Brandon McGraw

I came from a background in brand and so my natural instincts served me most well on the outbound side of product marketing. I had my fair share of imposter syndrom in the early days when I looked at my peers and realized that I'd never done the traditional inbound work of a PMM. I spent more time than I should have in those early days being afraid to ask for fear of not being able to meet the bar. It took building a relationship with a peer whose work I admired to admit that I was really learning on the fly and to my surprise, they were too!  We all have strengths and areas where we ...

Hard skills may vary by company, but I think there are two that are critical: * Insights. Know the difference between an anecdote and an insight. This is especially critical when you work on a service at scale. Your best (and sometimes most challenging) users tend to be the loudest, so make sure that you're helping the team hear from a diverse array of customer voices. I find that one of the most important parts of any study is the recruit/target audience. Spend time getting the team aligned on who you're going to hear from. * Analytics. Spend time not just understandin...

I think typical is atypical in PMM. I come from a background in brand before and have managed team members that came from consulting, manufacturing, advertising, as well as traditional marketers. Many of those past team members have gone on to careers in other parts of marketing, to product, or to careers in strategy/business line ownership. Many have built careers as leaders of growing PMM teams too. One of the things I love about Product Marketing is how customer-centric it is and I believe that prepares you for a wide-variety of careers. If the path to CMO isn't your end-goal, fear no...

I'd consider, where possible, looking for opportunities within your company to hone the skills and make the transition over courses and education. I'd focus on three things: 1. Build Relationships: Growth roles generally put you in the position of being responsible for a key business KPI. Find opportunities within your current role to build relationships with the other stakeholders driving that success, particularly those in Product Management. When considering someone who's making the switch, I look at their track record of working with people outside of their day-to-...

This varies by company and role, but I generally think about the path to promotion on the two key vectors: ownership level and degree of autonomy.  Strong performance against OKRs or KPIs is a core underpinning to that. When considering promotion I start there and then look at how the person has demonstrated rising levels of ownership and autonomy across the following: * Strategic Direction: As an associate, I'd expect you to own a feature set fully and demonstrate the ability to bring insights into the go-to-market under direction. As you rise in the organization, I'd expect you...

I love this question because I came from brand marketing before. I like to think about it as the distinction between the promise and the proof. The partnership between these two teams is essential. Brand is the promise you make to your customers about your core ethos and what they can expect from you. It sets the tone for the relationship and is the thing that you often fall back on when times get tough. The brand team owns this promise, but like any promise it has to be believable. Your product is the proof. Product Marketing owns showing how the promise of the brand is relevant in uniq...

Like all things, I think this comes down to trust building. When you're new, focus on building trust with PMs by showing that you can handle the highest priority, high impact problems they bring your way. Use this to show them that you know your stuff and can handle operating at the speed and pace of the business.  I've found that this usually leads to the invitation to more challenges upstream but if it's not happening naturally, don't forget to ask! PMs engage a lot of stakeholders and I've most often found that they aren't sure where to engage PMMs when they're new to the relationship...

Business customers are all consumers at the core, but there are really important distinctions.  For one, businesses have totally different buying patterns and a myriad of channels to reach them through. When you're working for a traditional consumer technology company you're most often relying on scaled channels to reach people. Scaled is usually a part of the mix on B2B, so I'd look for opportunities to show command of those channels. For another, consumers are fickle. A business is usually looking to solve a problem and the core customer may be buried beneath a stakeholder that won'...

I myself come from a less than traditional path to PMM after spending the first half of my career on the brand side of the house. I may be biased, but I think less than traditional backgrounds are really valuable in a PMM and I typically look for a couple of key characteristics: Trust Building I look at roles this person has had before and ask about the stakeholders they've had to work with. So much of PMM is being at the center of a wheel where you need to operate without top-down automony. I look for stories of times where they were able to use the trust they built to execute beyond t...