Alex Gutow

I actually tend to take bits and pieces from different ones that I've used in the past to create my go-to. Whatever framework you use should help you get to a focused opinion on the tagline, elevator pitch, and 3 benefit pillars. This means it should capture who is this for (primary personas) and what you're competing against (competitors) as "givens" to set the stage. Then the most valuable thing to have in the messaging are the 3 key benefit pillars of your product/solution/feature that are untouchable by the competition and matter most to your target audience. To justify your 3 key benefits, it's important that a messaging framework make you "show your work" so to speak. For each, why was it a challenge prior? How do you make it better? What's unique? What's the impact to your customer? Answering these in the framework also can make it easier when you're collecting feedback and buy-in, because it gives enough background for folks to debate. And then once you've nailed those pillars, the tagline and the elevator pitch tend to stem from there.

2 pieces of advice here: 1) Take a look at the messaging from other companies (even outside of your market or industry). Who is really nailing it and what do you like about it? And who are the players that you still can't figure out what they do? See if you can start to incorporate some of the aspects you like into your message, or prune out some of what you didn't like. One thing I love doing here is seeing if there are ways to be more colloquial in your messaging. Especially if you work in B2B, see if you can incorporate some of the fun, down to earth messaging that B2C tends to do more of. 2) Don't be afraid to have your work torn apart. It can be hard getting feedback, especially for something you've spent a lot of time and energy on. But try not to get defensive or tune out what you don't agreement with. Go get feedback from the hardest critics. And don't be afraid to ask them follow up questions (ie "Do you agree with this point directionally or you don't think it's a main value at all?" "Do you have suggestions for alternative wordings?" etc)

Having a portfolio at the ready is always helpful (and can be a nice thing to reflect back on for you). For product marketing, this can consist of things like blogs or web pages you've written, webinars or conference sessions that you've presented, etc. I recommend always keeping a running Google Doc of links to the ones you're especially proud of as they happen. (Reminder, make sure these are externally published and that you're not saving any internal materials from past jobs) If you don't have these materials, you can always offer to do a writing sample or otherwise for the specific interview. However, regardless of whether you have the materials available or not, being able to speak to the projects clearly is what matters most. Be prepared to speak to what the project was, why it mattered, what made it a success (or not), and the role you played in making it happen and what specific assets you owned/created. While the outputs of a launch are great, what's often more important in an interview is showing how you got there and how you navigated any challenges.

As a product marketer, the top three skills I use are: * Being curious and not being afraid to ask questions: Curiosity is so critical for product marketers, especially when it comes to the products and features that we're responsible for. The more you understand about your area, the better you can identify what are the parts that will matter most for your customers and your field team. Never be afraid of asking "why" many many times. * Problem solving: One of my favorite parts of this role is being able to create and own the go-to-market strategy, which means working with all different parts of the business to be successful. This means you're often dealing with complexity and ambiguity, so being able to problem solve and find ways to continue to lead your area forward is critical. * Communications, especially writing: A good product marketer is a storyteller at heart. You need to be able to take a bunch of features and functionality and turn that into a story that matters to your audience. Having strong writing skills to fall back on is great to help you refine the story, get buy in internally, and land it externally.

I love this question! This is one of my favorite parts of product marketing - getting to translate deeply technical concepts into what actually matters. As much as possible, I encourage you to dig into the technology. Spend time with your product and engineering teams to really understand what is being built and why. And don't be afraid to ask lots of questions! That's how we learn. And continuously asking why something matters or how it's different is a great push on those teams to get crisp on their responses to customers too. Take the time to stay up on the latest in the industry too. Check out presentations from competitors and listen to podcasts/webinars/etc. It's a great input to get ideas on what works and doesn't. And a great way to uncover more questions or new information on technologies. And always review your messaging to see if it's too jargon heavy or if you're simple describing a feature. What the feature is matters much less than the impact it has on customers. Start with why it matters before trying to talk about your own product.

In general, I'm a big believer in product marketers having multiple "tools in their toolkit" to use depending on the project at hand. This means being able to pull different frameworks or skills from multiple places. So as much as possible, try out a course here and there instead of going all in on one certification. And spend time connecting with other PMMs to see what works for them. That being said, here have been some resources that I've found helpful: * Pragmatic Marketing: Even if your company won't cover their courses/certifications, you can still access a lot of their templates. These can be a helpful place to start especially if you're new to PMM overall or are taking on new areas within PMM such as competitive. * Obviously Awesome by April Dunford: One of the few good books on positioning I've found. She also has a new book out, but I haven't checked it out yet * Sharebird: Leverage all that's available here! They do a good job of providing a wide range of different resources and networking depending on what works best for you. * Ask Sales and PM: These are two of your most important stakeholders. Better understanding their world will help you work better together.

Product marketing can be an especially hard role to break into, but not impossible! First, one of the most powerful things for a product marketer is how well they know and understand the audience they need to speak to. Look for PMM roles that are looking to sell to your current role, since you'd bring firsthand knowledge of that audience. For example, if you're in finance, you can look for PMM roles at companies selling finance products that you might use; or industry-specific PMM roles focused on financial services. Next, good product marketers know how to work cross-functionally to deliver big impact projects and then measure the impact. When preparing your resume or for interviews, I'd recommend including some examples of leading cross-functional projects in your current role (or helping to unblock a cross-functional project even if you weren't the lead). Be prepared to talk about why it mattered, why it was (or wasn't) a success, what worked well, and what you'd change for next time. Finally, if you're struggling to break in, try finding roles that work closely with PMM - such as customer marketing, content marketing, partner marketing. This can give you the opportunity to better build your marketing skills and get to know a certain company or industry. Sometimes it can be easier to then transition internally from there as PMM roles become available.

Over the past few years (and continuing), it's become more important that product marketers have technical depth in the areas they cover. Being able to go deep in your area will make your messaging better and will help you better identify what are the right topics and tactics necessary to land in the market. This will also make you a more valuable partner to PM, and can open doors to helping with betas and influencing roadmap. You also need to be able to understand data. This ranges from being able to work with data science and analytics teams and clearly communicate what questions you need to answer, to having the ability to dig into data yourself to identify trends and adjust queries.

While I certainly love product marketing, it's definitely not for everyone. PMMs often deal with a fair amount of ambiguity. Even if the problem is clearly defined (which isn't always the case), there can be many different paths to solving it. It's on the PMM to create the structure to solve the problems at hand. If you prefer clear cut problems and solutions, PMM might not be a fit. PMM can also be a high visibility role. You need to be the champion of your area, whether that's internally to different teams, externally in the market, or both. You're going to be the person many different teams come to when they have questions or ideas. If you prefer executing in the background, PMM might not be a fit.

One of my biggest criteria for success is how much messaging is repeated. Whether that's by your sales team, customers, media/articles, etc. So I tend to bring testing and validation into the messaging process pretty early and collect that qualitative data. I'm a big fan of going directly to account reps and sales engineers, and getting their honest feedback and see if it's something they'd actually repeat to customers. If you're able, go directly to customers and see if these are the words they'd use, and that these are the leading benefits to them. Or industry analysts to see if it matches with what they've heard from their clients. Because I think getting this in depth feedback is so valuable, I actually don't over-rotate on frameworks or process here. In terms of how effective a launch was and the messaging's impact - that can depend on the goals of the launch. You can run A/B tests on web, emails, etc to see if the new messaging is creating more views/clicks/etc. One of my favorites is to work with SDRs to try out new emails and call scripts with the messaging and see if it increases response rates or meetings secured.