When is the “Right Time” to Hire a Product Marketer?

Based on my experience, the best time to hire a product marketer is as soon as the company hires a product manager.

Because product marketing exists as an extension of product management, with a focus on the market adoption of a product, a product marketer is best setup for success when they can work closely with the product manager.

Bringing in the product marketer at the early stages of a product development roadmap allows the company to be strategic and proactive about customer adoption.

Being proactive requires building growth and customer adoption into the DNA of the product from day one, rather than trying to bolt it on later.

And hiring a product marketer to help bridge the gaps between marketing, growth, sales and product will meaningfully increase any team’s chances of success when launching a new product.

If you’re hiring a product marketing manager, you’re hiring for a specific set of skills.

Below, I’ve put together a list of product marketing interview questions that will help reveal whether or not your candidate is up for the sophisticated task of bringing a product to market.

Product Marketing Interview Sample Questions

Understanding of Product Marketing

• How would you define product marketing in your own words?
• How would you work together with a product manager to launch a successful product?
• If you were tasked to launch a product in a new market, what approach would you take to commercializing that product?
• What are the roles and responsibilities of a product marketer?
• What are the steps you would take to understand a new ecosystem?
• How would you validate your product’s viability in market?

Go-to-Market (GTM)

• Walk me through how you would build a GTM plan?
• How do you decide which features to build when competing with engineering and sales?
• What are the aspects of operationalizing a GTM plan that might prove to be most risky?
• How would you communicate a GTM plan with multiple stakeholders, especially with third parties and interdependencies that can become bottlenecks?
• What are some of the immediate next steps that you would take if your product launch was unsuccessful or fell short of your goals and metrics?

Scenario Questions

• If customers are coming to your product page and not converting, what are some tactics that you would pursue?
• How would you package and position our company’s product?
• If your sales team is having difficulty closing a product, walk me through what questions you would ask to support them?

Competition

• How would you conduct a market discovery and due diligence on your target customer?
• A competitor is building a similar product and feature set. How would you approach this situation?

If you want a much more comprehensive list of interview questions for the product marketing interview, you can check them out in book Breaking Into Product Marketing.

If you found this useful, and you’d like to learn more about Product Marketing, stay in touch!

My latest book, The Launch: A Product Marketer’s Guide, is now available on Amazon. I also wrote the book “Product Marketing Debunked. The Essential Go-To-Market Guide” which you can purchase on Amazon.

If you’d like to become a member of Medium to get access to awesome content, you can check it out here. If you are serious about learning about the go-to-market process, check out my go-to-market workshops.