Unveiling the Secrets of Product Marketing: Essential Attributes for Success in a Thrilling Career
A must-read glimpse into the world of product marketing, including the highly recommended attributes you will need to survive in the role.
Finding yourself at a crossroads in your career, perhaps you are trying to find your next career challenge, you may be looking to specialise or your path could be steering you head-on into the world of product marketing. Should you consider product marketing?
A career in product marketing will take you to the highest of places, with a chance to experience growth, success and glory and it will take you to the lowest of places of frustration, despair and doing some of your least favourite tasks.
Product Marketing is fast becoming the popular stream out of all the marketing disciplines to specialise in, but it ain’t for the faint-hearted. For those courageous enough to take the challenge, a role in the field can bring great reward, and create a foundation that can elevate you in your organisation personally, as a trusted advisor to many.
It’s an exhilarating ride of highs and lows, lots of trials and disappointments, great learnings and joyous successes. It’s a marketing professional’s journey that will have you spinning, leaving you facing in all directions, almost all at once. And you, most often will find yourself at the centre of the stakeholder universe, with all eyes on you.
As a key member of your marketing organisation, you will find yourself as the go-to for other marketing heads, much like a design resource is to a marketing team, there will always be something that someone would like you to do. The product marketer becomes the glue that binds all facets of marketing activity, from knitting together campaigns with product messaging or promotion, to providing insights for new markets, regions or product opportunities, your role becomes the source of knowledge that your co-workers will lean on.
The product marketer works hand-in-hand with the product and engineering teams to orchestrate product positioning, messaging and GTM activity. These teams rely on your communication chops to translate the technical into consumer-facing language in the right tone of voice, and to deliver products, features and communications to market at exactly the right time, in the right place, to the right audience.
As a product marketer, be prepared to walk in step with client-facing teams; sales, customer success and support. You will be required to uncover the inner workings and behaviour of prospects and customers, create enablement tools, ideal customer profiles and customer personas and identify ways to help influence and impact the customer journey with your brand and product. Paying particular attention to what your customers or the market are saying about your brand. The feedback and insights you collect are weighted in gold, and it will be your role to ensure that they are communicated back to your internal stakeholders for future product development or to create new, better opportunities for engagement and advocacy.
In the role, you will report to senior leadership and be comfortable communicating up the line to an Executive or Board. In the same vein, you will build relationships across the entire organisation, creating connections with individuals who operate in different spheres to you. Get used to working with finance and operations, they care about performance and so should you. Most commonly, your interaction will be relative to pricing and packaging, customer communications relative to price increases, the impending impact of activities, and how your activities are performing against budget and targets. Internally, you will be breaking down technical/ discipline language barriers across departments.
A product marketer’s role will vary from organisation to organisation, and within industries, and what I have described here is not the exhaustive list. Most of this will be dependent on the maturity of the organisation and the level of resources at their disposal.
Is product marketing the right fit for you?
In my years of experience working in product marketing and with teams of product marketers, and connecting with some of the best product marketers I know, there are several traits or superpowers that a certain kind of individual needs to survive and thrive in a product marketing role. If you align with all of these attributes, well then product marketing might be your world.
A level of curiosity is a must. A product marketer needs to be infatuated with a constant search for questions and answers about all things, product, customer and company. How product features work, what customers think, why customers behave a certain way, what the data shows, how we improve a customer’s journey, and how we do things better, faster, and differently next time. The brains of product marketers often spiral from one thought to the next, but it is a skill that enables them to focus at any point in time, on the thing that most deserves their attention.
“Endless questioning and exploration!… You can uncover that mysterious x-factor that brings everything together by going down the rabbit hole. But you do need to be self-aware and able to practice self-restraint to come back to the surface before you waste all your time!” Kristen Lee
A passion for the product you are marketing. This comes down to the innate need to love what you do, and that should extend to the products or services you promote and sell. You need to have that conviction to bring people on the journey with you and convert those non-believers to truly realise the value of an idea, product or service. So resist taking a product marketing role in a company that doesn’t align with your values or ethics, you won’t pull it off and if you do, you’re going to be exhausted trying.
Never lost in translation. Your role as a product marketer is to use those powerful communication skills you hold and bring that translation key to the fore. It is your responsibility to take technical explanations of the product from the product team into a consumer-facing language, bedded in the right tone of voice for the marketing and sales team to utilise. Ensuring that the translation you have prepared connects the value between your solution and the problem you are solving for the customer.
“The power of translation allows an effective product marketing manager to connect the solution to the pain point of your target market, and customer base, in a way that the value can be concisely understood.” Chloe Wilson
Ability to pivot and move quickly. The world of product marketing is seldom boring. If anything, it’s the one marketing discipline that keeps you on your toes. You need to have the ability to operate in a fast-paced environment and be prepared to pivot. Whilst you may have the best laid-out plans, they quickly come unstuck with shifting priorities, moving targets and product delays, all of which are common in the world of SaaS. Your ability to go with the flow and have that backup plan up your sleeve will save you and prevent tears and heartache.
“Act as a puzzle master. You need to be able to not only spot the problem but find multiple ways to solve it. One is never enough… You need to be ready to pivot fast to option B… Or C!” Kristen Lee
“Hold the power of adaptation. The market is constantly changing, as a PMM, be someone who can quickly adapt to new customer demands and technology will thrive.” Eduardo Siqueira
Strong Resilience. It takes a certain fortitude to deal with disappointment, or an uphill battle or challenge, as a product marketer you need resilience. Many of the decisions that cause you to pivot will be out of your control, especially when it comes to product release or top-down re-direction. In this moment, you need to stay strong and recognise this isn’t a failure on your part. You are just one star in the universe that needs to align for an activity to proceed successfully. You can be prepared by ensuring you have built great relationships so you can hear and see what’s coming up on the horizon before it slaps you in the face.
Thrive in ambiguity. As a product marketing manager, you are going to face some uncertainty, whether that’s unclear briefs on tasks, shifting deadlines for releases, changing direction and vision of the product eco-system, or simply changes in the company structure. And you need to be ok with feeling uncomfortable, and happy in a position where you might not have all the answers, or know everything but are willing to search for them. You need to take this all in your stride and be the rock that doesn’t crumble. When unsure of how to proceed you need to be the one that steps up and searches for the information you need to march on.
Be a connector of people in the organisation. You don’t have to be an extrovert to be a product marketer, but you will need to have a little courage as an introvert to mingle outside of your kind. As marketers, we are in a unique group that gets each other, no matter what discipline we’re from; field, digital, brand or growth, we have the same foundations and the same goals within the organisation. But as a product marketer, you need to connect with and be the bridge between people in the unique, different and crazy worlds of product, engineering, finance, sales and support. Be willing to learn what drives them, the lingo they use and the objectives they have and go on a journey of enlightenment, understanding and a newfound friendship that will reward you ten-fold.
“You need to be a people person and be great at building relationships with other teams and stakeholders” Bonita Reck
“As a PMM you need to be a shapeshifter. You need to be able to wear many different hats and have a tone of empathy to become “the glue” between teams to make a product successful.” Javier Casanova
An ability to speak with customers. One of the critical roles of a product marketer is to delve into the world of the customer, to listen and take on their insights and feedback. Often this relates to general product usage, inclusion and insights into beta trials or collection of testimonials and case studies. Sometimes that means having an uncomfortable conversation with an unhappy bunch of customers and then switching over to calls with true admirers of your product. Whilst you may have technology at your disposal to assist you, in this role you need to have the confidence to speak with a customer, and that could be in-person, online or on the phone. This is a skill you can learn, but you need to be prepared to jump in and sometimes do the uncomfortable tasks.
“Ultimately, customer insight either directly or indirectly is critical to the role of the Product Marketing Manager, you need to be able to connect and speak with them”. David Allinson
There are plenty of resources out there for people entering the field of product marketing, and communities that will support you in your journey, whether you are the sole product marketer in a company or part of a team. Finding a mentor who can help you on your journey is a great place to start. It's as simple as connecting with a marketing leader or product marketing professional and asking for their guidance. The Product Marketing Alliance is just one global network that also provides learning resources, certifications and a community to support your journey in this dynamic role.
