Jasmine Anderson Taylor

B2B and B2C Product Marketers have much in common in the way of skills, both must assume the role of Voice of Customer and Voice of Product. Both must be strategic thinkers with an exceptional ability to execute. Insights gathering, GTM strategy and execution, and cross-functional collaboration are core needed skills for PMMs in both industries. In fact, many Consumer PMMs I’ve hired over the years were once B2B PMMs.  

That said, B2B product marketers who wish to transition to B2C should spend some time considering the following:

1. Learn the consumer marketing channel mix: Consumer marketing channels are meaningfully different from Enterprise (e.g. think push notifications vs. sales teams). Spend time learning how to effectively leverage these channels to reach your new customers where they are.  
2. Find ways to practice interpreting customer data at a different scale: often the difference in audience size is millions. This change in audience size gives you an opportunity to do more testing, but also represents new challenges in interpreting results.   
3. Prepare for engagement at a new speed: while not universally true, B2C marketing can mean more immediate responses to your campaigns and messages, often in the form of 280 characters. As a result, it’s important to understand go-to-market best practices for levers like Customer Support and how that differs from how launch reactions are managed for Enterprise businesses.

One thing I wish I learned earlier is the most powerful product marketing you can do is always centered on a shared human truth. When I look back on my very early PMM GTM work, I focused primarily on communicating about the product and the benefit derived from the features themselves. But the product features, however innovative, were only half the story. Connecting the Product to the Customer Need is where the true magic lies. Find the truth we all share (an experience, an emotion) and connect that to the new experience the product provides -- that’s where your message takes on real meaning and can more effectively get your customers to take action.

Product Marketing’s superpower is being the “Voice of the Product to Customers and the Voice of Customers to Product.” When establishing PMM as a new function, the best place to start is listening. First 30 days: Listen and truly get to know your Customers and the Product. 

On the Customer side, what this looks like practically is spending as much time in the early days reviewing Help/Support tickets, reading through research reports, sitting in on focus groups/interviews -- anything you can to get close to the Customer. Even if you’re a Customer yourself, you’ve got to fully understand the range of customers your product attracts and why. Who are the power users? Who are the churned users? What experiences are the most delightful? The most painful? 

Engage with Product to understand what’s most top-of-mind for your team. How is the product best used today? Are there unexpected ways customers have learned to use your product? What aspects of the customer experience are the most challenging to solve? 

First 60-90 days: Build the shared plan (see previous question) that addresses the company’s short-term, most pressing, PMM needs while building a PMM team that will drive longer term success for the business.

If someone is new to PMM, there are two skills I look for:

1. Strategic thinking: Can you demonstrate an ability to take an intentional, rational thought process when solving problems? Can you get creative about solving a problem while also never losing sight of the end goal? Can you solve a problem as it develops / as you receive new information? 
2. Ability to prioritize and execute: Can you cut through noise and narrow in on what’s most critically important? Once you have a plan, can you make that plan a reality?

PMMs are (and need to be) masters at many things but if I had to pick the most important:

1. (Soft) Cross-functional Collaboration: PMM is a highly cross-functional role. On any given project, you’ll work with Product, Design, Engineering, Research, Marketing Channel Experts, Operations, Legal… and the list goes on. A product campaign can’t get done without many partnerships. So you have to be great at working across different teams and getting them to share in your goals.  
2. (Hard) Data Driven: Product and business decisions are most times made based on quantitative insights. PMMs are critical to helping product and business partners make decisions at scale, so you have to have a keen ability for understanding, creating and effectively communicating data as information.

First - anyone inviting you to interview will see from your resume whether you’ve done product marketing. If you haven’t and you still get invited to interview, then there’s no need to worry about being new to PMM. Instead keep in mind there are likely a few key areas your interviewer will want to assess. Take your past work and reframe it to demonstrate your ability to grow into your role, while proving you’re showing up Day 1 with skills to contribute:

1. Identifying Insights: Share a way in which you helped a business or team identify something they did not know before
2. Positioning and Messaging: Demonstrate your writing skills 
3. Go-to-market prowess: Share ways you’ve had to work on complex projects with multiple stakeholders with audacious goals and you got it done

“Passion” is a tricky word. It can lead you to believe that you somehow have to be a power user of a product to be a great PM, PMM, etc. for it. Some of the most successful tech products have enterprise customers, so that can’t be true. When deciding on whether or not to take a job, I use a framework that I once read about on a LinkedIn blog post: 

Product: Is it a product that has a strong growth trajectory? Do customers (whether I am one or not) love it? What about the product sets it apart from other options in the industry? 

People: Are the people I’m meeting from the company people I want to work with every day? Can I learn a lot from them?    

Role: Is this a role that I can both totally nail while also providing room for growth and development? Is there a balance to what I will give and what I will gain? For this one, it’s sometimes useful to understand the broader context of how the company’s teams are evolving to assess how much growth is possible in a given role. 

Pro tip: these are three key areas to focus your line of questions while going through the interview process. After all, you’re interviewing the company just as much as they are interviewing you.

Only a few weeks into my current role, I’m living this one in real-time! For myself, I’ve created the following approach: Listen → Set Expectations → Execute → Close the Loop. For prioritizing needs/deliverables, I spend as much time as possible listening and understanding what is most pressing for the business immediately (and then mid and longer term). The key here is to determine where the business needs product marketing the most. When you’re the first PMM, it can be incredibly natural for everyone to welcome you on to their project -- there will be so much product marketing to do! So it’s important in the early days that you never bite off more than you can chew and no one is under the impression that you’ll work on more than you feasibly can.

Perhaps you’re coming in during planning, then you’re focused on helping identify key insights that can help shape the roadmap. If you’re coming in mid-stream, then you dive in to try to strengthen the most immediate and high stakes launches. Often it’s a mix of both. Wherever you’re coming into the cycle, choose these initiatives intentionally and ensure key partners agree with your prioritization.

From there, it’s about flawless execution and communicating internally as projects reach milestones and meet objectives.

Brand plays a critical role in Product Marketing and vice versa. In broad strokes, campaigns are either Product or Brand-led, and if one is leading, to be effective the other must be supporting. If we’re launching a new app, our focus is sharing the value proposition and highlighting key features, but the campaign is delivered in our Brand’s voice and within the umbrella of our broader Brand promise. If we’re launching a campaign to drive greater awareness of our Brand within a category, we’ll put our story and message front and center, but we’ll use key RTBs of our Product to underscore relevance. In this way Product and Brand are never too far apart and we’re best positioned to win hearts and minds.