After graduating from Duke University’s Fuqua MBA Program, Anna Hersh Mensing returned to management consulting, but after almost three years she realized she was ready to tackle new career opportunities. In our interview, Hersh-Mensing shares how she identified that she was interested in product marketing, how she transitioned into a Product Marketing role, and what she does in her role as a Product Marketer.
MBASchooled: After business school, you went back into consulting. When did you realize that you wanted to transition to a new opportunity, and how did you figure out what you wanted to do next?
During business school I interned as a product manager for a large tech company and thought long and hard about returning to consulting because I really enjoy the pace of work in the technology space. However, the consulting firm I was with gave me the opportunity to move to a new city – San Francisco – and change my focus from federal clients to technology industry clients. I thought this was a real opportunity to give consulting another try while pursuing my interest in the Technology industry.
After about 2.5 years back in consulting, I realized that the opportunities that excite me remained out of reach. I wanted to be part of building and launching amazing products rather than implementing existing tools and trying to integrate software with legacy systems. While in consulting I honed important skills that are applicable like how to manage agile software development projects and international teams, however, I was working myself farther and farther down a path that would be challenging to make a change from.
I started investigating exciting software companies in the Bay Area and connecting with my classmates from business school to find the best way to move fully into the technology industry. I looked at several opportunities and landed on Splunk Product Marketing focusing on their machine learning products. I really clicked with the team, and believe in the product set. This company was on my initial LAMP list (a brainstorming tool for what companies to apply to when you are job hunting from The 2-Hour Job Search) from my first year of business school so it has been on my radar for a while and the right opportunity presented itself to join the Product Marketing team.
MBASchooled: Why did you decide you were interested in Product Marketing? What appealed about it to you?
Product Marketing holds a unique role in the business – you are the connection between the more technical side of the business (Product/Engineering), and the Sales and Marketing side of the house, as well as to customers externally. You own communicating the value of your technology both to internal stakeholders and external customers. You manage all aspects of launching a new or enhanced product so there is a great deal of responsibility.
This appealed to me based on the parts of my experience in consulting that I enjoyed. It is a great role that makes use of my background in engineering and what I learned in business school. I am constantly learning and improving my technical, general management, and marketing skill sets in this role.
MBASchooled: As you went through the transition process, did you face any challenges with switching your career from consulting to product marketing?
After roughly seven years as a consultant where you know how to be successful, it is not immediately easy to switch to a fully new function and company. I was used to being the manager who knew what to do, and who was in charge of the team. Moving into product marketing, I had to learn a whole new set of terminology, understand what I could and could not do within marketing, and understand how to succeed in a different corporate environment than the one I left.
Consulting is extremely hierarchical with many layers, while my new environment is very flat with a few very senior levels. I have a great deal of autonomy to get my work done, and not a lot of people checking up on me until a big moment occurs for my product.
MBASchooled: What’s been the biggest change from consulting to Product Marketing?
I think working in Product Marketing I deal with more ambiguity than in Consulting. In Consulting, you have a project with a defined set of goals and a due date. And even though in consulting it can be challenging to manage scope that your client constantly wants to change, and a team that may not be meeting due dates, at least you have a defined scope to refer back to.
In Product Marketing, success is less clearly defined and it is up to me almost entirely to figure out how we will attain it for my products. If you launch a new product, you must decide what pieces of supporting content need to be created to train the sales team, update the website, inform the customers, train the users, educate the analysts and media who report on you. We have teams to help produce the content, but as the product marketing manager, the decision and management rest with you. It is both freeing and a huge weight of responsibility to make the right decisions.
MBASchooled: As a Product Marketer, what are some of the most important skills you rely upon?
I rely on cross functional people management and ongoing research skills. In Product Marketing, you very rarely are officially in charge of the people you must get to help you launch a product so you must influence in a friendly but purposeful way to accomplish necessary goals. Additionally, I rely on my research and continual learning skills. I am meant to be the expert on my product in the market – this means understanding how technology works, what use cases it is applicable to, how we stack up against competitors, and essentially everything pertaining to my product. This is an uphill effort when you first take on a product to become an expert, and a constant research effort to best position your product in an evolving competitive landscape.
MBASchooled: For MBA students who are interested in PMM, what should they focus on to make themselves good candidates?
I think MBA programs’ default coursework prepares candidates well for the day to day work of a PMM team – particularly Strategy, Operations, and Marketing coursework. However, I think the real challenge is becoming an expert in the industry that you want to work within. A successful PMM has the right generic PMM skills (ability to manage product launches, position their product, write messaging, produce the right content at strategic times), but really needs to understand their market – particularly in the B2B space.
MBASchooled: What can MBA students do in business school to prepare themselves for a career in PMM?
If you want to be a PMM, pick an industry and get knowledgeable on it through MBA coursework focused on that industry or experiential learning opportunities to do an internship or externship in that space.
MBASchooled: What advice do you have for students who are interested in transitioning into a career in Product Marketing?
Even if your past title does not align directly with PMM, identify what aspects of your past roles or studies can be transitioned, or talk to industry experience in that same industry that gives you useful knowledge about what a customer is looking for that space that will make you a great PMM.
For me, the PMM team I joined was looking for someone with technical experience, they had a great team but needed to bulk up on technical understanding of their products to better get into the heads of their very technical customers. I have another team member who was brought in because she was an operations expert and we needed to redefine our new product introduction process so her deep process and operations experience bulked out the team.
Currently, there are not enough people out there with PMM titled experience on their resumes to meet the demand for open PMM roles so recruiters need to get creative in who they pull in. Consultants, with a wide range of experiences can often succeed in finding something that meets the need in this role.
Similarly, MBA students make great targets for hires if you can pitch your previous industry experience plus the great strategy and marketing knowledge you pick up in class as the right mix for a role.