AMA: LinkedIn Former Head of Product Marketing, EMEA and LATAM, Robert McGrath on Product Marketing Soft and Hard Skills

Prove your passion for the customer. Demonstrate how you've set out to understand their needs and challenges, and how you solved them in your past roles. The importance of messaging and positioning in your day-to-day, and how that's driven success is another angle to call out. If you're breaking into PMM, it's about passion...passion for product, for customer and for excellence.

Having a culture of openness and transparency across the team. Strong support in the development and alignment with each individual PMMs career & skill development roadmap. Finally, you offer interesting and stretching projectsthat spike passions and, as a manager, give your team the guardrails to operate and then, get out of their way!

There are multiple ways I'd suggest doing this. One approach is to use the current area that you're focused on i.e. sales enablement, and how you can use your knowledge and experience of this to influence the likes of product launch strategies. For example, if you're in sales enablement you have a birdseye view of what the sales teams challenges are, what they're hearing from their customers and what works within the pre and post-sales processes. Use this knowledge to springboard yourself into conversations with other people across the org. This helps because 1) it allows you to build lasting relationships and trust, and 2) gives you insights and experience into how and what they work on. Be curious, ask questions and champion the customers. 

Research, and come with a growth mindset! Look and listen to what competitors in your market are doing. How does their messaging make you feel, how does it relate to your own organisation's. Why do customer go with them versus you? Also, and something that often goes overlooked; we're all consumers. So, what brand do you admire, what messaging makes you stop and think about the product/solution/service. Messaging can only resonate when you have the right alignment of the customer, knowing their challenge/need and the best product/solution/service to solve for that. Answering these is key to effective messaging, especially if you're operating in smaller regions and/or markets with different cultures and languages. 

Bring your behaviours into your answers. The relationships you've built, the challenging people you've persuaded etc. It's important to be clear on the activity and the task, but ensure, within the STAR framework, you're not only answering the "what" you did but the "how" you did it. As an interviewer the "how" means more to me, as it's a signal not only to your ability to succeed in the role but your ability to be the best you can be within the culture of the organisation. 

A lot depends on the type of role. In general hard skills is where a lot of hiring managers would edge towards as it ensures the technicality of the role can be carried out. Soft skills are also vitally important and shouldn't be ignored. For soft skills, in a cross-functional role, it's virtually important but is also an area, with the support of a good manager, can be coached and developed. 

Presentation & communication skills are at the top of my list as must-haves. In Product Marketing, you're forever positioning your team and its value. Whether that's within sales enabling a narrative or USP, or in your day-to-day communications with internal leaders. Being clear, empathic to the audience and telling an interesting story will set you apart and allow you to be even more persuasive in building a coalition of support for your team and the individual projects they're working on.