Julian Dunn

I break it down as follows: product marketing's main role in sales enablement is to educate salespeople on the target customers/market segments/buyer personas & needs, etc., how to position value (not benefits or feature/function) for those customers, and provide competitive intelligence (battlecards, training on what to know and what to say, objection handling, etc.) There is also a technical marketing component to it of course, which is training sales engineers (typically) on features &amp ...Read More

As a PMM, I was always conducting my own wide-ranging research about competitors and market dynamics (competitive and market intelligence) and providing this to PM. This included reading a lot of analyst reports, both about our category and adjacent categories, meeting with industry analysts to conduct inquiries on pressing questions of interest, keeping up on industry news, and understanding what trends are likely to impact the product and category. Finally, distilling this down to both proacti ...Read More

This is a great question. I've transitioned from PM to PMM and back again, so I can give you my perspective on both. The biggest challenges for anyone moving into PM, whether that be from PMM or other roles, are the following: deeply understanding the domain; leading by influence; and being comfortable with high levels of ambiguity. (And, of course, the ability to make good judgment calls on top of all that.) For PMMs specifically, particularly those without a technical background, the first are ...Read More

Rare is the engineering leader today who has never worked with product managers. The issue is that sometimes they misunderstand what modern product management looks like: it's not (primarily) about project management, it's not about prioritizing every single thing that engineering is working on, and it certainly isn't about being accountable for engineering's own delivery accuracy. These values and beliefs may be a surprise to some engineering leaders, and it's natural for them to push back if t ...Read More

If you are literally looking to stay in product marketing or marketing (and already have a job in the field) then I would agree with the other posters that an MBA is not going to get you much. However, if you have designs to move into (strategic) product management, start your own company, or something else adjacent to where you currently are, then an MBA can be useful, particularly if you don't have an undergraduate business degree. That said, if you plan to move into product, I would actually ...Read More

I try to focus a product team on the most pressing areas that only PM can do. Our job is to create unique leverage for the company, not try to do everyone's job. So for example, while it might be tempting to play junior engineering manager, it's not a good use of time for PMs to project-manage every single engineering story and deliverable (IMO). If I or my team have to flex into a role temporarily to fix a problem, I will make it clear to all stakeholders that it is a temporary fix. An example ...Read More

I used to be very much on the side of "PMM should own pricing" but I will now caveat this with a couple considerations. First off, though, I think at a smaller company, say a startup where you're the only PMM, PMM should still own pricing. That's because there's both a strategic ("how should we set our suggested retail prices and package the product?") and tactical ("how much should we allow our reps to discount the product and on what basis?") element to pricing. At smaller companies, I've seen ...Read More

It can vary from not-terribly-technical to quite technical. This depends on how complex your product is and how much the nuances of that complexity matter to the user's success with it. As an example, GitHub Actions has sophisticated features like matrix builds for parallelization, required and reusable workflows, and others where the design, down to the structure of the YAML, matters a lot to the end user. But even in Actions, these are corner cases. What's important is that developer product m ...Read More

To me, this is less a question of literally number of PM bodies to engineering bodies; that depends on the company, its context, the complexity of its products, and many other factors. Instead, the way I think about this problem is mapping PMs to the number of logical domains within a company's product. A senior+ PM should be able to own a single domain, with its own KPIs, goals, and product strategy. Typically, this aligns a PM with an engineering manager over that domain, and underneath that E ...Read More