The Top 100 Product Marketing Mentors To Learn From And Work For - 2025
Overview
The knowledge we need to excel at our jobs is often locked in the minds of peers. At Sharebird, our mission is to make this knowledge accessible to everyone. Imagine succeeding with top mentors by your side.
The Product Marketing Mentor List showcases the top 100 product marketing mentors to learn from and work for to develop your career. Every one of these practitioners has contributed content that Sharebird users trust and value for their professional development.
Methodology
Sharebird's algorithm ranks product marketing contributors based on how helpful our users perceive their 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 support@sharebird.com.
About Sharebird
Sharebird is where the top product marketing leaders share their expertise. Discover actionable insights and advice to tackle your toughest work challenges and unlock your full career potential.
In Alphabetical Order by Company:
Career Path Tip: Product Marketing is like an octopus, with 8 (or more!) legs reaching out across the organization. The most important thing you can do to grow within your organization is build relationships cross-functionally. Whether you start with a monthly coffee or a weekly check in, building relationships will help you grow both professionally but also personally!
Career Path Tip: Early in your career, focus on (a) building a reputation for delivering high-quality outcomes quickly, (b) cultivating authentic relationships by supporting others and earning trust, and (c) embracing challenges with a growth mindset by seeking feedback and learning from leaders. This will set a foundation for long-term success.
Career Path Tip: I always prioritise three things when I'm looking at new career opportunities and after compromising on a few over the years I've discovered that these are non negotiable keys to personal and professional happiness for me. Very much in order, they are:
1) People..it always starts (and ends) with the people: Are they great people to be around? Will you learn from them? Do you respect them?
2) The industry and/or the product opportunity: Does the product or solution excite you? Is it innovative? Is it groundbreaking within the industry etc..If you aren't excited about the product or the industry at the best of times, think of the disinterest when the going gets tough!
3) And last (but not least) the actual role: Is it a step forward? Is it a net new and challenging role or just filling the last person's shoes? Does it genuinely excite you?
If you don't get tingles by each and every one of the above..I would wait until an opportunity comes along that does!
Career Path Tip: Before you start working on a GTM strategy or a tactic or an idea, stop and ask "What's the goal?" If you can answer the question simply and clearly proceed. If you can't answer that question or if you get a different answer from all the leadership involved, insist on getting this question answered before you start work. You will save yourself so much time and busy work as a result!
Career Path Tip: This is the age of the full stack product marketer. Get hands-on experience in all aspects of PMM so you can be best positioned for any job or pivot your company makes. And don’t forget to pay it forward by teaching and helping others.
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
Career Path Tip: Like success, career paths are not always linear. Embrace change and new opportunities along the way. Prioritize what you’re learning and who you’re learning from over lofty job titles or compensation packages. While the latter are not to be ignored, surrounding yourself with strong mentors opens more doors in the long run.
Career Path Tip: Careers don’t have to be ladders—they can be jungle gyms. Sometimes you move up, sometimes sideways, sometimes you go deep before climbing higher. Embrace the zigzags—they often lead to the best destinations and make you a stronger, more adaptable leader.
Career Path Tip: Remember: product marketers market products, but sell ideas. Don't forget to use your positioning and messaging superpowers to traverse the wide range of pains, lingo, and KPIs to help each stakeholder understand your vision and buy into your plans.
Career Path Tip: Being a great storyteller goes beyond writing compelling copy. It’s about designing end-to-end customer journeys and building effective distribution channels that deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. Focus on crafting a connected narrative that resonates across touchpoints—whether it’s through email, social media, in-product messaging, or sales enablement materials—to maximize impact and engagement as well as influence your KPIs.
Career Path Tip: Work with people who energize you. My most impactful career moments and successes involved teammates who inspired me and made work fun. As you explore new career moves, if you’re not energized by the people who interview you, keep looking. The right team changes everything.
Career Path Tip: Always be learning from customers. Don't just focus on learning their role or how they use your product. Get to know them, how they learn, and how they think. You'll be surprised at the kind of marketing you can do when you know—and care—about your audience.
Career Path Tip: Build relationships — with customers and cross-functional partners. Your superpower comes from deeply understating customer and business needs, and connecting the dots to deliver impactful stories and solutions.
Career Path Tip: Product marketing is not something anyone learns in school. Strong mentors are the only sustainable way to build and maintain your product marketing skill set. Invest early and often in relationships that make you a better PMM. And don't forget to pay it forward!
Career Path Tip: There is very rarely a project that will fall on your plate and feel like A + B + C = success! Learn to be comfortable operating in ambiguity - not only is it the norm, but it will lead to more enriching and valuable career experiences!
Career Path Tip: Always continue to hone your craft. The art of storytelling as a product marketer is a continuous journey that you never graduate from. Be curious, experimental, and don't forget to put yourself in the shoes of the customer.
Career Path Tip: Stay curious about your audience. Strategies and tools change all the time in marketing, but the ability to fall in love with your audience and their problems is a foundational skill for your entire career.
Career Path Tip: If you put the customer's perspective first, you'll never fail as a product marketer. Use customer empathy to shape your strategy, messaging, vision & even to lead your teams -- if you do that, the rest will follow.
Career Path Tip: As product marketers, we rarely work in isolation. Our projects involve numerous cross-functional team members and colleagues whose contributions are essential for launching new products, conducting enablement sessions, creating outstanding content, and performing the daily product marketing tasks that we excel at.
One of the most impactful actions you can take in your career is to acknowledge and thank those amazing people you collaborate with. Just a few minutes each week spent reaching out to express your gratitude can foster stronger collaboration and ensure that your colleagues remember and appreciate you throughout their careers.
Career Path Tip: Be comfortable with being uncomfortable! Growth comes from taking on new challenges–ones that stretch you beyond your comfort zone; they force you to learn new things, meet new people, try new approaches, and sell others on new ideas. You won't always get it right, but that's perfectly ok. Each growth experience compounds, rapidly building up your skills and accelerating your career trajectory.
Career Path Tip: As important as it is to stay curious and learn about your customer, product, and competitors, don’t forget to learn about yourself. What motivates you? What are your unique strengths, weaknesses? Reflecting on these will help you find the roles, teams, and projects that will be the most fulfilling for you.
Career Path Tip: What makes the best PMMs is wisdom, having the ability to harness past experiences, customer needs, and sales requests, understand the market and the technical components of a product - and use all of that to make decisions, craft stories and bring something new to life.
Career Path Tip: Ultimately, your career growth is in your own hands. Of course it helps when you have a great manager, but the ball is really in your court, so take on the responsibility to own your brand. Find the opportunities where you can help your team. Be the person your stakeholders can rely on. Think about how your work and your product map into the business’s key priorities. Focus your competitive energy on being better than you were yesterday. And if you feel like you're hitting a wall in your career, bet on yourself and do something that others may shy away from / something that scares you.
Career Path Tip: I believe all product marketers today would strongly benefit from having a growth mindset and skillset -- but whether or not that's the entire charter of their role depends on the core goals of their specific product area and your business priorities.
Career Path Tip: In product-marketing career development circles, we talk a lot about the basics of helping develop products and bring them to market. However, we don't talk enough about the value of resilience in your journey. Learning to let things "roll off your back," and not slow you down, is something we start learning as early as childhood. Yet, resilience takes a lifetime to master. And as a professional in the middle of product, marketing, sales, and customer success, you'll need to ensure you're an expert in "growth mindset" principles if you want to excel.
Career Path Tip: At the risk of being yet another person beating the AI drum, one thing that’s become very clear to me over the past year is that the product marketing teams that leverage AI will outpace the ones that don’t. If your company has licenses to tools like ChatGPT or Glean, take this as your license to experiment. And if it doesn’t, take those $20 you spend on Netflix every month and subscribe to a pro version of any one of these tools. They won’t replace you or your craft, but they will make you better and more productive at it.
Career Path Tip: Don't despair if you don't see a lot of entry level PMM roles, and instead just try and land a marketing role in a company where you care about the product. There will be plenty of time for you to transition into a PMM role when opportunities come up, and there's no downside to starting on a different team. Your early career marketing experience will set you up well for PMM whenever the opportunity arises.
Career Path Tip: Relationships with PMM peers and mentors will take you further in your career than logos and accolades. Share your dreams with these people, and bounce ideas off each other. You'll become a stronger PMM... and I promise it makes the journey a lot more fun!
Career Path Tip: If an opportunity scares you, it’s probably the one you need to take. Growth comes from being uncomfortable, failing, and figuring it out as you go. In the end, it’s what makes you stronger and more resilient.
Career Path Tip: Dedicate time to deeply understanding your market, customers, and prospects—these insights can sometimes get overlooked internally but are critical to uncovering new opportunities. Even if they don’t directly impact your KPIs, this knowledge will empower you to craft impactful GTM strategies and demonstrate unique value to Product and the wider business.
Career Path Tip: A lot of people think about PMMs as pipeline accelerators—whose job it is to make value obvious to target buyers. But to do that you may also need to be a pipeline investigator—diagnosing why things fall out of the funnel where they do, and what about your ICP, message, sales process, product, or onboarding may need to change as a result. Be a champion for making value obvious at *every* stage, and work through peers to make it a reality.
Career Path Tip: Ask your manager what are the top priorities for the broader organization and then push to get projects that support those efforts. A lot of good work goes unnoticed because the executive team tends to just focus on the “big rocks” that they are trying to move forward so the best way to deliver impact is to complete work that aligns with the things that they care about most.
Career Path Tip: Think about your career as a novel with chapters that all look very different from each other but revolve around the main character. Pick things each year that you want to learn and try to advance the plot. Recognize that some years are more intense than others and learn from each of them.
Career Path Tip: Careers are long and you get out what you put in. So, avoid shortcuts (they're likely to cost you in the long-run), invest in yourself, and always prioritize long-term goals over short-term payoffs when you have an important decision to make.
Career Path Tip: The best product marketers I have worked with were successful not necessarily because they had the most product or domain expertise. Rather, they were the best because they could effectively lead through influence. Your success as a product marketer is linked to the success of your partners in product, sales, customer success, marketing, and more. Be sure to nurture those relationships, align your goals with theirs, and consistently deliver value to create relationships that positively impact the business, as well as your personal brand.
Career Path Tip: Life is short, don’t waste a second working on things that don’t matter. Your job in Product Marketing is not to do “all the things.” Your job is the build a business that matters. Prioritize accordingly. Remember, Product Marketing optimizes for alignment. The impact you deliver will be directly correlated to your ability to partner with the field, product and marketing to build a bridge between your product and its buyer.
Career Path Tip: Don't wait until you are "the expert" to speak up. You were hired for your skills, trust your instincts and have conviction in your POV while building experiences.
Career Path Tip: As a product marketer, it's important to stay adaptable and flex your scope based on the organization's unique strengths and weaknesses. The first 1-2 months on a job is a great time to identify the unique gaps of an organization, pick one that you have a strength in (and are interested in solving), and build a crisp perspective (with a written deliverable that can be shared without voiceover) that positions you as a thought leader on that topic. You'll find yourself invited into conversations much more quickly, and make an impact more directly.
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
Career Path Tip: The best product marketers color outside the lines. They identify gaps, take initiative, and work cross-functionally across Sales, Marketing, Product to resolve them. This is where your best growth and brand building opportunities lie, so don't be afraid to take initiative and get your hands dirty!
Career Path Tip: Seek new experiences that help you learn and grow, but don't lose sight of doing the things you love in areas where you uniquely excel.
Career Path Tip: Figure out your career goal first, then figure out the career path to get there. This way, every career change and choice contributes to a larger narrative around the most important product you’ll ever market — you!
When making a career decision, ask yourself three things: 1) What can I learn with this new experience? 2) If I fast forward one year, what can I say I've accomplished? 3) How does that experience make me better suited to be a {whatever I want to be in 5 years}?
Career Path Tip: Plan for serendipity. Your next job or inspiration may come from an unexpected place! Spend 15 minutes a week reaching back out to your network or learning something new and you'll build more chances for discovering your next move.
Career Path Tip: Put the customer at the heart of everything you do. Deeply understand their needs and use that knowledge to guide your strategic decisions. And become the customer voice within other teams and leaders across the company, make sure you are collaborating with all teams to ensure everyone is aligned around solving the customer's problems.
Career Path Tip: Think of your career (and life) as an investment portfolio. At different stages of your life, your needs and wants will likely change. Be intentional about what you’re optimizing for (e.g. money, work-life balance, positively impacting the world) and understand the tradeoffs that come with it. Check in every 6 months or so and adjust as needed!
Career Path Tip: Learn the art of listening without an agenda - to your customers, your teams, and to your own intuition. The quality of your product stories will mirror the depth of your listening and understanding of drivers that shape purchasing decisions.
Career Path Tip: Writing copy with GenAI is so basic. Develop a PMM GenAI stack and redo all your workflows.
Career Path Tip: Stay curious and agile: The marketing landscape evolves quickly. Invest in learning new skills, tools, and trends and experiment to remain ahead of the curve.
Career Path Tip: While comfort is easy, true growth in any role comes from seeking discomfort. Challenge yourself with projects and tasks that feel uncomfortable. It's in these that you'll find growth and readiness for future roles.
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 initiatives to drive maximum business impact. Finally, always measure impact in terms of hard metrics (ARR lift, % of Product adoption, # of reps enabled etc.)
Career Path Tip: As a PMM you're in a unique position to expand your influence across the organization. Take the initiative to partner with different departments from growth marketing to revenue enablement, product, sales, and customer success and actively look for opportunities to expand your skill set and stretch your influence. The more diverse your experiences and skill set, the more indispensable you'll become to the company's growth and success.
Career Path Tip: Thriving as a product marketer is partly about honing your craft (non-negotiable) — as you play the long career game, don't miss cultivating a resilient mindset and being able to spot patterns from experience that set you apart. The opportunities that challenge you the most are often the ones that define your growth. True progress happens at the edge of your comfort zone, discomfort drives discovery. Embrace the setbacks, lean into the challenges, and trust yourself to figure it out along the way. These are the moments that forge resilience, build unshakable confidence, and prepare you to lead. The process of building, growing, and breaking is long and continuous - learning to enjoy it when it starts to be fun.
Career Path Tip: Information is abundant but insights are scarce. As a PMM, you increase your value when you bring novel insights to your leadership about core customer needs, competitive intel, and data-driven ideas for how to grow the business into new products or markets. Be the marketer who can help your execs make difficult, strategic decisions on a 2-5 year horizon.
Career Path Tip: Good PMM work should always be measurable. It’s easy for PMM to become a catch-all for things that don’t fit anywhere else. Without measurement it’s hard to stick to prioritization and drive meaningful impact.
Career Path Tip: Keep an open mind, no one's career is perfect, be open to doing different things. PMM has expanded so much over the last years that there's so many branches of things you can work on.
Jane Reynolds
Match Group Director of Product & Brand Marketing, Match Group North America
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Career Path Tip: In my career I've found it’s crucial to stay agile and attuned to shifting user behaviors, cultural trends, and technological advances. By continuously refining your understanding of user needs and being ready to pivot strategies, you can can ensure that your products stay relevant and deeply resonate with the targeted audience.
Career Path Tip: Experiment to find what you enjoy and what you want to invest in. Try new projects, roles, and companies. Career success is often a function of longevity and motivation and if you don’t like what you do, you probably won’t stick it out.
Career Path Tip: Great product marketers aren’t just storytellers, they’re architects of market success. Build your career by mastering the art of influence, bridging product and customer needs, and never underestimating the power of curiosity and creativity.
Career Path Tip: To demonstrate a growth-mindset, be adaptive and lead others, even if you are not managing them. This will help you grow, learn, and develop new skills and valuable insights.
Career Path Tip: Don't be afraid of lateral moves - these sideways moves can help you gain new experiences and perspectives. Career growth takes twists and turns so try to be intentional about the moves you make - whether that is rotating positions at your current company or joining a new one. When you feel bored or that you have a skills gap, filling the void with a lateral move is never a bad move.
Career Path Tip: Product marketing isn't just about launches or features - it's about storytelling. The best product marketers understand their audience's motivations, needs and pain points, and are able to infuse that into their messaging strategy and go-to-market plans. This will not only help you stand out from other PMMs, it will also make your launches more successful.
Career Path Tip: Stay curious and always be learning. Dive deep into your customers, market, and competitors because curiosity fuels agility and keeps you ahead of the game. At the same time, know your business inside and out, and build strong relationships across the organization. Your success as a product marketer hinges on collaborating with teams like product, sales, partners, enablement, and extended marketing teams. Great storytelling connects product value to what matters most, but leveraging your extended team will help you uncover blind spots, get advice, and build the trust that drives real impact.
Career Path Tip: Always remember that skills are both learnable and transferable. If you have gaps in your skillset that keep you from landing your dream job, start learning. If you don't have direct experience in the role, find your transferable strengths. You'd be surprised how taking a different perspective on your past work experience can translate to a new opportunity.
Career Path Tip: Find what scares you and do it as soon as you can. Whether it’s a job, leading a project or improving a skillset, ignore the voice saying you need more experience and convince yourself you’re ready now, because you are. We tend to underestimate our own accomplishments, and you’ll find that being forced out of your comfort zone leads to you doing your best work.
Career Path Tip: If you want to level up your career in product marketing, now’s the time to figure out how to use AI to work smarter and faster. Some parts of product marketing will always need a human touch, but you can’t just sit back and wait for the AI wave to hit—those who take charge, experiment with the tools, and use them to tackle new challenges will be the ones who stand out.
Career Path Tip: PMM is a heavy influencing role where we don't always have the resourcing or authority to drive towards an outcome, so instead we need our partner teams in product, sales, marketing, research, comms etc. to take on work on our behalf. Understanding how to navigate an organization, who to influence and how is key to getting things done, scaling yourself and delivering results.
Career Path Tip: Rather than focusing on checkboxes, chase the work that both excites and energizes you and helps the company grow. If you can find that mix, your career will grow quickly, you'll bring value to the organizations you work for, and your work experiences will be full of interesting pursuits.
Career Path Tip: The less siloed you are in how you operate, the more valuable you become across an organization. Straddling the business and the technology spectrum has become more important than ever before, flex your learning muscles in both directions.
Career Path Tip: Always be learning! To be a great product marketer, there's so much to learn and relearn over time, from messaging and positioning to enablement, leadership, and more. The best product marketers are always seeking new knowledge and insights. Don't shy away from asking for feedback, both positive and constructive. We're all growing in some dimension, and that also makes the journey more fun.
Career Path Tip: Your authenticity is your strongest asset. Cultivating genuine connections with people across your company isn't just about collaboration or even networking—it's about learning and growing through diverse perspectives. The most successful PMMs don't just understand their products; they understand the people behind them. By being true to yourself and valuing others for who they are, you create a foundation of trust that not only enriches your career journey but also leads to your best work. Always be yourself; the right people will resonate with your authenticity.
Career Path Tip: One of product marketing's super powers is being able to see the big picture across many groups of stakeholders. Use this unique perspective to illuminate gaps or misalignments between groups. Then partner with product, design, engineering, and data leaders to create clarity, alignment, new processes, and novel product solutions that drive efficiency and quality.
Career Path Tip: Work for and get exposure to a variety of leaders, even those whose styles may clash with your own. Embracing these differences will sharpen your vision of the leader you want to be and help you take the best from each to shape your unique—and authentic—approach.
Career Path Tip: A career in product marketing requires a deep understanding of why and how products are built along with why and how products are bought. As you build your own product marketing career, it's important to think about all of these skills and seek out the experiences that will deepen your expertise across each of these areas. It can be helpful think about the various stakeholders (product, sales, brand, success) and impact to the business as you evaluate career opportunities.
Career Path Tip: No career is a straight line. As a product marketer, you may not have always been a PMM. You might not always be a PMM in the future. Know that every experience you've had to this point in your career uniquely positions you in some way, and figure out a way to identify those skills and strengths that are uniquely yours. Some of the best PMMs I know come from outside marketing. Embrace that difference as a strength, not a weakness.
Career Path Tip: Be the quarterback! As a PMM, you have unique view of the whole field. Youre the one pulling together the inputs (competitors, market trends, product strengths) and shaping that into clear strategy. Don't be scared to speak up and share that vision to rally the team!
Career Path Tip: The company story is the company strategy," said Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz. Whether you're developing a GTM strategy, launching new pricing, or crafting sales material, remember that as a Product Marketer, you are—above all—a storyteller.
Career Path Tip: Clarity wins. In a world of information overload, focus on simplifying your message down to the most important details. Whether you’re pitching a campaign, enabling sales, or updating leadership, focus on the what, why and how - and make it impossible to misunderstand.
Career Path Tip: Spend a few weeks a year in a customer support function at any company you go to. It’ll be painful, but there’s no better way to understand the product. Also, find and remember YOUR definition of success and stay true to that - not anyone else’s.
Career Path Tip: Never be afraid to speak up and share a well-informed opinion or perspective that is backed with data, deep customer empathy, and a deep understanding of the market you operate in. This is always appreciated by leaders and peers and can often get you a seat at almost any table you want to be at.
Career Path Tip: Product Marketing is an incredibly dynamic role that covers a wide range of responsibilities. It is important to embrace continuous learning and maintain a curious mindset. Actively seek opportunities to learn from others, whether it's attending industry conferences, learning from your colleagues, or from relevant courses. Always ask questions and pay attention to the details.
Career Path Tip: Know your customer (like, really!). Talking directly with your customers in 1:1 conversations is the best way to truly understand their world, and take great leaps forward in how effective your marketing can be. Make this a regular part of each week and you'll see results in your immediate goals and projects, and longer term growth in your career.
Career Path Tip: Be an expert detective when it comes to knowing everything about your product, including the data, technical details, jobs to be done, audience insights, etc. You will shine as a product marketer if you can speak confidently about your product to anyone.
Career Path Tip: Approach your work like a business. Consider the product, marketing, GTM strategy holistically, and focus your efforts on the initiatives that will drive the most significant impact.
Career Path Tip: Thinking like a GM is a career accelerator for product marketers, because it helps you go from a tactical contributor to someone who also shapes positioning and strategy. Make it your business to deeply understand the market in which you play, your buyers and their needs, the competitive landscape, and your differentiation.
Career Path Tip: A little initiative goes a long way. Keep building connections cross functionally and finding opportunities to contribute to the business. And don’t forget to socialize the impact you bring!
Career Path Tip: Stay curious in your career. Don’t rest on your laurels or fall into rhythms — make sure you’re carving out the time to strategize and improve, because that’s where real growth happens. Take on scary challenges, embrace new partnerships, fail forward, learn and evolve your best practices.
Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann
SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing
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Career Path Tip: I took a leadership workshop years ago and this stuck with me ever since: “Most decisions about your career growth are made in rooms you aren’t in.” From hiring to department transfers to promotions, your manager is typically representing you to other leaders. So, it’s critical that your manager knows your career aspirations and how to best position your strengths to others. The best way to do this? Proactively prep them. Have direct conversations. Write it up. Your manager will begin to repeat what you say about yourself to others and help you get where you want to go.
Career Path Tip: Don't wait for a seat at the table – if you're not invited, pull up a chair. You've got insights to share and you'll learn a whole lot about where you can lean in to deliver value for your customers and the business.
Career Path Tip: Since Product Marketers interact across many teams, it is valuable to build a diverse network of trusted mentors. Identify peers and leaders you respect and admire and nurture trusting relationships. Tap into your network for regular feedback, advice on the challenges and opportunities you face, and to gain perspective from their experiences.
Career Path Tip: Simplify mercilessly. Messaging, positioning, GTM - everything you touch. If your final work product has a z-axis, resembles a circuit diagram or requires extensive explanation - keep boiling it down. PMM needs to be in the Big Animal Picture business, even if your product and the market is complex.
Career Path Tip: Be intellectually curious about your customers to develop deep empathy. Whenever possible, spend a “Day in the Life” to immerse yourself and experience their pain points firsthand. This will help you be a better marketer.
Career Path Tip: I use CAC (Curiosity, Adaptability, and Collaboration) as a leadership framework, although it is often associated with Customer Acquisition Cost. Cultivate curiosity to uncover customer insights and embrace trends like AI and digital transformation. Remain adaptable to quickly shifting market dynamics and organizational priorities. Foster collaboration to align teams, optimize marketing plans, and execute impactful campaigns. By leveraging this framework, you can deliver innovative strategies that increase brand loyalty, capture market share, and drive measurable results critical for growth and scale.
Career Path Tip: If marketing a technical product, learn it well so you can demo it, and then do as much booth duty and demos as you can. Will help ensure the product marketing messaging & positioning you do lands well with your audience, and also makes you more valuable as you can produce a broader range of assets in support of your product.
Career Path Tip: Tell ’Em What You’re Going To Tell ’Em; Next, Tell ’Em; Next, Tell ’Em What You Told ’Em" is fine advice for college essays, but terrible for persuasive communication. Resist the urge to prove your expertise by talking at people - try to persuade them by really connecting with their minds.
Career Path Tip: As you grow in your career, success becomes less about what you know and more about who you know—and who you trust. Invest in surrounding yourself with great people and building real, trusted relationships; this ‘squad’ will help you tackle challenges and elevate your work as you advance.
Career Path Tip: Do the things that scare you a little—that's where growth happens. Take on a side project in an area you're less familiar with, learn new AI tools, or pitch a bold new idea to your business.
Career Path Tip: The most valuable career compass I've found isn't a rigid five-year plan — it's embracing genuine curiosity. By exploring different roles, diving deep into customer and stakeholder perspectives, and experimenting with new technologies, you develop a unique lens for spotting patterns across disciplines. The most innovative solutions can come from these unexpected connections, and curiosity is what transforms you from a marketer into a strategic leader who shapes product and company direction.
Career Path Tip: A key component of success in product marketing is embracing change and ambiguity. The landscape is constantly evolving, and it's our role to not only adapt, but also foresee and shape that change. Stay agile and you'll thrive.
Career Path Tip: Don't shy away from testing and experimenting. Whether it's A/B testing different messaging, trying out new channels, or exploring innovative approaches to product launches, being open to experimentation can uncover hidden opportunities and refine your skills for optimal impact. Embrace the learning journey.
Career Path Tip: Growing as a product marketer starts with being customer-first—it’s why we ultimately are in business, and your foundation for success. Extend that mindset to cross-functional teams like product, sales, data science, and third-parties (think agencies, partners and more!) and you’ll unlock collaboration and innovation. Personally, this approach also guides my career coaching with clients. Remember: You've got this!