Kelly Kipkalov

I'm going to answer your question slightly differently. PMMs can acquire skills as they develop in their careers, that's a given. So when I hire PMMs, I'm not just looking for skills, I'm looking for a specific customer-first mindset. Do you understand the customer problem you're trying to solve? How do you know it's a problem, and how painful is it? How do you typically engage with customers? How do you validate your ideas to make sure they resonate with your customer? I will often hear things like "I validated my messaging with sales," or "the survey data says..." but to be an effective PMM you need to deeply understand your customers and their pain points. So the skill set matters much less to me than the mindset.

Customer quotes are incredibly validating for prospects considering your product. One practice I've seen though is for marketers to build customer stories or quotes that a particular customer uses and loves a product, but they stop short of explaining why. To your point about story telling, these types of basic quotes don't actually help strengthen the overall story you're trying to tell. All good messaging is grounded in your customer insight and product benefit. So any customer quotes or case studies should ladder up to the customer benefit. If your product helps customers save money, then your quotes and case studies should showcase exactly how your customers use your product to save money, and then quantify if you can, how much was saved. Use your stats as the reasons to believe (RTBs) that your product delivers on the benefit. Then you have one cohesive story.

Anything by Trout and Ries (ancient, I realize), or April Dunford. April's 'Obviously Awesome' book is an quick and fascinating read, and while it focusses on positioning, good messaging falls out of great positioning. So start there and everything else follows!

I don't use a lot of variety in the way I approach strategic messaging - you have to be able to tell a good, cohesive story regardless of how you acquire customers. But with PLG, it becomes a lot more important to make sure that you're following the customer journey and have really tight alignment - at each stage of the funnel - between your messaging and the customer need at that stage. The higher up in the funnel, the more aspirational and broad you can be, but as customers move down the funnel, you have to get a lot more specific about what your product can do and how it will do it. And even more important than messaging, in PLG you need to make sure you have the right content aligned to stage in the funnel (video, tutorials, demos, etc). Messaging and content, aligned to stage of the buyer journey.

I've hired people straight out of undergrad, it's possible. Look for entry level titles like product marketing analyst, or specialist...they are out there. BUT, I will say don't despair if you don't see a lot of entry level PMM roles, and instead just try and land a marketing role in a company where you care about the product. There will be plenty of time for you to transition into a PMM role when opportunities come up, and there's no downside to starting on a different team. Your early career marketing experience will set you up well for PMM whenever the opportunity arises.

I guess I'll have to pile on the Chat GPT bandwagon! But I will also say that we haven't used Chat GPT to create messages as much as we have used it to fine tune them, and to help with voice and tone. Some PMMs struggle with brevity and I've found Chat GPT helpful to take longer messages and skinny them down into something short, punchy and memorable. But you've got to start with the raw goods first and then let AI do the heavy lifting.

Based on the language you used in your question, I think you already know the answer! Balance is the right word because the leading and lagging indicators measure very different dynamics. The leading indicators - I think about engagement, clicks through rates, paid ad conversion and sales pipeline - are all measuring top and mid funnel dynamics. Those are a really good reflection of the success of your launch messaging and your ability to gain eyeballs and attention and can give you an early indication that you are on the right (or wrong) track. But you really need the down funnel metrics - revenue, churn, NPS, CSAT - to know if you’ve got a truly viable product in the market. To the point I made about very different dynamics, having great looking leading indicators doesn’t mean customers will convert or pay what you want. And having weak leading indicators also doesn’t mean that the customers that are in your funnel won’t convert and won’t pay. So you really need the two together to complete the full picture. I'm not sure I'm tracking the second part of your question about attribution. Is it attribution you're worried about, as in making sure that the results are trackable down to a person? Or maybe it's about accountability? Not sure but feel free to DM me on LinkedIn for more clarity.

Of all the skill sets I think are important for a product marketer, brand marketing isn't on the top of the list. In fact, it's probably the opposite - particularly in smaller tech companies where brand = product - where I think a brand marketer could benefit from experience as a product marketer. The relationship between brand and product marketer is important to ensure that products being built deliver on the brand values (like Volvo and safety or Staples and easy) but you don't have to be a brand marketer to be a good product marketer. I'll take the analytical skills all day long. PMM is part art and part science, and the importance of being numbers driven is underestimated. Understanding statistics (market research level), using data for decision making, measuring the impact of PMM are some examples of area where analytics skills can help make you an invaluable product marketer.

In our PMM career ladder at BILL we evaluate PMM career progression in the following areas: * Ability to uncover market insights * Influence product strategy and development * Create positioning and messaging * Orchestrate Go To Market plans At the level you're asking about - PMM to Sr PMM - there are two areas we look for a step change in performance. (1) We like to see more fluency in your ability to leverage market research to bring insights back to product managers; and (2) and we also like to see that not only can you execute against a GTM plan, you have started to create small scale GTM plans, and that you are able to drive execution through others in marketing.

I'll first share the components of my GTM strategies, those don't vary if it's the first product or the 100th. The components are the same: Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Problem statement Solution description Why the problem is worth solving, and why now Competitive landscape Messaging and Positioning Success Criteria Launch plan with marketing channels For the first product at a tech company, spending additional time on the product positioning is a very worthwhile investment. I always refer people to April Dunford's book "Obviously Awesome: Nailing Product Positioning." She's a veteran tech PMM and I go back to the basics in her book ALL the time.