Carrie Zhang

I see 3 product marketing career paths ways: Continue down the product marketing career path. At some point, you will be capped at a VP or Director of product marketing role 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 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 lo ...Read More

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: Develop product or feature launch/ GTM strategy and plans, including positioning and messaging Quarterback marketing and sales partners (e.g., paid marketing, SEO, content marketing, lead generation) to execute GTM and growth plans Lead customer researc ...Read More

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 profess ...Read More

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: 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/ quan ...Read More

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 ...Read More

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-o ...Read More

There are two things I found challenging for the PMM role.  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 t ...Read More

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  ...Read More