Ask the Experts
Product marketingAsk me anything Looking to make your next move up the product marketing career ladder? Teresa Haun, Director of Product Marketing at Zendesk, will be revealing all on August 12th.
Looking to make your next move up the product marketing career ladder? Teresa Haun, Director of Product Marketing at Zendesk, will be revealing all on August 12th.
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In Product Marketing Alliance you can ask and answer questions and share your experience with others!
Hi Teresa. What do you look out for when interviewing product marketing candidates? Are there any specific traits that you think are fundamental to a great product marketer?
Hi Amy - What I look for changes depending on the level of the role I’m interviewing candidates for, so I’ll talk through what that looks like for more senior roles vs more junior roles and then also some attributes across any level. When I’m interviewing candidates for more senior roles, it’s typically critical that the person has enough prior product marketing experience to be successful. To evaluate if they do, I look for candidates to walk through examples proving they can do these foundational things I think a great product marketer excels at:
For more junior roles, I think it’s all about making it clear that you have relevant skills and experience that will apply, even if you don’t have much direct product marketing experience. Also, that you have tremendous potential and are so eager to learn. If you really don’t have a lot of experience that you can make clear is very relevant for product marketing, I would suggest just being upfront about that. Then ensure you talk through how you’re going to make up for that, like you’re a super fast learner and you’re getting up to speed in PMM skills already through a class.
For any role regardless of level, there are also a few attributes I look for that I think are critical to being a strong performer in any function. These are qualities like being reliable, organized, collaborative, proactive and self-aware, as well as having a good work ethic with the drive and passion to always do your work well.
Hey Teresa. Do you have any tips about moving functions horizontally? I’m currently working as a PM, and would like to make the transition to product marketing. Would you say there’s anything specific in the toolkit of a PMM that I should be focussing on (before I make the move) that'll set me up for success & help make the change that little bit smoother?
Hi Ryan - Excited to hear you’re looking to transition from PM to PMM. PMs and PMMs work so closely together, so even if you’ve never done product marketing before, so much of your Product experience should definitely be very relevant and translate well.
For specific product marketing skills to focus on, I’d suggest the same foundational things I mentioned in response to Amy’s question as well. You’ll want to show you can do the following which are skills a great product marketer excels at:
Given you’re already working in Product, you’re probably good at #1, #3, #4, and #5. You’re also probably skilled at #6 as well, just with different workstreams and parties that are on the Product Development side of the business vs the GTM side. You can talk about how that experience will translate and then I would also try to learn more about specific GTM efforts. I bet your PMM counterpart would love to hear you’re interested in moving to product marketing and would be happy to help. They could walk you through what goes into the GTM strategy for a launch and the role PMM often plays as a “launch captain” across the teams.
The one area in my list of PMM skills that is probably your biggest opportunity is #2 - creating compelling messaging and positioning. To get a better understanding there, I also think partnering more closely with your PMM counterpart could be really effective. Maybe for your next launch, you could ask to help wherever is needed in the development of that positioning and messaging to gain some exposure. Additionally, I’d suggest reading and learning about positioning and messaging from the many great resources out there like this thread on another product marketing community, Sharebird, that has a ton of great responses from PMMs sharing the messaging resources that helped them. There are also some courses you could look into, as well as many more resources at some of the very reputable marketing programs, like at the Pragmatic Institute (here’s a sample blog post from them with a lot of messaging suggestions) or SiriusDecisions (here’s a sample resource they produced called SiriusDecisions Messaging Nautilus for their messaging framework).
One last suggestion to make the smoothest transition from Product to Product Marketing is also consider going into a technical product marketing role vs a non-technical one. Your ability to understand more technical details than the average PMM from your Product experience could really help. In particular, it could help to make up for not having experience in #2 and #6 and a hiring manager might then be fine with you learning those pieces more on the job.
Hi Teresa, how do you think PMMs should be measuring their impact when looking to push forward in an organization? I’m always a little concerned that my OKRs are currently activity-based or are vanity metrics that don't directly translate into business value and that might harm my opportunities for promotion. Any resolutions?
Hi Carla - Measuring the impact of product marketing is definitely something I’ve struggled with as well. This is also something I still struggle with so I unfortunately don’t think I have a great answer yet, but happy to share some of the ways I’ve been trying to advance how my team measures our work at Zendesk.
First, there are very high-level quantitative metrics like product pipeline and bookings vs targets and prior periods that we often use. The challenge with these is of course that they’re driven and shared across so many different teams, making it very difficult to actually measure the true efficacy of our direct PMM impact. Drilling down deeper to get closer to what product marketing strategy and our work actually delivers (or at least alongside fewer teams), we often look at specific content and campaign pipeline and bookings performance too. For example, we look at performance for a tactic like a webinar our PMM team develops vs the average webinar performance. For bigger launches that have a more robust GTM strategy with many marketing tactics, you can also use prior average performance across all of the tactics to roll up a bottoms-up estimate to try to beat. Since we’re always striving to use past learnings to do better and better, we also like to layer on an additional % expectation beyond the historical averages too to make sure we’re measuring our work against a goal that challenges us.
I’ve also been trying to drive my team to measure their work more based on product, plan and feature usage and adoption. They’ve each set various metrics at that more granular level that we’ve aligned on them being able to more directly impact. Each month they evaluate the performance and we talk through what’s working, what’s not and what else to consider to improve them. It’s still often hard to know exactly what drove a change in a metric and what was truly the PMM contribution, but I do think it’s been a great exercise in helping my team to consistently view and evaluate their work as having an impact that is more measurable.
In addition to the above quantitative measures, there are also some qualitative ways we evaluate impact too. Internally, the feedback from cross-functional teams on a launch is a big part of this. That can come in the form of direct feedback from stakeholders on a launch and whether it was well strategized, planned and executed or if there were things that should have been done better. We also get internal launch feedback through surveys, especially with our Sales team on how well enablement was done. They share both qualitative and quantitative insights in those surveys and we have target satisfaction ratings we’re striving to exceed. Externally, we also run customer surveys measuring things like CSAT/NPS, awareness, and adoption to gauge how successful our product marketing efforts have been.
There’s still a lot of room for more progress in how we measure product marketing’s impact, but I hope those ideas help. Having personally started my career in much more analytical roles where my and my team’s performance was directly tied to clear targets, I’m always trying to find a way to better quantify our impact. If you or anyone else has any other ideas on clearer PMM metrics to use, I would love to hear them!
I’ve been a PMM for around 18 months now and am super keen to make the move up to a Senior Product Marketing Manager. In your opinion, what are the key jumps/differentiators/skills gaps that I should be focusing to go from PMM to Snr. PMM?
Hi Sara - If you haven’t already, I would start by making sure your manager actually knows that you aspire to become a Senior PMM and would like to work toward getting promoted. It’s often implied as most people want to continuously work toward the next level, but that’s definitely not always the case and if you’ve never discussed that desire with your manager, then that’s a key first step. If you’re already performing well and it’s clear that you want to and are working towards a promotion, the conversation with your manager then likely becomes about any skill sets or areas you need to invest in developing further or prove that you have through more projects and experience. This is all to ensure you’ll perform well at that next level. I think it’s often expected that you prove you can do the job above you before you'll get promoted, especially in smaller organizations or growing areas of a business. This is because there’s not time to get trained or ramped up, instead you need to just hit the ground running once you enter that more senior position. It can definitely be pretty challenging to work towards a promotion though because it does often mean going above and beyond to prove you're ready, by taking on projects that are typically owned at that next level, and unfortunately, often without relief on your already existing responsibilities.
In terms of what I specifically think Sr PMMs should be able to do and what I look for, here are some of the key things I included in my internal hiring guide when I was hiring a few Senior PMMs last year. These were for some high-impact positions where there would be a lot of strategic work, like launching entirely new products and determining how we best position and message them to targeted audiences. I asked our interview panel to look for people that proved they could accomplish the following:
Hi Teresa, what advice would you have for someone who is building out a Product Marketing team for the first time? I am sort of making my own PM career ladder here and other than nailing down which people we need on the team, I'd love some advice on running a PM team and what priorities I should be focusing on.
Hi Ashley - I’m unfortunately running out of time in this AMA, but I wanted to at least suggest two resources I’ve seen that could be helpful to you in building out the PMM function and team. I haven’t gone through this process myself (product marketing has always been at least somewhat established where I’ve worked), but there are some great insights in this post from PMA, including direct quotes from folks who have, and also this resource from Intricately. I’m also happy to hop on a call to brainstorm with you if you’d like. Feel free to message me on LinkedIn if that would help!
Hi Teresa, what advice would you give to someone who wants to transition into a Product Marketer role from a Sales role (with some "basic" product marketing experience)? Without a formal education in Marketing, and having little experience, what are some tips you can give to enter/transition into the field? How important is certification from PMA? Thank you.
Hi Rachel - Excited to hear you’re looking to move into product marketing. I haven’t hired anyone with a Sales background so far, but I would absolutely be open to it if they showed they had the potential to be a great product marketer. I would look for the classic things like the ability to truly understand a customer/buyer, create compelling messaging and positioning, and understand our product (this is definitely a skill that would translate well from what you already do in Sales). I would also look for other critical skills that aren’t just key for product marketing, but general ones I always want to see, such as being organized, collaborative, and proactive, plus showing the ability to truly drive and lead workstreams.
There is actually an incredible product marketer, Omead Kavishi, that I work with at Zendesk who came from Sales (specifically Pre-Sales aka Solution Consulting). Omead was kind enough to share his thoughts for this question, which I figured might be most relevant to you. I’ll summarize what Omead shared, address your question on the PMA certification, and then include the full detail from Omead below.
To summarize what Omead shared, he knew for a few years that product marketing, specifically doing competitive research, seemed like it could be a very good fit for his abilities and interests. He took the initiative to meet our competitive product marketers and offer to help anywhere they needed, which then led to 4-5 projects he started collaborating directly with PMM on for a few months. These projects helped him prove he had the right skills to be an effective PMM, such as the ability to think critically and strategically, create good messaging and positioning, determine the best value props for a relevant buyer, and research and develop a thorough competitive analysis. Additionally, one of the key skills he showed would directly translate and really give him a leg up in PMM was the ability to establish credibility with Sales and truly understand what they cared about and needed. This is incredibly helpful because a huge part of many PMM roles is sales enablement and you’re of course positioned to be more successful in that work if you actually understand the Sales team and their needs.
As for the PMA certification, I do think anything you can do to further your product marketing skills is worthwhile. I haven’t done the PMA certification myself, but I’ve heard great things about it and actually at Zendesk a lot of our product marketers are currently going through it to really hone their foundational skills.
Lastly, here’s the full advice Omead shared on transitioning from Sales to Product Marketing:
General advice on making the transition into Product Marketing from Sales
Top skills someone with a background in sales needs to show they have for a PMM role
Skills that would already translate well from Sales experience
Hey Teresa, what defines the success or failure or a product marketer and how does one typically meausure that? Depending up on the company one is in, a PMM owns different things - sometimes leads, sometimes even revenue targets (co-owned with sales), sometimes content and GTM strategy, sometimes just an enabler and contributor working on various things/teams but not necessarily owning anything. In my experience, there's no one way to define and measure the success of a product marketing manager. Or is there?
Hi Vinod - Great question and this is what Carla asked as well so going to reshare my answer from there:
Measuring the impact of product marketing is definitely something I’ve struggled with as well. This is also something I still struggle with so I unfortunately don’t think I have a great answer yet, but happy to share some of the ways I’ve been trying to advance how my team measures our work at Zendesk.
First, there are very high-level quantitative metrics like product pipeline and bookings vs targets and prior periods that we often use. The challenge with these is of course that they’re driven and shared across so many different teams, making it very difficult to actually measure the true efficacy of our direct PMM impact. Drilling down deeper to get closer to what product marketing strategy and our work actually delivers (or at least alongside fewer teams), we often look at specific content and campaign pipeline and bookings performance too. For example, we look at performance for a tactic like a webinar our PMM team develops vs the average webinar performance. For bigger launches that have a more robust GTM strategy with many marketing tactics, you can also use prior average performance across all of the tactics to roll up a bottoms-up estimate to try to beat. Since we’re always striving to use past learnings to do better and better, we also like to layer on an additional % expectation beyond the historical averages too to make sure we’re measuring our work against a goal that challenges us.
I’ve also been trying to drive my team to measure their work more based on product, plan and feature usage and adoption. They’ve each set various metrics at that more granular level that we’ve aligned on them being able to more directly impact. Each month they evaluate the performance and we talk through what’s working, what’s not and what else to consider to improve them. It’s still often hard to know exactly what drove a change in a metric and what was truly the PMM contribution, but I do think it’s been a great exercise in helping my team to consistently view and evaluate their work as having an impact that is more measurable.
In addition to the above quantitative measures, there are also some qualitative ways we evaluate impact too. Internally, the feedback from cross-functional teams on a launch is a big part of this. That can come in the form of direct feedback from stakeholders on a launch and whether it was well strategized, planned and executed or if there were things that should have been done better. We also get internal launch feedback through surveys, especially with our Sales team on how well enablement was done. They share both qualitative and quantitative insights in those surveys and we have target satisfaction ratings we’re striving to exceed. Externally, we also run customer surveys measuring things like CSAT/NPS, awareness, and adoption to gauge how successful our product marketing efforts have been.
There’s still a lot of room for more progress in how we measure product marketing’s impact, but I hope those ideas help. Having personally started my career in much more analytical roles where my and my team’s performance was directly tied to clear targets, I’m always trying to find a way to better quantify our impact. If you or anyone else has any other ideas on clearer PMM metrics to use, I would love to hear them!
There’s been chatter for a while now around the career progression for VP/Director level PMMs. I know PMA’s survey earlier this year said around half of C-suites said they think they’ll progress to be a CMO and just this week Greg Joswiak, a PMM at Apple, was announced as Apple’s new CMO. I was just wondering what your thoughts were on the next steps for PMMs at that level? Do you think CMO is the next, most logical progression?
Hi Carlina - Thanks for this great question. I was also excited to see Greg Joswiak’s promotion to run marketing at Apple as another clear example of strong product marketing expertise leading to that progression.
Specifically to the part of your question on levels, I think VP/Director level PMMs typically need to go through a few more levels first before reaching CMO, at least at bigger organizations, something like Director → Senior Director → VP → SVP → CMO. At smaller, early-stage companies, I’ve often seen there isn’t actually a CMO role until they get to a more developed stage, so that most senior marketing role is often Head of Marketing. In those early-stage organizations, I do think VP/Director level PMMs often have enough experience to go directly into a Head of Marketing role that may eventually evolve into a CMO role as the company grows.
To the bigger question I think you’re asking though around whether experience in product marketing vs other marketing functions can be preferred for CMO roles, I do absolutely think we’re seeing product marketing become more and more valuable. A couple years ago I was actually evaluating this exact question as I tried to be more thoughtful about my career. I was trying to understand the experience I would need to have to hopefully eventually reach my longer term ambition to be a Head of Marketing or CMO. In talking with a number of marketing leaders and doing lots of LinkedIn background stalking, it seemed clear the two most common paths to be a tech CMO are from product marketing and demand generation roles. There are of course a lot of other critical marketing functions that could lead there too, but most often I saw strong product marketing and demand generation backgrounds for most tech CMOs. While it’s of course ideal if you can get experience in both of those marketing functions, what I learned in my discussions and research is it doesn’t seem to be essential. As long as you have a good enough understanding of the other area, I think you can still be successful as a CMO with a background in either. In the past, it seemed like demand generation was more often the background of most tech CMOs, but now I think we’re seeing companies, especially ones in B2B, value product marketing experience just as often, maybe even more often. This is happening as the role of product marketing across companies is becoming more and more critical. I think this is largely driven by how much more competition there is everywhere and a result, a greater need to strategically and uniquely position and message the company and its offerings driven by the CMO.
For the last part of your question, I do think CMO is the most logical progression for product marketers to strive for, but I’ve also seen a lot of PMMs move over to Product and the last role within that function instead of CMO is typically CPO (Chief Product Officer). I think both paths could also of course lead to CEO too if that’s your ultimate career ambition!
Hi Teresa - when interviewing candidates for PMM roles, what are you looking for in terms of experience and/or skills? What should PMM focus on in the interviews (or prepping for interviews) for PMM roles?
Hi Ashley - Thanks for the question. This is what Amy asked as well so going to reshare my answer from there:
What I look for changes depending on the level of the role I’m interviewing candidates for, so I’ll talk through what that looks like for more senior roles vs more junior roles and then also some attributes across any level. When I’m interviewing candidates for more senior roles, it’s typically critical that the person has enough prior product marketing experience to be successful. To evaluate if they do, I look for candidates to walk through examples proving they can do these foundational things I think a great product marketer excels at:
For more junior roles, I think it’s all about making it clear that you have relevant skills and experience that will apply, even if you don’t have much direct product marketing experience. Also, that you have tremendous potential and are so eager to learn. If you really don’t have a lot of experience that you can make clear is very relevant for product marketing, I would suggest just being upfront about that. Then ensure you talk through how you’re going to make up for that, like you’re a super fast learner and you’re getting up to speed in PMM skills already through a class.
For any role regardless of level, there are also a few attributes I look for that I think are critical to being a strong performer in any function. These are qualities like being reliable, organized, collaborative, proactive and self-aware, as well as having a good work ethic with the drive and passion to always do your work well.
Hey Teresa,
Keen to find out the best way to grow in the PMM career, should you focus on a specific industry i.e eCommerce solutions, fintech, HR solutions, Customer Support products etc or is it advisable to be open minded when it comes to roles you can take up ?
What is the one career advice you’d give a new PMM who is keen on excelling in the Product Marketing profession ?
Hi Carolyne - For your first question, I think in the long-term you’ll have more options in your career if you have diverse and broader expertise in product marketing beyond just one industry or one type of product. At a certain point, to keep progressing, you’ll need to be able to manage many industries and many different products, so if your experience is so narrow, it might become very limiting. In the short-term though and at earlier levels in product marketing, there can be advantages to focusing your attention and being an expert in a very particular area, rather than more of a generalist. Overall I would say it depends on what stage you’re at and what you strive to do in the short-term vs long-term.
For your second question, one key principle I’d encourage any PMM to embody and believe has directly helped in my career progression is showing consistent reliability and tenacity. Showing you are consistently reliable and tenacious means becoming a person everyone can count on to get the job done and done well. This is incredibly important because everyone wants to work with someone like this. There is no question you’ll successfully complete your responsibilities in a workstream, and if you hit roadblocks, you won’t just give up. Instead, you’ll find smart ways to unblock the path. By showing consistent reliability and tenacity, you’ll become very valuable as someone who is always dependable to produce high-quality work regardless of the challenge.