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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

There's another question I fielded about soft skills, so take a look at that one in the feed. The soft skills I listed there: * Clear and confident written and verbal communication * Ability to influence others (particularly product) * Strong drive for results/taking initiative There's one more I'd add: * Bias for action

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.

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.

My answer to this is that 'it depends' on where you are in your career. If you are early career and just starting as a PMM, I would typically be making a hiring decision solely based on soft skills. There's no expectation that you have a well rounded set of hard PMM skills as an entry level candidate. But as you progress in your career, that dynamic will come into better balance and hiring managers will be looking for both. Starting at the manager level, I would be vetting candidates for specific PMM craft (your hard skills), not just soft skills.