How To Find a Product Marketing Job

/ Product Marketing / By

A few times a week, I get one of the following questions
“How do I get into product marketing?”
“How do I find a product marketing job?”
“What is product marketing?”

I’m going to address that today with my quick guide on how to find a product marketing job.

Lesson 1: What is Product Marketing?
To start, you need to understand the role of product marketing and what product marketers do. As a baseline understanding, here is a definition by Ada Chen:
“The role of the product marketer is to accelerate product growth by championing the customer, communicating product value, and driving distribution. It may even be just one of many hats, like what it is today in my role as founder at Notejoy. Regardless, effective product marketers are focused on ensuring the product connects with its ideal customer”
Action: Read content, check out what other people do, talk to people about their jobs.

Lesson 2: What makes a good product marketer?
What skills do product marketers have or what skills do you need to be a good product marketer? I’m going to offer a few, but there are plenty others that are out there that you’ll want to learn when you interview some PMMs who are currently working for companies you are interested in, but here is a start: (courtesy of Jeffrey Voccell, and Indeed)

  • Public speaking: The product marketing manager is tasked with developing and delivering training presentations for sales and support teams. They must be comfortable standing and speaking in front of a group, whether it consists of their marketing colleagues, C-suite management or prospective clients. Persuasion is a related beneficial skill which could help you convince groups of professionals to support your position and ideas.
  • Storytelling: Product marketing isn’t just about telling potential buyers what your product is, it’s about telling them why it matters and creating a story that resonates with that individual or business. A good product story frames the problem the buyer may be experiencing, or a change that is happening in the broader world, the value your product provides and how it’s the solution.
  • Understand the product, buyer, and overall market: It goes without saying, but as a product marketer you need to understand your own product, the buyer, and what the overall market looks like. This may mean starting a free trial of the product to get familiar with it, or looking if there are free versions available.
  • Be adaptable & work cross functionally: Priorities within most organizations can change fast, as a product marketer you need to be adaptable. For example, when a critical update needs to be made 72 hours before launch and delays your launch by a few days, you need to be able to react quickly and make the necessary changes.
  • Leadership through influence, not authority: Product marketing is one of the most cross-functional roles within an organization, but as a product marketer, you’ll often find that you need to work with and leverage the skills of people who don’t directly report to you. Because of this, it’s important to lead through influence and show how you can lead others to an objective, even if they didn’t formally report to you.
  • Analytical Thinking – Product marketers have to flex their analytical chops to analyze data to drive decisions, such as what features to launch, what customers to target, or how to effectively allocate budget to the right marketing channels. This requires an analytical skillset, with an ability for key tasks/skills you learn in business school (ex: market sizing, cohort analysis, business case/ROI creation.)

Lesson 3: Am I a good fit for a product marketing role?
You want to make sure that this role is what you want to do and that aligns with your interests and skillset. To do this, start by searching for Product Marketing roles, and then reviewing the job description. You’ll want to pay attention to the responsibilities and qualifications to get a better sense of what the job is about and what’s needed to do it successfully.

Here are a few examples you can use to start:

Action → Read up on product marketing and the roles. Get a better sense if it’s actually what you want to do. Pay specific attention to what the responsibilities are, and if these are things you like doing.

Lesson 4: How do I know if I am fit for a product marketing role?
Now that you know it’s what you want to do, you want to take a look at what’s out there and make sure that there are opportunities for you that are a good fit. To do this, you’ll want to start looking at job postings, and specifically, the role and responsibilities to see how you stack up against them.

Create a spreadsheet with three columns
Column A: one column has the responsibilities from the job description
Column B: Has the skills you have that would enable you to do the job
Column C: Has the Experiences that you have that are relevant for the job

Your goal is to be objective in understanding how good of a fit you are for a specific role. You’ll want to highlight both where you are a match, and when perhaps there are signifiant gaps.

Action → Read job descriptions and go build a spreadsheet to evaluate your fit for the roles. Identify the strengths as well as highlight any gaps you think you have.

Lesson 5: How do I become a better fit for a Product Marketing role?
In a competitive hiring market, you need to stand out. Furthermore, many recruiters and hiring managers want to see direct and relevant work experience in the candidates they interview. This doesn’t mean that if you’ve never been a PMM that you can’t get hired, it just means you need to do everything you can to convey that you have the skills and experiences to do the role, even if you haven’t had it before.

We all have gaps and that’s okay. If you have time now, figure out a way on how to improve on them or strengthen those gaps by upskilling or gaining additional experience.

  • Take a Course – There are some great product marketing fundamental courses out there that can help you build some of the skills you need to become a product marketer
  • Start a Project – Some ideas include, starting a blog on something that you care about, starting a podcast on a topic or interest and interviewing the top leaders in that specific niche, building a website or personal page that highlights some of your creative work
    • Ideas
      • Customer Research
      • Blog
      • Podcast
      • Review Messaging and Positioning
  • Do Pro Bono Work – Everyone wants to be heard and get their message across, especially non-profits and community organizations. See if you can reach out to one you’ve worked with and scope out a marketing project to help increase their awareness/brand/visibility
  • Do a Value Validation Project – I love this idea which was coined by Austin Belchak. The premise of it is to take on a project for someone who you’ve built a relationship with who is working at a company you are interested in and is in a product marketing role, and do the project for them. Ideally, the project should add mutual value. For you, it should help you build skills, and for them, it should give them something that helps them do their job better.

Lesson 6: How do I find the right Product Marketing Role?
Build a target list of companies that you are interested in. This can be a combination of companies you are interested in, companies you’ve talked to, and just opportunities you see available. Another way to find the right roles is to come up with some criteria that are important to you, and then to target roles based off that. Some common criteria are below. These do not have to be your criteria, but it is a good starting point for you to come up with your own criteria

  • Size: Do you prefer a small, or large company? Startup? or Established?
  • Market/Vertical: What specific vertical or market are you interested in? Ex: IT Security, Enterprise Software, Collaboration Software, Consumer Facing Products
  • Buyer: Do you have experience in serving a particular buyer, such as a CIO

The goal with this, is to find something that plays to your strengths. For example, if you worked with CIOs implementing cloud technologies, finding a B2B product marketing role might be a great fit.

Action → Build a company list of companies, as well as roles that you want to apply for. You can add jobs to this list by monitoring job boards like LinkedIn, Indeed and Glassdoor. Furthermore, make sure to setup your alerts, so you can get the latest postings as they come in (applying early can make a difference)

Lesson 7: How do I network?
You’ve hopefully already built relationships with Product Marketers, and you need to continue to do so to refine your understanding, but also to get a leg up in the recruiting process. Research suggests that employee referrals tend to be #1 source of hires, so your best bet is to try to use your network to find and land a job. These people can help you get noticed by recruiters and hiring managers, tip you off to roles, and help you navigate the recruiting process. Note: its important to remember a few things:
1) getting a referral doesn’t mean you get the job,. You have to be qualified and nail the interview. It often just means your resume will get looked at
2) Networking just for the sake of getting a referral is not a good practice. Your best bet is to be continuously networking and building relationships, and then that way, when it comes time for you to job search, you can tap into that network
3) For a deep dive on networking, you can check this out.

How to build your network of PMMs, and for companies you are interested in:

  • People in your existing network
  • People in your network who know PMMs at companies you are interested in
  • People from your alum or MBA program who work at companies you are interested in

Action: Build a networking list by looking at LinkedIn. Identify contacts for each of your company lists. Join communities like Product Marketing Masters.

Lesson 8: How do I prepare for a Product Marketing Interview?
Prepare Prepare Prepare. I have an entirely separate post for preparing for Product Marketing Interviews.

  • Behavioral Interview – These are your typical interviews where they will ask you traditional questions about your background, work experience, etc.
  • Case or Presentation – During these interviews, you will most likely get a prompt, or case or presentation of some sort to prepare. You’ll get time to work on this, and then you will present either to your hiring manager or a group. Some common prompts/presentations
    • Upcoming product launch. How would you launch this product?
    • Put together a presentation for a customer on our product, and answer questions

Common Questions

  • Describe each of the products at your previous company.
  • We’re releasing X feature. How would you launch it?
  • “Name a good product that’s marketed poorly. What would you do differently?”
  • “We’re increasing the price of one of our features. How would you communicate this to our customers?“
  • “How would you fix onboarding?”
  • “We sent a notification asking customers to update their software. 60% updated. How would you get the remaining 40% to update?”

Conclusion
The funny thing about finding a product marketing job, is that it is in many ways very similar to what you have to do as a product marketer each and every day.

  • How do you convey it in a way that it sells a customer on a solution that solves a specific problem they have?
  • What unique benefits/features do you have that make a customer’s life easier, solve a problem, or help them do something?
  • How do you communicate customer value?

Remember this as you prepare and target PMM roles. Best of luck!

 

Additional Resources