Finding Product Marketing
I found product marketing very much how product managers build products, which is through testing and learning. When I was in business school, I fell into product marketing. I knew that I wanted to work in the tech industry and knew that I preferred a big tech company. I took all the functions that were out there and did research on them and realized that there were some that I wasn’t a fit for or weren’t interesting to me. One of the functions that was interesting was marketing, based off of my interests, as well as some of the past work that I did.
From there, I started looking at the various roles within marketing and discovered product marketing. Initially, what attracted me to it was the chance to still be customer facing (I had worked in professional services previously and appreciated the customer piece) but also the chance to communicate stories and content between companies and customers. However, I will readily admit that I didn’t truly understand what Product Marketing was, even after doing a 10 week internship in it!
Choosing Product Marketing (again)
After business school, I returned to management consulting, and after doing it for a few years I realized I wanted to move onto another opportunity but I wasn’t sure what. So I did three things:
- I wrote down all the projects/initiatives that I thought I would like to keep doing, and the ones I wanted to stop
- I wrote down the skills that I wanted to keep using in my next job
- I did a 360 degree assessment which got me a ton of feedback from my peers about what types of careers and roles they thought would be a good fit
Ultimately, I realized Product Marketing was the right blend of my past skills, my strengths, but also a desire of what I hope to do more of in the future.
Eventually, I started recruiting for roles, and ended up landing one. The role ended up being both a combination of my past strengths and skills as well as a transition into something new. The takeaway which I think is valuable for MBA students is that even with a career transition you are still going to bring parts of your old self with you, so make sure you identify what those are, and use them as a unique differentiator when you pitch yourself to companies.
For me, I put a lot of thought into choosing Product Marketing which was a combination of internal work (reflection and understanding myself) in concert with external work (researching companies and roles, doing informational interviews, getting feedback from my peers.) What it came down to was three things.
Communications – There is a saying that marketing is just words. That said, words matter. Product Marketers are always communicating – whether that is written, spoken, or through some sort of visual medium (slides, blogposts, webinars, sales trainings, videos, etc) I enjoy communicating with people, especially customers.
Cross Functional Work – One of the things I enjoyed about management consulting was the chance to work with lots of stakeholders. As a Product Marketer, you have to do a similar thing. I enjoy working and collaborating with others in general, but what I also find is that I am someone who is good about not just being a team player, but also, with influencing and providing leadership, even if I don’t have formal leadership authority. I get to do this a lot especially on cross functional projects that I work on as a PMM. I also find that in a cross functional role, because there is so much gray area at times it often leaves room for flexibility in the types of project work that you get. Sometimes all it takes to get a project you want, is to simply raise your hand, and I appreciate the fact that I can do that.
Teaching and Instructing – One of the things I enjoy most about my job is that I get a lot of situations where my job is to take something that is complex, make it simple, and then teach, or explain, or coach someone else on it. I have always had great teachers, coaches, and instructors and thus have picked up a love for these same topics. I feel like I get to do this a lot as a product marketer, whether it’s teaching our sales teams new messaging, coaching/guiding our customers on our products, or doing some research and sharing it as well as my point of view on what it means to my product managers.
How did You Know Product Marketing was right for you?
One thing I encourage people to do is to learn the deliverables of the role that they are looking at. So for example, if you are in an informational interview with a Product Marketer, ask them what projects they worked on but what their key milestones and deliverables were or are. From there, you can then figure out, if you A) have done something like that before or B) at least have skills in your toolkit, that would enable you to do that thing. For example, a huge part of my role now is sales enablement, and coaching our sales teams on our products.
While I didn’t directly do that in my old job, I led numerous training sessions and workshops to consultants of all levels and coached them on various consulting skills and methodologies. While it is not exactly similar, you can probably see the transferable nature of those skills. Another thing that I do a lot of now is around content and thought leadership, or writing or designing pieces of content that speak to issues or topics that our customers care about. I had direct experience with this, and was even able to attach some examples of published works, which gave a lot of credibility.
What are the roles and responsibilities of a Product Marketer?
Like a lot of things, it depends, but here are mine:
Messaging and Positioning – Coming up with messaging for our products, that is then used throughout all of the content we create that is internal or external, ranging from the copy on our website, the messaging in our external assets such as blogposts or ebooks, and any type of material that makes its way to customers.
Content – I write a lot of content and build a lot of decks! Much of this is related to our products, and is either directly consumed by a customer, or is consumed by a stakeholder who then uses it with a customer. For example, I recently finished creating a deck that our sales teams use in their initial conversations with a customer. While this was only one deck, it has the potential to be used with every single customer we have, so it took a long time to create until we got it right.
Sales Enablement – Training our sales teams on our products, and ensuring they have the right messaging, content and narratives to use when they talk to customers
Presentations – I present alot! This is to internal teams, such as sales teams, or cross functional stakeholders, or as well as with customers. This can mean anything from an overview of our products and organization to our new hires at new hire training, a roundtable discussion with our customers at a virtual event, or lead
Competitive Intelligence – Keeping an eye on the market and industry to understand emerging trends, strategic decisions made by other companies, and gathering insight into win/loss data. From there, I share this back and provide recommendations on how we can use this within our organization
It’s important to keep in mind that:
- Product marketing can look different within a company, depending on your team, role, product or business unit
- Product marketing can look different company to company, or vertical to vertical
Advice for new MBA students who are considering a career within product marketing for an Internship?
I think the most important thing to start off with is to understand what it is, and then to understand why (or why not!) you want to pursue a path in product marketing. The former is more external research, in terms of talking to current product marketers and other trusted people to understand what product marketers do, what skills they use, what makes a product marketer successful, and the career paths of product marketers. The latter, is more internal focused, and speaks to your own career goals, values, as well as your strengths and skills. Here, it’s more about answer questions like
- What would I enjoy about product marketing?
- What skills do I have that would make me a good product marketer?
- What types of projects do PMMs do that I have experience with or have skills for?
- Does a potential career path in product marketing align with my own goals?
The other thing that helps is to once you validate the external research with internal reflection, is to articulate that in writing as well as in words. Throughout the internship search process you are going to have hundreds of conversations about product marketing, so the quicker and more confidently you can articulate why you are interested in it, why you think you’d like it, and what would make you good at it, the better off you’ll be.
Once you do this, you can then start to move forward with some of the more tactical (but critical) aspects of the process.