AMA: Pluralsight CMO, Lindsay Bayuk on Developing Your Product Marketing Career

Great question! This is so important. Because product marketing is often the "glue", it’s easy to miss how critical it is to driving company alignment and growth. Make sure that you have a regular cadence of updates and clear/measurable metrics reported to your CMO and Executive team. Being proactive about advocating for your function is part of being a great marketer!

Lots of things can come after VP/Head of Product Marketing. It’s not just about a linear path. Depending on the size of your company you can take on additional teams adjacent to product marketing such as content marketing, social, research, customer marketing. You also don’t necessarily need to lead new teams to learn about them. You should be learning about all aspects of marketing (how to drive pipeline, optimize conversion, develop content and events) in order to figure out how to drive the growth of your product/company.

I look to see if that person is already leading teams. A great product marketer already leads through influence. They will already lead cross-functional teams through launches or campaigns and they will already lead their team through challenges. I always look to promote someone who's already doing the work without being asked and without having the title. 

Intangible: Curiosity, resilience, diplomacy, grit, and being an evangelist for your product/space. The best product marketers can flip between the forrest and the trees. They understand where their market is headed. They can speak with Executives and support reps with ease. Tactical: Relationship building, public speaking, writing, editing, analysis/modeling, extreme attention to detail, and survey design.

If you do really exceptional work and execute a masterful launch that delivers meaningful outcomes for your product, you’ll have a great story for the next interview. Just do the work. The results and stories will come. I'd also add that part of being a great product marketer is being a storyteller. So consider that the way you tell the story is just as important (if not more important) than the results of the lanch itself.

I’d say that a great product marketing leader needs to be great at the basics: research, positioning, messaging, enablement. They also need to be able to lead strategy for both marketing and product, clearly talk about their space, the competitive landscape and communicate with Executives and customers. A great product marketing leader is someone others follow. They are influencer and a thought leader. They push their teams, companies and products forward. They are exceptionally proactive and energetic about their work. 

A great product marketing manager is obsessive about their craft. They study product marketing. They watch how other companies execute their product marketing. They follow practitioners and strategists on Twitter. They read all the classic books on product marketing, product management and copywriting. They focus on being great for the sake of being great and delivering results, not to climb the career ladder. 

First I think a generalist needs to learn about the core pillars of product marketing. I have a post I’ve written about the four pillars of product marketing. I would recommend that a generalist marketer figure out how their experience has taught them about each aspect of product marketing and have specific examples to make the tie.