market, and customer that makes your perspective an important part of the conversation.
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: There are a lot of priorities we have as product marketers. Spend the time connecting with customers and doing research in the market. And just as importantly, share your learnings with others internally. It will naturally help build your leadership, your market and customer expertise, which will ultimately help drive your career.
Marcus Andrews
Pendo Sr. Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Most PMMs do a good job of learning the product, learning the market, and figuring out the positioning - very few can turn it all into a simple story that's persuasive and easy to learn and share. In a world where we're constantly bombarded with information, simple, powerful stories still cut through the noise. PMMs aren't always known for this ability, but we should be.
Naman Khan
Personio Chief Marketing Officer
Career Path Tip: The Marketing Career Flywheel: Build a career plan based on self reflection of your strengths & development areas using a defined set of marketing competencies. This will help you select roles that maximize your impact & support development, which in turn will lead to more interesting opportunities. It's amazing how this flywheel can happen!
Nikhil Balaraman
Pomerium Head of Marketing
Career Path Tip: PMM's superpower is connecting customers and product, and for B2B PMMs our most valuable is our cross functional relationships. To be successful in the role, invest in building strong relationships internally, enabling channel teams (e.g., Sales, Events, Paid, Content), and articulating a compelling vision for why your product, and why now to your market.
Sarah Din
Quickbase VP of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Two things PMM’s need to learn to do really well: Communicate and orchestrate. Build clear plans, communicate them often and broadly (especially when things pivot), and make sure you bring your cross-functional team along for the journey. And when in doubt, over-communicate!
Caroline Walthall
Quizlet Director of Product and Lifecycle Marketing
Career Path Tip: Deeply understand the customer assumptions that would have to be true for your company’s business strategy to deliver the results expected. Conduct research to understand the customer gaps and opportunities related to the strategy, and share results regularly with key company leaders. This helps shape priorities and increase confidence in the plan, which is invaluable to executive stakeholders.
Rekha Srivatsan
Salesforce Vice President Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Nothing sticks in your head than a good story. It's not just for the content you create, but also for the brand you are. Always connect your experience from one role to another to help you grow. And remember opportunities don't happen, you create them.
Eleanor Horowitz
Samsara Senior Manager, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: When evaluating new opportunities, use your product marketing skills and approach your career as you would approach a great go-to-market plan. Take time to identify your target audience, define your story, highlight your unique differentiators, etc. Going through this exercise will help you better understand your own career goals, and – as a bonus – it'll help you stand out in interviews.
Suyog Deshpande
Samsara Sr. Director | Head Of Product & Partner Marketing
Career Path Tip: When we all start our careers, we search for the right answers. In fact, we are judged by our ability to find the right answers. However, as we grow, we acknowledge that we don’t and won’t know the answers to all the questions asked of us. At that point, the ability to ask the right questions (of yourself and of the team) takes priority over the ability to answer the questions.
Sharadhi (Gadagkar) Patel
ServiceNow Director, Platform and AI Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Lead with Empathy. Be it for your customers, managers, teammates, interviewers, etc... At the end of the day, we're all human and developing that human connection (especially in a remote world!) is something that if prioritized, can help distinguish great from exceptional. People want to work with and buy from humans they connect with on an emotional level - investing time to build relationships helps build that trust and sets you apart as a leader.
Robin Fontaine
Shopify Senior Product Marketing Lead
Career Path Tip: Invest in relationships! Product Marketing is such a cross functional job, so making those human connections will help you in your current role and company, and will expand your opportunities as you move into other roles and other companies.
Sara Rosso
Smartcat Senior Director, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Make sure you're encouraging a mentality of change at all times, including re-examining prior processes, meetings, or collaborations, because the product and the customer is constantly evolving. PMM is not a place to settle down and coast. You have to expect things to constantly change. As a leader, you can help folks feel like you're in it together - those hard skills will always be in demand, but you'll be shifting and applying them differently all the time.
Alex Gutow
Snowflake Senior Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Product marketing is a lot easier (and more fun) if you're actually excited about the product(s) you're working on. That excitement will come through in your work, and will make your sales enablement, customer meetings, and other presentations all the more impactful. Think about the types of products, audiences, industries, etc that excite you and seek out those opportunities that align with them as much as possible.
Roopal Shah
Snowflake Head (VP) of Global Sales Enablement
Career Path Tip: Don't be afraid to ask for what you need - whether it's resourcing, flexibility, career progression, or better coaching. People can't read your mind, so it's always best to be clear and articulate about what you need and go for it.
Ryan Goldman
Speedata Senior Vice President of Marketing (interim)
Career Path Tip: Although most product marketers know that bias is the enemy, it’s also where urgency comes from, especially when it comes to your stakeholders’ perceptions of their own needs. Since you can’t possibly point out others’ biases or tell colleagues that their needs don’t fall into your priorities list, use “maybe” instead of yes or no as a way to dig deeper into root cause, objective value, and alignment. By asking questions, you can share the responsibility for problem-solving with your stakeholders.
Seema Haji
Splunk AVP Platform and Industry Marketing
Career Path Tip: Empathy is the name of the game. When you go into a new product launch, pricing updates, win-loss calls or customer migrations, always come from a place of humility and curiosity. It will help you understand your user better and what they actually want, versus what they're saying. They are often two different things.
Sam Duboff
Spotify Director, Head of Creator Brand & Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: In a product marketing role, it's easy to get stuck on the "launch treadmill," where you don't have bandwidth for strategic work outside of constant go-to-market activity coming from product teams. Launch marketing is a critical part of a PMM's job, but just doing launches limits your impact — and the creativity and fun you can have with your role. Try to carve out a dedicated percentage of your time each quarter for marketing-led projects you think can accelerate your business, even if it means sacrificing a launch or two looking perfect.
Akshay Kerkar
Stripe Head of Product Marketing, Emerging Products
Career Path Tip: Always optimize for impact. Too often, Product Marketers tend to focus on activity as their proxy for impact. Instead, identify the key metrics that will move the needle for your business/product, build your plan to move those metrics, and communicate this impact within your org.
Priya Patel
Stripe Head of Marketing, SaaS Products (Revenue Finance Automation)
Career Path Tip: For those earlier in your PMM careers, don't be afraid to take risks and take on projects that are outside of your scope if you see an opportunity to make an impact. Especially at high growth companies, opportunity comes to those who are focused on solving business problems and exemplify flexibility.
Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann
SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing
Career Path Tip: When deciding to make a big career move, keep one thing constant. That could be the industry, company, job function, etc. For example, when I first started at Momentive (it was SurveyMonkey at the time), I changed company and role, but kept the industry (market research) the same. When I transitioned to product marketing for the first time, I did it as an internal transition at my current company. Having one constant anchor allows you to lean on gained expertise while you’re stretching into something new.
Priya Gill
SurveyMonkey Head of Global Marketing
Career Path Tip: In my career, I've found that people who really accelerate in their PMM careers at a fast pace understand the importance of PIE (performance, image, exposure) early on and that it primarily needs to be self-driven. It's that winning combination of high performance, strong personal brand and exposure to your work at the senior level that really helps set you apart from your peers. Good managers can help you get there, but they can’t do it all for you.
Julia Szatar
Tavus Head of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Embrace the ambiguity and choose to be a life-long learner. Product marketing and tech will continue to rapidly evolve – so be comfortable with your skill gaps but continually work to fill them. Don’t be afraid to go outside your organization to find the answers. Build relationships with other product marketers, meet regularly, brainstorm ideas, discuss challenges, and celebrate breakthroughs.
Christine Sotelo-Dag
ThoughtSpot Senior Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Always start every project by asking - "What is the problem we will solve with this project, why should we solve it now, and what will success look like?" Regardless of the role you are in - answering these questions ahead of jumping into a solution will ensure you have clarity on the impact you'll be driving, and how you should prioritize. The most successful people know how to take on projects with the biggest impact, and thoughtfully say no to those that don't.
Hien Phan
Timescale Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: First principles or frameworks are great starting points, but you must always tailored them specific to your targeted persona. And copywriting is a critical skill, it will help you bring the value of the product to life.
Alex Chahin
Titan VP of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Product marketers are great external storytellers. But many forget to hone their internal storytelling acumen. When this is strong, you tend to get buy-in faster, get invited into more strategic conversations, and catch the attention of exec teams. Think of it like anything else: Know your internal audience, what they care about, and the messaging that will convince them.
Jenna Crane
Triple Whale 🐳 VP of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Seek out great people — people who are excellent at what they do, and who you enjoy working with. Hire them, work for them, work alongside them, learn from them, help them out when you can, and then stay in touch with them. A strong network and a few trusted mentors is the best possible foundation for a fulfilling and successful career.
Alex Gammelgard
Trusted Health Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: The potential impact of PMM is expansive, but what capabilities are MOST needed differ at every org. Understanding what the biggest needs are (whether its sales enablement, messaging, competitive intel, or simply better VOC) and focusing your early wins there can help your teammates understand the impact PMM can bring quickly. This makes it much easier for you to gain buy-in & scale your sphere of impact within the company.
Vanessa Thompson
Twilio Vice President Marketing
Career Path Tip: Think about the unique viewpoint so that your personal product marketing brand stands out from the crowd. Some of the best product marketers I've seen have come from different parts of the business, product, support, campaigns, etc. It's not because they did a different role, it's because they bring a unique perspective. And my final pro-tip is, always market your marketing!
Dee Dee Wolverton
Udemy Product & Instructor Marketing, Director
Career Path Tip: Spend your energy where it is most deserving: aim to deeply understand consumer options, experiences, and expectations. You personally add a special, unique perspective. Own that. It is your power.
Liza Sperling
Upwork Head Of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Develop your cross-functional collaboration muscle. Together, your work will drive more value, and you'll elevate the importance of product marketing in your organization.
Priyanka Srinivasan
Verkada Vice President Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: I always say to my team that you earn your seat at the decision-making table by talking to customers and having a data-driven point-of-view. If you can come up with justification for a certain course of action, be it product messaging, pricing, or what initiatives to focus on that is based on hard data and conversations with 20 customers, I have rarely seen anyone shoot that down.
Joshua Lory
VMware Senior Director, Blockchain Go To Market
Career Path Tip: When you're lost, go back to customer feedback and use it as your compass to create value.
Hila Segal
WalkMe Vice President, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: The role of product marketing is defined very differently in every company. You’ll play a different role in a sales-led vs. product-led organization, direct vs. channel GTM focus, fast-growing startup vs. a mid-stage public company. Be proactive and intentional about the experiences you’re looking to get in each phase of your career and use this to guide you in what roles you pursue.
Meghan Keaney Anderson
Watershed VP of Marketing - Product Marketing & Communications
Career Path Tip: Product marketers are unique because their role requires them to run the spectrum from being great creative storytellers to highly analytical go-to-market strategists. Few product marketers start out equally strong at both, however. The trick is having the self-awareness to identify where you're weaker and then the humility to seek out the peers, content and experiences that can help you strengthen that muscle. So you can feel comfortable seamlessly skating from one end of that skillset to the other.
Jiong Liu
Wiz Senior Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: One of the best ways to stand out is to apply your product marketing skills in messaging and positioning to tell your own career and personal life story. Connect the dots between important life choices and milestones with a narrative that ensures your audience (interviewer, hiring manager, colleague, or even a coffee chat connection) can immediately understand your values and motivation.
Tamara Niesen
WooCommerce CMO
Career Path Tip: Lead with empathy and be customer obsessed. Spend time with your customers and customer facing teams, dig deep and commit to understanding their challenges. Put the customer at the forefront of every decision. If it doesn’t help the customer, if you can’t put yourself in the customer’s shoes, or if it puts the organization's needs above the customer’s, it’s not the right thing to do. And don't be afraid to push back when these values are at risk.
Chris Mills
Wrike Vice President Product Marketing / GTM
Career Path Tip: Get out and talk to customers (and encourage your team to) as much as possible. Direct customer knowledge is like currency for product marketers. Having direct interactions with customers as often as possible gives you insight and empathy of what it's like to walk in their shoes and helps you build credibility with your key stakeholders including product, sales and the customer team. Go on sales calls, attend QBR's, chat with customers at conferences, interview customers for case studies, quotes and buyer/user research. It's no substitute for live interactions, but listen to calls/meeting from conversation intelligence recordings at 1.5X speed.
Diego Lomanto
Writer Chief Marketing Officer
Career Path Tip: If your interest is in startups, look for two important selection criteria. 1. find a substantial market, and 2. work for the best company in it.
A bad company in a hot market or a great company in a weak market are recipes for years wasted. It sounds obvious but it's easy to fool ourselves because founders are good at selling their companies. However, if you aren't objective in your selection you will find yourself pushing a rock up a hill. You only get a few at-bats in your prime, don't waste them on hopeless situations.
How do you determine a "hot market"? My mental model for this is to look 5 years in the future. What seems inevitable? How do you tell it's a great company? It's hard to know for certain when it's early, but look for it being founded by people of integrity and substance, validated by high quality investors and real momentum in revenue.
Lisa Kant
Zendesk SVP Product, Solutions and Customer Marketing
Career Path Tip: Careers can't just always go up. The goal shouldn't be about getting to the highest title. It should be about getting to a place where you can be incredibly successful both professionally and personally, where you can really get a lot of value and joy out of what you do. That may not always be at the place with the biggest title for the biggest salary- it's going be at a place where you can really add value and have fun.
Daniel J. Murphy
Marketing Strategy Consultant
Career Path Tip: Product marketing always get pulled in so many directions, into so many projects and is supposed to influence numerous metrics. Be very picky about what you say "yes" to. You have to work on multiple fronts, but pick the ones that have the highest leverage for the business. Don't get trapped being a resource for everyone, because you'll end up being less valuable.
Div Manickam
Mentor : Workplace Wellbeing | Authentic Leadership | Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: As product marketers, we love to wear multiple hats/roles. I empower my mindful team to discover the one thing that you love in product marketing and craft and refine your signature recipe to be your best skill. For me, it was positioning and messaging as I love storytelling and connecting the human element to our product/solution.
Create your experience portfolio and be your true authentic self always! The world is ready for your magic!
Mike Berger
Ex-VP, Product Marketing @ ClickUp, SurveyMonkey, Gainsight, Marketo
Career Path Tip: When you are early on in your career, forget about the role, title, pay, etc. Instead, jump into any seat on a rocketship. When you’re on a rocketship, if you perform well, there will be plenty of opportunities for growth as the company grows, and the experience you gain will be highly valued by other companies hoping to achieve similar growth. I know it can be hard to see this when you are early on in your career, but in hindsight it will be clear as day.