The Top 100 Product Marketing Mentors To Learn From And Work For - 2023
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:
Alex McDonnell
Airtable Director, Compete & Partner Marketing
Career Path Tip: As a PMM, you usually are not the person closing the sales, building the landing page, or owning the roadmap. But you might be underestimating the impact you’re having by connecting and enabling all those people. They’re moving faster and more confidently because of you.
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: The secret to thriving as a product marketer, I've found, is to maintain a relentless curiosity. To always be peering around the corner, seeking out new perspectives, and never becoming complacent. This means staying attuned to your audience, understanding the forces that shape their behavior and desires, and being able to craft compelling stories that resonate with them. To anyone aspiring to make their mark in product marketing, I would offer this tip: Cultivate this same spirit of curiosity and experimentation. Embrace the uncertainty that comes with trying new things. And, above all, be passionate about what you do. Only then will you be able to achieve true greatness in this field and leave an indelible impact on the industry.
Harsha Kalapala
AlertMedia Vice President Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: The most important skill set I look for in a product marketing professional is their ability to influence without authority. Even if you are a people leader, product marketers often have to convince people across functions to collaborate and deliver on high-impact projects under tight deadlines. Develop your ability to build strong relationships and get people excited about working toward a common goal. Demonstrating strength in this area with clear stories and outcomes to back it up is invaluable in today's tech environment.
Amey Kanade
Amazon Product Marketing at Fire TV (Smart TVs)
Career Path Tip: The Product Marketing role is perhaps the most ambiguous role within an organization. In my experience, I have seen the definition of a PMM role vary significantly across orgs/companies. But then I think you can use this ambiguity to your own benefit. Proactively try to define your own role, take risks, experiment, put yourself in uncomfortable situations. If you have a technical background, spend more time with your creative team. If you are a creative person, go attend sprint meetings with your engineers. That is the beauty of Product Marketing, it is both an inward and outward facing role. This will make you understand your business better than anybody else in the organization and will help you in the long run
Andrew Stinger
Amazon Sr. PMM, Outbound Communications
Career Path Tip: The difference between tactics and strategy, is documenting your alignment and sequencing. The latter always wins.
Kevin Garcia
Anthropic Product Marketing Leader
Career Path Tip: Spend time meeting customers. Learning about their context, skills, interests will make you a better storyteller. It will also help you connect dots that other marketers—who are only looking inward or at competitors—will miss. Customer insight leads to customer intuition which leads to better marketing every time.
Andrew McCotter-Bicknell
Apollo.io Head of Competitive Intel
Career Path Tip: Say yes to everything. This goes against a lot of guru advice that you might see online. But when you're building your career, you want to expose yourself to as many opportunities as possible to figure out what you like and don't like. Once you've got a better sense for this, quadruple down and then you can start saying no a bit more often
Christy Roach
AssemblyAI VP of Marketing
Career Path Tip: PMMs often get a little too hung up on ownership and spend a lot of time trying to carve out exactly what they own. Orient yourself more towards partnership and ask Who should I be working with to make this work great? rather than How do I convince everyone that PMM should own this?. You'll create better working relationships and orient more towards customer outcomes rather than internal politics.
Daniel Kuperman
Atlassian Head of Core Product Marketing & GTM, ITSM Solutions
Career Path Tip: Create and cultivate relationships across the business. As a product marketer, your success depends on the work from multiple teams, be it product, sales, demand generation, public relations, and more. As you establish your reputation in your company, make sure to leverage your extended team to help you uncover blind spots, get career advice, and build stronger relationships.
Angus Maclaurin
BILL Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: One of the biggest challenges for PMM is often to get a seat at the table early. How can you influence the PRD and product strategy? Find multiple ways to be the voice of the market, from competitive analysis, to regular conversations with Customer Support and Sales. It takes time to foster these relationships, but PMM is at its best when closely tied to product strategy.
Anna Wiggins
Bluevine VP Corporate and Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Invest in understanding how your business works and which levers drive revenue. This will empower you to be an active contributor to strategic decisions, make you more impactful in getting engineering or budget resources, and help you prioritize what's important while still delivering on the best customer experience.
Indy Sen
Canva Ecosystem Marketing Leader
Career Path Tip: We're at a crucible moment in tech where most companies if not all will need to convince people that they're worth their valuations, and that any gains of the past are anchored in true benefits to the customer and sustainable advantage and impact in their respective industries. Look to revamped narratives, ruthless product prioritization and focused GTM execution... all of which spell incredible opportunities for the right product marketers. I've seen the dot.com bust and the Great Recession and my takeaway is that the best companies are borne out of times like these. If you find yourself back in the market, look for companies that are coming out swinging with the right product(s) at the right time with the right leaders at the helm (and investors if applicable). Nothing will accelerate your career more than betting on a company that sees the coming years as ripe with opportunity.
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.
Manav Tandon
Cisco Head of Product Marketing, Collaboration SaaS
Career Path Tip: Product Marketing is a uniquely cross-functional role that bridges product, marketing, and sales teams. To be effective in your role, you should build relationships with stakeholders in all three departments, understand what their priorities are, and then align your OKRs to theirs to contribute meaningful value to your organization.
April Rassa
Clari VP, Solutions Marketing
Career Path Tip: Be a contrarian: If you want to stand out in your career, don't be afraid to buck the system and chart your own course. Be willing to challenge authority, question assumptions, and forge your own path. Take risks, even if they may be met with resistance. It's not always easy to be a contrarian, but it can be a powerful way to differentiate yourself and make your mark in your field.
Ryane Bohm
Clari Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Write content, tell stories, and make friends. PMM is all about the art of storytelling and the ability to use that content to influence behaviors. Take every opportunity to refine that skillset, no matter your tenure, and never be shy about sharing your knowledge.
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.
Christine Sotelo-Dag
Close Head 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.
Daniel Kish
Conveyor VP Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Train your brain on curiosity. A beginner's mind might be the single best asset you have to continuously 1) reinvent your job and grow 2) reinvent yourself and stay engaged.
Lauren Craigie
Cortex Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Product marketing is often referred to as the group that “moves the product off the shelf.” That’s true, but isn’t where the work begins. Start by understanding what your current and future shopper needs, then place the order with the product team. You should be a partner in building as much as you are in shipping.
Melinda Chung
Credit Karma Senior Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Maximize the game you're in. Even if you're in a situation you would prefer not to be -- such as being given a project out of your interest area or choosing to stay at a job for financial reasons rather than passion -- you can always learn and grow in any situation. So how do you maximize what you can get and learn out of your current situation, even if it's not the game you wanted? You'll surprise yourself by what you learn and do.
Jesse Lopez
Dandy Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Be the dot connector across Marketing, Product, and GTM teams by ensuring your internal stakeholders and external audiences understand what you offer, how your product works, and most importantly, why your customers should choose your solution over others. Ensure to instill a growth mindset across your company by testing new marketing approaches and sharing learnings proactively.
Alissa Lydon
Dovetail Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Don't shy away from projects that scare you. Because this role can take so many forms, it's easy to gravitate toward the things you enjoy and know that you're good at. Great product marketers take advantage of their unique position within the organization to learn and try new things. Raise your hand for that pricing and packaging exercise, dive into that user research initiative, and don't be afraid to collaborate with a new team. It's a great way to increase your internal visibility, and you'll be a better marketer in the long run.
Amanda Groves
Enable VP of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Trade the career treadmill for the open trail. Lean into experiences over titles and diversified opportunities over linear learning. Don’t be afraid to try new things, fail fast, and learn faster. It may feel uncomfortable at first but that’s what growth is all about.
Matt Hodges
Equals Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Companies with best products AND brands are the ones that will be successful in the long-term, because they are defensible. Copy-cats won't survive because they typically cannot innovate. Focus on your customer, not them.
Aneri Shah
Ethos Head of Marketing, B2B
Career Path Tip: Build a vision of where you want to be 5-10 years now and a roadmap of how to get there. See what people in aspirational roles did earlier in their careers, and carve out time to learn new skills & expand your abilities. Proactively identifying where you want to go helps you understand what you need to do in the short and medium term to get there.
Jameelah Calhoun
Eventbrite VP, Global Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Don’t forget the importance of a well-thought out internal Go-to-market plan. Change management can be one of the hardest parts of product launches and it often gets underinvested in. However, this process is not only critical to ensuring proper support for your product, but it is also a fantastic way to get your name out there across your company.
Priya Kotak
Figma Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Storytelling is just as important internally as it is externally. In the same way that a great PMM uses their knowledge of the product and audience to craft a compelling narrative, they also need to use their knowledge of the business to showcase their impact. Internal storytelling is the key to influence and setting your strategy in motion.
Catlyn Origitano
Fivetran VP Product & Portfolio Marketing
Career Path Tip: If you don't have the PMM experience per se, try to do activities associated with PMM work - like creating sales enablement, doing customer interviews, creating sales materials. At a smaller company, many marketing folks have to do it all - so you can start at a place like that and lean into projects that are more PMM-y.
Sahil Sethi
Freshworks Vice President - Global Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: You can learn anything!! Growth in PMM comes from leaning into new challenges. Over the course of your PMM career, you will work on messaging and storytelling, sales enablement, product launches, customer insights, roadmap influence, campaigns and what not. But no PMM starts out being great at all of these disciplines. If you ever feel daunted by the road ahead, just remind yourself - you can learn anything!! A growth mindset to learning new skills will help you tremendously in your PMM journey
Dave Steer
GitLab Vice President of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Listening is a product marketer's superpower. By investing time in active listening - to customers, to teammates, to the market - you will grow your capacity for customer empathy, your leadership skills, and your track record in effectively taking products to market.
Sophia (Fox) Le
Glassdoor Director, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Dedicate time to reflect on what you really want out of your career, then unapologetically go for it! Things happen, life changes, and your definition of career success and happiness can evolve, too!
Sherry Wu
Gong Senior Director, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: When faced with a career decision, run TOWARD opportunities rather than running away from frustration. Too often, I see PMMs hop from team to team without evolving their skills. When faced with a career choice, ask yourself, “What new experience could I learn here? If I fast forward 1 year, what can I say I’ve accomplished?”
Madeline Ng
Google Global Head of Marketing, Google Maps Platform
Career Path Tip: A career is a portfolio of experiences, not a single path. With each role you get a chance to gather new skills, and each new skill gives you more options for your next opportunity. Learning something new will never backfire on you!
Vishal Naik
Google Product Marketing Lead
Career Path Tip: Think about the health of your company. If you can balance the internal point of view that you see every day with a perspective on how a specific strategy will solve the underlying goals that your company is trying to solve, while hitting the metrics your org cares about, then you can introduce interesting new strategies to your org and really see your own impact. That and don't let the impostor syndrome slow you down, look for what you can learn from everyone around you, but believe in yourself and your vantage point.
Natala Menezes
Grammarly Global Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Show up, be awesome. It's the best path to bringing relevance and delivering on immediate business needs and building credibility.
Christina Dam
Gusto Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: I encourage PMMs to think about their careers through the lens of skills learned or experiences accumulated, as opposed to climbing a ladder. Often the next big stage of personal growth may not be a promotion, but may in fact be shifting to a different product at a different stage in product maturity, or a similar role in a very different industry. Ask yourself what other skills or experiences do I want to have? and let that guide you.
Leah Brite
Gusto Head of Product Marketing, Employers
Career Path Tip: Invest in relationships. Harness your PMM empathy skills to understand your cross-functional partners and their goals, create alignment, and launch impactful work on behalf of the customers you serve.
Nate Franklin
Hex Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: I believe that a major difference between successful PMMs and those who struggle is their relationship with the Sales org. Here are some ideas that can help you build trust with sales: 1) Help win a deal. 2) Be responsive and available. 3) Understand a challenge sales is facing and ship a solution. 4) Become an expert. 5) Stand your ground.
Valerie Angelkos
Howl VP of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: As you think about your next role, think, define, and write out your career vision. Where do you want to be in the “peak” moment of your career and what do you want to be doing? Once you define this, draw a few different paths you can take to get there. This exercise can help you make your next move in the context of this higher-level goal, helping you optimize for different things, such as learning a new skill, company size, specialty in a function within Marketing, etc., and give you more structure in how you approach your career moves.
Adrienne Joselow
HubSpot Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Stay curious - always ask questions, get to know the details, and avoid assumptions. Curiosity is the catalyst for remarkable product marketing - and as a byproduct, career growth.
Nisha Goklaney
HubSpot Senior Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Establish a strong relationship with your peers in sales and product (in fact make them your best friends) and have an ongoing habit of meeting w/customers. This will help you look through the lens of your most important stakeholders and approach every project with a view of 'what's in it for them' (WIIFM). This will also enable you to focus on the most important (read: FEW initiatives) that drive the maximum business impact. Finally, always measure impact in terms of hard metrics (ARR lift, Close rate lift, % of Product adoption etc.)
Natalie Louie
ICONIQ Capital Product & Content Marketing
Career Path Tip: AI gifted every PMM their own writing and content creator assistant. Note everyone is using the same assistants and it uses historical data – but it is one more tool in your marketing toolbox, so test it to see if you can get efficient, get ideas, or find a unique benefit for you. Just don’t rely on it as your final product!
Patty Medberry
Infor Senior Director, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Successful product marketing, even outside of launches, requires close collaboration with the product management team. I encourage the PM team to consider product marketing as part of their team. Attending their staff meetings, business/planning meetings, and regular sync-ups are a must to understand and execute on the business.
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.
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.
Jason Oakley
Klue Senior Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: It’s easy for PMMs to get pulled in a million different directions, reacting to projects as they come. Aim to be more proactive by starting each quarter with a clear understanding of business and department objectives. Use that as your North Star for deciding which projects you tackle and which to push back on. It makes the difference between ending each quarter with a pile of completed ‘work’ vs feeling like you are helping drive the business forward.
Julian Clarke
Lattice Director, Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Find yourself career role models and anti-role models – people you can observe and learn from without needing to know them personally – and figure out what it took for them to get where they are. Replicate the best qualities and actions of your role models, and invert or avoid those of your anti-role models. You can learn amazing things about what to do and what not to do on the path to where you want to take your career.
Meredith Davis Shields
LendingClub VP, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Raise your hand to collaborate / have your team collaborate on special assignments. Ask questions and really set aside time to deepen your relationships with a couple of folks within the Strat team. It will be well worth it.
Claire Maynard
Magical Head Of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Focus on product-led growth first. Make your product as intuitive and frictionless as possible, encourage viral sharing mechanisms, and product hooks that keep users returning. Add marketing-led or sales-led motions to supplement or accelerate your growth as you mature.
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.
Quinn Hubbard
Matterport Head of Global Brand & Product Marketing, Director
Career Path Tip: Take the time to understand how you work best and how those around you work best. This shared understanding unlocks a positive environment, stronger marketing work and greater efficiency.
Alex Lobert
Meta Product Marketing Lead, Facebook for Business & Commerce
Career Path Tip: Get good at creating plans to solve increasingly larger, more ambiguous goals. The people I find are most successful are able to take really big questions like How will I grow this business? and break them down into a plan that is actionable and inspiring. Doing this means creating a clear target, figuring out what is most important to achieve it, assessing what you do and don't know, figuring out the skills and people required to get there, and more. It's hard, but proactively creating paths from just a goal vs. reactively responding to tasks as they come will serve you well.
Chad Kimner
Meta Product Marketing Director, AR/VR
Career Path Tip: Even if your heart is set on a PMM leadership role, take assignments in adjacent functions as you grow. The best PMMs are often proud generalists or T-shaped, boasting a few areas of deep expertise and the ability to understand the motion of the entire business. Plus, developing empathy for everyone you'll collaborate with from Finance to Data to Marcom will serve you when it's time to lead them.
Susan "Spark" Park
Monzo Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Look for a strong manager that will enable you to grow in your career. They are just as important as vetting the company or role.
Sina Falaki
Motive Head of Global Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: If you can understand customers, clearly communicate your “why” and identify market opportunities, then you will drive growth and ultimately revenue. Move the needle with brutal prioritization.
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.
John Hurley
Notion Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: PMM is hard (and awesome) because we are a hub, not a spoke that often controls the final outputs. We’re not growth marketers, or demand gen manager, or brand marketers. However we do influence, inform, manifest, and/or articulate growth strategies and campaigns.
Harish Peri
Okta SVP Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Always strive to understand how value is created in your company and get involved in that process. It could be helping create a better sales motion, tighter messaging, more technical content for a discerning buyer, etc. The closer you are to value, the faster you can move up in your company - no matter the size.
Victoria Chernova
OpenAI Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: The most successful and respected PMMs I've worked with do three things really well: They 1) Deeply understand their market, customer, and product to lead with data and insights in everything they do; 2) Strive to be the closest to their customer and buyer, and advocate for their voice internally; and 3) Unify cross-functional teams around shared goals, always with the customer in mind.
Alex Wagner Lavian
Origin VP of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Adoption can not be built as an afterthought, build for it from day one. Start with the customer – build product around their values and marketing strategies that meet them where they are in their journey.
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Write content, tell stories, and make friends. PMM is all about the art of storytelling and the ability to use that content to influence behaviors. Take every opportunity to refine that skillset, no matter your tenure, and never be shy about sharing your knowledge.
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
Justine Davis
Postman Head of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Stay curious, and say yes. New projects pop up, maternity / paternity leaves happen, people take different roles, and in order to grow, it is important to jump on those opportunities that widen your skills. A great PMM is a storyteller, a buyer expert, a market strategist, has an amazing ability to build rapport across sales, product, eng, etc., and is results driven. Hone in on the data, and the customer, and you have struck product marketing gold.
Sarah Din
Quickbase VP of Product 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.
Aurelia Solomon
Salesforce Senior Director, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Always ask yourself, and others, why? Why are we doing this? What problem does it solve for the customer? What value does it create? Why is this initiative a priority over initiatives b,c, and d? Challenging your own (and others') thinking and decisions helps ensure you remain focused on the right priorities/work to be done for your customers and your business.
Desiree Motamedi
Salesforce CMO - Next Gen Platform
Career Path Tip: Be customer-obsessed – become a detective and find out every detail about your target audience. What makes them happy, what they struggle with, what delights them – learn everything about their day to day. This will make you the best marketer out there.
Jodi Innerfield
Salesforce Senior Director, Growth Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Your ability to position and message yourself and your own experiences will help you navigate your product marketing career path. Be able to clearly and succinctly tell the story of the problems you've solved in your roles, what you've learned, and why you're uniquely positioned to help the next team or company you're looking to join. How you tell your own story is as important as how you tell your product's story.
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.
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.
Molly Friederich
Sanity.io Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Take note of moments or phases of your career where you feel particularly leaned in, fulfilled, and are having fun. Think about the projects you're shipping, who you're partnering with, and what you're learning. When you find yourself in a rut or burned out, look back to the list to see how to steer yourself back towards the conditions in which you thrive.
Danny Sack
SAP Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Product Marketing is not done solely at a desk. It's important to get out and go to conferences, attend customer meetings, or even go to where your product is used. The best way to think outside-in, is to get outside!
Jack Wei
Sendbird Head of Marketing
Career Path Tip: People over profit. The top reason someone loves or leaves a job? Their manager. It’s also unsurprisingly a major factor in career progression. Stick with people who have your back, and over time you’ll go further vs. prioritizing for pay, product/company popularity, or market size.
Sonia Moaiery
Skilljar Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Master the art of simplifying- whether its distilling customer research into insights or boiling positioning down to a key message. People, and your customers, will always remember 1-2 key takeaways and forget most of the finer details so try to get really clear about the most important idea someone should walk away with. My top tips for learning simplifying are asking myself “how would I explain this to my mom?” and taking a step away from a first draft of anything and coming back a day later to simplify further.
Vidya Drego
SmithRx VP of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Don't be afraid to lean into your superpower: find the aspect of product marketing that you're really good at and use it as your differentiator. Be curious and learn the other aspects but never hesitate to apply your superpower lens.
Christina Lhi
Square Head Of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Focus on the work that only you can do - whatever your super strength is as a product marketer, don’t lose focus on these things. Oftentimes, PMMs can get pulled in many directions trying to fix problems to bring products to market. And they are super busy doing so! But this can take away from the core job of the PMM. For example, who owns segmentation? Who owns positioning and messaging? Who can help prioritize what features or product are differentiated but has a market? If as a PMM you aren’t focused in areas like these, then you’re likely focusing on checking boxes around execution but not on the critical things that make for successful product growth.
Margueritte Harlow
Square Head of Product Marketing, Square Banking
Career Path Tip: Stay curious. Stay particularly curious about your customers. Ask why, and then ask why again. Spend time with your customers, ask questions, and authentically listen to their answers to deepen your understanding of customers and how to best serve them. Representing the customer's voice within your organization will position you well to influence strategy by keeping everyone grounded in customer needs.
Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann
SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing
Career Path Tip: The grass isn’t always greener. Some people have the instinct to jump ship every time there is a bump in the road. But one thing I’ve learned in my career is that change is inevitable. It’s how companies grow and adapt and, ultimately, thrive. No company is immune to reorgs and layoffs. If you believe in your product and your leadership, your relationship with your manager and team is solid, and you enjoy the work you do, ride it out. You will likely emerge with more career opportunities internally: fresh projects, people management opportunities, and expanded scope. Your career will grow as the company grows.
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.
Monty Wolper
The New York Times Executive Director, Head of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: A fulfilling career doesn't have to be linear. Quite the opposite! Take it from someone who's held positions across marketing, customer insights, business strategy, and product: you'll be much better at building empathy with your cross-functional partners if you've walked in their shoes and understand their motivations — it's not so different than being your own customer.
Kristen Brophy
ThredUP SVP, Marketing
Career Path Tip: Once you've established and socialized your goals, check back in with your organization (frequently!) when you have results and achievements to share. These results should show how your team delievered against the objectives you laid out in your intial plan and how your team has positively and measurably impacted the business.
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: The shortest path up the career ladder is not necessarily the best, especially if you are aiming to go beyond product marketing at some point later in your career. Instead of going straight up, spend some time early in your career getting experience with different company stages, industries, sales motions, audiences, etc. — you will build a strong foundation of playbooks and learnings that will make you a much stronger leader later on.
David Esber
Twilio Senior Director, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: We're expected to focus energy on fundamentals like personas, differentiated positioning, and executing for impact (for good reason), but rarely save space for creativity. Carve out time to push boundaries and balance the analytical portions of our day-to-day jobs. Creativity keeps work interesting and provides an energy boost when we need it most.
Lindsey Weinig
Twilio Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: As Product Marketers who connect and interact across many teams and perspectives, it is valuable to build a network of trusted mentors. Identify peers and leaders you respect and admire and then nurture trusting relationships. Tap into your network for feedback and insights on the challenges and opportunities you face, and gain perspective from their experiences.
Jon Rooney
Unity Vice President Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Get super crisp and clear in defining and socializing a kind of API (as in Application Programming Interface, or standardized, defined gives and gets for all PMM-related activities and artifacts) with the organization; the rest of marketing, sales, product, customer success - every person and team that you touch in the course of work. Clarify what you need from them, when and how and make it exceedingly clear what you're going to deliver, by when and how. This works either at a personal level if you're early in your career or for all of PMM as a leader. If you want to be a strategic partner rather than a short-order cook, set clear expectations and proceed to meet, then exceed, those expectations in such a way that you and the PMM function becomes reliable, trusted, admired and, eventually, a strategic hub for the company.
Pranav Deshpande
Vanta Senior Product Marketing Manager
Career Path Tip: To make an impact as a PMM in a startup or high-growth company, you need a thorough understanding of the business. Talk to customers, listen to sales calls, follow sales pipeline metrics closely, use your competitors products — the more hands-on you get with the business, the more compelling and relevant your PMM work will be
Sarah Scharf
Vanta VP of Product and Corporate Marketing
Career Path Tip: Becoming a well-rounded PMM is good, but knowing your 1-2 superpowers - and finding opportunities that uniquely benefit from those skillsets - is the best way to set yourself apart.
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.
Arianna Schatzki-Mcclain
Virta Health Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Everyone knows that messaging and positioning matters. Remember that this applies to internal stakeholders too. Utilize your PMM skills to focus the message on what your audience cares about, communicate value, and be concise. This will serve you well in any role, especially PMM where stakeholder management is critical.
Hila Segal
WalkMe Senior Vice President, Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Master cross-functional relationships. Know how to work well with product and align on roadmap priorities, market differentiation, and release cycles. Partner with sales regularly to help them win. Collaborate with customer success on adoption, renewals, and x-sell motions. Probably one of the most important skills of product marketers that will help you in many situations throughout your PMM career and beyond.
Josh Bean
webAI Head of Marketing
Career Path Tip: Build a strong network: Networking with other product marketers, industry experts and thought leaders can open up new opportunities and provide valuable insights and advice. Attend industry events, participate in online forums and groups, and build relationships with people in your field.
Tiffany Tooley
Workday Vice President Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: I've done a lot of interviews and hiring over the years and I'm constantly impressed by how smart and driven Product Marketers are! It's one of the things that makes interviewing so much fun - you get an opportunity to talk to and learn from the best of the best. I think there are a few things that really stand out for me, and they are: Curiosity, Customer-First ,Creativity, Resourcefulness, Impact-Focused.
Jennifer Kay Corridon
Yelp Product Marketing Expert & Mentor
Career Path Tip: Be an ardent and consistent champion for your customers- take an expansive view and get to know them genuinely and deeply, stay connected to them to understand how their needs, habits, and perceptions change over time- not just when you need research. Ask questions, be willing to navigate off script and through organic dialogue as often the biggest insights emerge in these more natural or unexpected turns in conversations. In terms of working on or with cross functional stakeholders and teams, no matter how high pressure the situation, go back to playground principles- always treat others how you want to be treated and don't throw sand in the sandbox.
Liz Gonzalez
Zendesk Director of Product Marketing - Global Enterprise (previously NYSE: ZEN)
Career Path Tip: Never underestimate the power of building relationships in addition to building up your skillset. Whip savvy and knowing all-the-right things is great, but without being able to bring folks along the journey with you and get buy-in-- you really can't move the business forward. Your internal partners need to be onboard. Rally, drive change!
Polomi Batra
Zendesk Director of Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Get in the mindset of constantly iterating on your work - messaging, positioning, enablement, GTM plans as examples aren't one and done. Infuse new learnings (from customers, sales and the market) regularly back into your foundational product marketing strategy to strengthen product-market fit.
Jam Khan
ZoomInfo SVP Product Marketing
Career Path Tip: Stay agile, get disciplined about the key results you feel support the objective, and have your team share their progress on those. Be sure to assign ownership to those objectives.
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.
Mike Berger
Ex-VP, Product Marketing @ ClickUp, SurveyMonkey, Gainsight, Marketo
Career Path Tip: I have a simple tip for product marketers at any level. That is, know thy buyer. Understand them as people and the reasons behind the decisions they make. This goes beyond surface-level business benefits. At their core are more powerful forces that often guide their behaviors. Gaining this type of understanding of the customer, and then connecting the dots in terms of why they purchased, and how they use your product, is something no one can take away from you. It’s a highly valued asset that will help you add value in many areas, and in the process, gain credibility and stature within your organization.