Lauren Barraco

100% agree - there are so many areas that you get pulled into as a product marketer. If you think PMM is the path for you, I'd recommend you start with the age-old question... What are YOU passionate about? What gets you up in the morning and drives you? Focus on that first. Like you said, PMM is multifaceted and can take you in a lot of different directions, but you will be the most successful if you're doubling down in the areas that you enjoy :) Do you like the strategy? The writing and content? The positioning? Start honing those skills and become an expert there. 

I would start by focusing your research internally - although the PMM team might not know what headcount they have yet, I can guarantee that they know where their gaps are / what areas they're struggling to keep up... How's their partner go-to-market strategy? Do they feel they have strong joint value props and plans? What about product launches - are they well coordinated and do they feel like they're executing at the level they want to be? How about sales enablement?  Once you find out where the gaps are, I'd focus your next stage of research on those areas. Find articles, podcasts, we...

I'll start by saying that there are two major variables on this one: 1) what the organization needs - this can be very different depending on size of the company, stage of growth, etc. and 2) the reporting structure of the PMM team - do you report to the CTO or CPO? Or do you report to the CMO? Depending on the answers to the questions above, your top 3-5 areas may vary. But in general, I think it's safe to say that your top list should include some form of the following:  1. Messaging / positioning / storytelling 2. GTM strategy  3. Product launches 4. Enablement  5. User persona / u...

Oh my gosh - the possibilities are endless! The skills required for PMM are transferrable in so many ways. Like you mentioned, there's the product route that you can build on and either lead a PM or PMM team (or both!). The other obvious one is in the CMO direction - for this, you'd definitely need to expand your marketing lens into other areas of the marketing org (DG, ABM, field marketing, etc.) - you could start by trying out corporate/brand marketing or content marketing as an easy transition there. Other routes I've seen: enablement, product evangelist, go-to-market strategist, etc. Al...

It sounds like you already have a lot of the relevant experiences to make your first jump into product marketing. We actually have someone on the product marketing team who started in the same way - partner marketing. She leveraged her experience on the partner side to build on product marketing. From launches, to building go-to-market materials with joint value props, etc. But at the end of the day, it's all about the team your interviewing with - what gaps do they have on the PMM team right now? Do you have experience in those areas that you can help them fill? I would start by focusing t...

First and foremost: practice, practice, practice.  But at the end of the day, the key to product marketing is storytelling, right? You should think of your career in the same way. Run through your resume and build a storyboard to help you articulate why you made each move and what you were trying to accomplish at the time. Treat yourself as the protagonist in this story - what challenges were you facing, what situations did you overcome, what activities led to you becoming the hero? You know the answers to these questions better than anyone else... So, start running through it - maybe yo...

Start building the foundational materials - product positioning, the pitch deck, messaging guides, launch processes, etc. and get alignment on these early! It's critical to get these pieces done first so that you can scale effectively. As a team of 1, you are going to need to rely on the other people in your org to help you get your product (and message) to market. By having these core materials created and getting buy-in from your execs and cross-functional teams in your first few months, you'll be enabling your team to be more self-sufficient and get some of those critical pieces done wit...

We actually just implemented Klue for competitive intel. It basically gives you a single source for all competitive intel and then allows you to build real-time battlecards based on that data. The product marketing team has been really happy with it so far.. and more importantly, our go-to-market teams are loving it too. During our buying process we also looked at Crayon, but ultimately went with Klue. 

I think this one all comes down to your framework. If you have a good framework that you've used in the past and a task management tool (like Asana, Jira, etc.), you're over halfway there. But the biggest thing is to socialize the framework with execs and your cross-functional launch team early. Get buy-in on the process and make sure that each launch contributor has a clear understanding of their role and responsibilities as part of the launch. Since it will be your company's first product launch, this will be new to everyone so you need to be flexible and may have to do a little extra han...