Jon Rooney

For new senior PMM hires (like Sr. Director/Director team leads), I think of 30-60-90 plans to follow a basic flow: assess (30 days), design (60 days), run (90 days).  During the "assess" phase, a senior PMM has to listen, observe and learn as much as possible: meet the team and figure out the current state of how basic stuff (sales decks, product launches, campaign content/strategy, analyst relations) gets done. Learn the product cold, not just the demos but how to actually use it. Watch how te ...Read More

The best way to balance research, content and GTM needs is to make sure you're not pursuing any area (research and content, in particular) for it's own sake - it's sometimes super easy to fall into a task sinkhole and lose sight of the larger goal. Make sure you have a mental model where the activities all nest under a couple of top-level goals, you have to keep that hierarchy and parent-child relationship in mind so as to not get lost in the flurry of work. If you're doing research, make sure y ...Read More

If you're landing 1st round interviews, that means your LinkedIn profile/resume looks good and covers the experience/skills/work experience needed for your targeted roles. That's great, especially when hiring environments are tight like they are now. If you're consistently not moving forward in the process, I'd do an honest self-assessment in 3 main areas: How am I coming off to interviewers? If you look good on paper (which you presumably do if you get past resume screens to a first call), are ...Read More

If someone has at least some work experience, the most important questions I ask are along the lines of "tell me about your previous/current company - what do they do? What problems do they solve and for whom? When they win against competitors, why do they win? When they lose, why do they lose?." Almost everything I'm looking for, especially in an early conversation, can be derived from how a candidate answers that line of questioning. Candidates who go off track either dive deep into the techno ...Read More

The most common mistake I've seen from product marketers during job interviews is mistaking information for messaging. Especially for more senior roles, your main job as a product marketer is to synthesize all sorts of data and information into a story. So in an interview, weave together a logical, compelling story, don't just rattle off facts, stats, speeds and feeds. Make database management or end-point-security or lead contact enrichment or AI agent-powered whatever interesting in the 30 min ...Read More

If you're pivoting from another function into product marketing, map out tasks or responsibilities that you've done in your current and recent roles directly to a PMM's core charter. The good news is that PMM roles can span in so many directions such that almost any other adjacent function (PM, engineering, sales, technical pre/post sales, campaign management) can make a case that they've been doing some part of PMM work. Partner marketing and content marketing are super closely related, so be s ...Read More

Some years ago, I was running a PMM team at Splunk when we introduced a new product that was a persona-driven solution for IT built on top of the core platform - it even featured machine learning capabilities before AIOps was a thing (Gartner was calling it ITOA at the time). To date, we had had a ton of success with IT practitioners and buyers but we saw an opportunity to move up the value stack and deliver something more purpose-built. When we drafted the value prop hypothesis and initial mess ...Read More

Selling to developers can be difficult, often because they have a ton of say over the decision but not explicitly the budget, but marketing to developers is simpler than people think. Quickly and concretely explain what your product does and how it works/fits in with other stacks (as much as developers love to claim that they're immune to marketing/branding - just look at the stickers on their laptops. C'mon - that's brand loyalty/affinity on par with pre-teen pop music fans) then get them into ...Read More