RJ Gazarek

Let me give you the one interview question, out of every interview I've ever been to, that literally stumped me. "Give me a time that you were the most creative".    It stumped me at the time because I approach my role in PMM from a very systematic, repeatable, scalable, and data driven approach. There have been plenty of times where I've had to be creative, but at the time all I could think about were things like "ad messages" and "campaigns" and "graphic design" and I don't participate in much ...Read More

For me, it was primarily just based on experience, and having done a number of launches, GTM planning, messaging, buyer/market analysis, etc - that I know what to look out for, and don't need a lot of hand holding. You can read about how to do our work, but until you are in the trenches and learn what really works, what doesn't, and what to look out for, it's hard to understand what really goes into it. As a PMM I can hit the ground running in nearly any company, because I know what's expected, ...Read More

For me right now - it's that the craft of Product Marketing isn't fully realized by both people in Product Marketing and companies. There is a pretty stark difference between someone who markets products and someone who is a product marketer. I find that people who market products are heavily focused on the top of the funnel only, which comes with a lot of content/headline writing, while product marketers are looking at the entire buying process from end to end. And while I write and produce a l ...Read More

I was lucky at the beginning of my PMM career, because I got into a pretty solid group that understood exactly what PMM did and didn't do. But I think my advice to people would be to really understand and grasp the craft of product marketing. We're not just writers - if we wanted to do that, we would have been writiers. Be a product marketer! This is someone who understands the target market (segments, buyers, changes, competitors), understands how people purchase your product in that market (al ...Read More

Depending how you work your career, you could easily aim for a CPO role (Chief Product Officer). You may have to spend a few years as a product manager - but as a PMM, you and your PM should be two hands of the same body. Everything my PMs do and know, I know as a PMM - I don't get into the engineering side, but I can. My PM can step into my shoes if they need to cover for me, and I could step into my PM's shoes if I had to cover for them - that relationship is extremely important to me.   So if ...Read More

Another avenue that some companies take, is the TYPE of PMM you are. So you can be a product marketer, a solution marketing, a segment marketer, a vertical marketer - these all still fall under the role of Product Marketing, but rather than focusing specifically on tacitical to strategy, they're also segmented more granularly on their individual focus. So a vertical PMM, may focus on everything across the portfolio, that relates to the banking industry, and tailors messaging, GTM motions, and en ...Read More

I agree with everything Dave has written, another role I would look for is someone in Content Marketing who has worked with Product Marketing, and wants to get into how the sausage is made. Understanding what the otherside of that world looks like, can be valuable coming into PMM, because when you create your messaging briefs/docs, you will have an eye on making them usable to a content writer/marketer.   PMM can be a pretty heavy role, which is why it can be hard to hire someone with no experie ...Read More

More towards being data driven and on the strategic side. I love Product Marketing because it is a very "scientific" craft, you don't really have to guess at anything. You get out there, understand your target market, talk to buyers/users/champions/decision makers, understand their pains, and then map those pains to your products solutions - and get that message into the market. Where you get to "experiment" is which of the 15 needs you uncovered is the primary one, but you can leverage your dem ...Read More

Mike makes a good point - in that it can be hard to help people see the value that PMM brings to the table. When I'm looking to take on a job in a new company, it's one of the first things I try to sniff out is what the company's view is on Product Marketing (e.g. do they just view product marketing as glorified content writers - which by the way, we're not... we're messaging, market, and buyer experts - not copywriters).   In terms of showing ROI beyond that, treat Product Marketing more like a ...Read More