Carrie Zhang

I see 3 product marketing career paths ways: 1. Continue down the product marketing career path. At some point, you will be capped at a VP or Director of product marketing role 2. Get broader channel marketing experience (the most important one being paid marketing) and become a CMO somewhere. Choose this path if Marketing is your ultimate passion 3. Learn more about product management and other business fundamentals and become a General Manager/ CEO leading a line of business. Choose this path if you love being a P&L owner, and all the glory and stress that comes with it Which path you choose very much depends on what you are interested in and what you are good at.

This very much depends on the company and individual team lead vision so I will just chime in with what it is like at Square. In general, PMMs at Square cover a wide range of responsibilities regardless of level. These responsibilities include: 1. Develop product or feature launch/ GTM strategy and plans, including positioning and messaging 2. Quarterback marketing and sales partners (e.g., paid marketing, SEO, content marketing, lead generation) to execute GTM and growth plans 3. Lead customer research and collaborate with PMs on product strategy and roadmap 4. Lead pricing and packaging recommendations Square is a multi-product company, so our junior PMMs tend to focus on one product to learn how to excel at the role. Senior PMMs start to cover more products. Additionally, junior PMMs are empowered on tactical executions, but important, strategic decisions like tent pole product launch strategies and pricing decisions are led by senior PMMs. As a team lead, I focus more of my time building and coaching my team, elevating the reputation of the function within our company, and weighing in heavily on product and business unit strategies.

Any interviews with me will involve a case - real world, but sanitized case questions like "you are the PMM for xyz product and your subscriber growth has slowed down [insert whatever metrics, scenarios] in the last 2 quarters. You need to get it back on track. What would you do to tackle this?" I look for ability to break down a problem, identify hypotheses, look for right data/ fact base to validate hypotheses and creative ideas to solve a problem. My best tip is to not jump into answering the question right away. Take 30-60s to structure your thinking first.

I have a different perspective. Most of the turnovers I have seen are voluntary - people moving on to different companies, different roles. So to me it's not necessarily a bad thing. Personally I get bored doing the same thing for more than 2 years. So if my role does not present new learning opportunities, I will probably move on. On the other hand, in general marketing can be an easy culprit when business is not doing well and budget needs to get slashed. It's just the reality of the profession.

Great question. I always tell my team that as product marketers we are the bridge between product development and the broader marketing & sales teams. We focus relationship building and collaboration in 3 areas: 1. Product (development) team. At Square PMMs are embedded within the product teams so this is technically our home. Where we add value is bringing in the customers' voice when it comes to product strategy and roadmap. My team does a lot of work visiting customers, conducting qual/ quant research, collecting feedback from Sales, Account Management, Support, through our FB, Seller Community. This allows us to bring a strong customer perspective and have a seat at the table for product strategy and roadmap discussions. 2. Marketing and sales channels. Help them do their jobs better. This includes having a clear point of view on where subscribers and growth are going to come from and guiding (but not directing) how they should be thinking about their tactical plans. For example, clear customer insights help paid marketing team develop better media plans; product proof points help content team write better content articles; sale collaterals/ training help Sales close more deals. 3. Creative team. At Square we have an awesome in-house creative team. Just write kick ass creative briefs and inspire them!

Our sales team are always asking us for 3 things: * A kick ass product intro/ overview deck - generally used for reps to go over with prospects * Competitive battlecards - how we stack up against our competition and where we win * Case studies - tangible upside that customers have gotten by using our products These are the foundations in my opinion.

Yes, PMM role varies a lot by industry and company. So you have to ask yourself what you want to do and what ultimately interest you. When you choose what companies, PMM groups to join, you need to evaluate whether that helps you get to where you want to be. For example, I am not into enterprise B2B. Product marketing in that space requires a lot more sales enablement work that I'm not passionate about. I've personally found the following background helpful to excel at product marketing: * Hands-on channel marketing experience. A good PMM need to know how different channels work, e.g., how to do acquisition via paid marketing, how to do customer lifecycle management * Classic CPG marketing training. Best place to learn about segmentation, targeting, positioning and brand management * Strategy consulting. PMM needs to have a business mind. Strategy consulting is great at teaching you how to solve an ambiguous problem

There are two things I found challenging for the PMM role. 1. Prioritize all the things we can work on and make sure we are having the biggest impact on the business. Our role at Square is very broad. At any time, we can be pulled in from working on the next 18-month product strategy together with the PM, to fix the pricing of the product, to develop a set of growth experiments, to put together sales collaterals. Our stakeholders (execs, PMs, channel marketing, sales) will have a ton of requests to us. If we don't prioritize, we can easily drown in all the tactical work. As a PMM, we need to have a really really good understanding of the value drivers of our business and work on initiatives that are going to move the needle. For example, in the first 6 months of a new SaaS product launch, my product team got really concerned about meeting subscriber and revenue goals and kept asking about increasing marketing budget. BUT, we had huge churn problem after the initial GA. So I stuck with "don't worry about $; let's close feature gaps and fix churn first". At any time, we need to have a good sense of what is the pecking order of metrics we need to move to grow the business (acquisition? paid conversion? churn? increase in ARPU?) and what are the underlying drivers to move these metrics (product features? pricing? messaging? dollars?) That is the North Star for me on a quarterly, monthly, weekly basis to decide what me and my team are going to work on. 2. Inspire the creative team and make sure we develop kick-ass marketing communication. Whether we work with in-house creative or outside agency, at the end of the day, the creative is what gets in front of the end consumer/ customer. How do we evaluate creative? How do we ensure it's on strategy without being prescriptive to the creative team? A lot has been written by the general marketing community about good vs. bad clients but it is still an ongoing learning curve for me. In the PMM/ creative relationship, initially I was deferring more to the creative team since they've been here longer and arguably knows our business and customers better than I did. Overtime I've figured out that as a PMM, my job is to represent the customer and the business. My job is to help the creative team understand who are the customers of my product(s), and what benefits my product(s) bring to them. It is exactly the positioning and messaging piece that Marcus mentioned above. So I won't provide stupid feedback like whether the logo should be bigger or smaller, but I have every reason to comment on whether the creative delivers on the positioning and messaging I want for my product and why. Additionally, getting the creative team excited about your product! Help them understand the business opportunity. Bring the product to life during the creative briefing/ kickoff - product demos are always helpful in those situations! (BTW, if you cannot do a product demo as well as the PM, in my opinion you are not a good PMM). I'm learning but honestly think getting better at creative brief and feedback is something I need to continue working on.

Covered this a bit in another question. PMM can bring a very strong customer perspective when it comes to product development. To have a seat at the table though, you have to do the work. This is what we do to bring customers perspective to our product teams: * Visit, shadow, do work at our customers. No research can compare to the insights you get by actually being in the shoes of our customers - in our case, small businesses * Talk to customer facing teams (Sales, Account Management, Support) and synthesize feedback. They are on the frontline all the time. You will be surprised how much you can learn from them * Comb through social media (Facebook, Twitter), our own Seller Community forum and syntheszie customer feedback * Conduct qualitative and quantitative customer research When you've done all this work, you have a wealth of fact-based customer insights that nobody can ignore.

It’s a joint decision between product management and product marketing at Square. In general our PMMs tend to have more ownership here. They will lead competitive analysis and commission qual/ quant research to inform pricing decisions. That said, from what I observed, when you zoom into the specific PM/ PMM pair, it really comes down to whoever has the expertise and the respect from the team to make the right call.