AMA: Snowflake Director of Product Marketing, Alex Gutow on Product Marketing Career Path

As a product marketer, the top three skills I use are: * Being curious and not being afraid to ask questions: Curiosity is so critical for product marketers, especially when it comes to the products and features that we're responsible for. The more you understand about your area, the better you can identify what are the parts that will matter most for your customers and your field team. Never be afraid of asking "why" many many times. * Problem solving: One of my favorite parts of this role is being able to create and own the go-to-market strategy, which means working with all different parts of the business to be successful. This means you're often dealing with complexity and ambiguity, so being able to problem solve and find ways to continue to lead your area forward is critical. * Communications, especially writing: A good product marketer is a storyteller at heart. You need to be able to take a bunch of features and functionality and turn that into a story that matters to your audience. Having strong writing skills to fall back on is great to help you refine the story, get buy in internally, and land it externally.

Product marketing can be an especially hard role to break into, but not impossible! First, one of the most powerful things for a product marketer is how well they know and understand the audience they need to speak to. Look for PMM roles that are looking to sell to your current role, since you'd bring firsthand knowledge of that audience. For example, if you're in finance, you can look for PMM roles at companies selling finance products that you might use; or industry-specific PMM roles focused on financial services. Next, good product marketers know how to work cross-functionally to deliver big impact projects and then measure the impact. When preparing your resume or for interviews, I'd recommend including some examples of leading cross-functional projects in your current role (or helping to unblock a cross-functional project even if you weren't the lead). Be prepared to talk about why it mattered, why it was (or wasn't) a success, what worked well, and what you'd change for next time. Finally, if you're struggling to break in, try finding roles that work closely with PMM - such as customer marketing, content marketing, partner marketing. This can give you the opportunity to better build your marketing skills and get to know a certain company or industry. Sometimes it can be easier to then transition internally from there as PMM roles become available.

While I certainly love product marketing, it's definitely not for everyone. PMMs often deal with a fair amount of ambiguity. Even if the problem is clearly defined (which isn't always the case), there can be many different paths to solving it. It's on the PMM to create the structure to solve the problems at hand. If you prefer clear cut problems and solutions, PMM might not be a fit. PMM can also be a high visibility role. You need to be the champion of your area, whether that's internally to different teams, externally in the market, or both. You're going to be the person many different teams come to when they have questions or ideas. If you prefer executing in the background, PMM might not be a fit.

In general, I'm a big believer in product marketers having multiple "tools in their toolkit" to use depending on the project at hand. This means being able to pull different frameworks or skills from multiple places. So as much as possible, try out a course here and there instead of going all in on one certification. And spend time connecting with other PMMs to see what works for them. That being said, here have been some resources that I've found helpful: * Pragmatic Marketing: Even if your company won't cover their courses/certifications, you can still access a lot of their templates. These can be a helpful place to start especially if you're new to PMM overall or are taking on new areas within PMM such as competitive. * Obviously Awesome by April Dunford: One of the few good books on positioning I've found. She also has a new book out, but I haven't checked it out yet * Sharebird: Leverage all that's available here! They do a good job of providing a wide range of different resources and networking depending on what works best for you. * Ask Sales and PM: These are two of your most important stakeholders. Better understanding their world will help you work better together.

Having a portfolio at the ready is always helpful (and can be a nice thing to reflect back on for you). For product marketing, this can consist of things like blogs or web pages you've written, webinars or conference sessions that you've presented, etc. I recommend always keeping a running Google Doc of links to the ones you're especially proud of as they happen. (Reminder, make sure these are externally published and that you're not saving any internal materials from past jobs) If you don't have these materials, you can always offer to do a writing sample or otherwise for the specific interview. However, regardless of whether you have the materials available or not, being able to speak to the projects clearly is what matters most. Be prepared to speak to what the project was, why it mattered, what made it a success (or not), and the role you played in making it happen and what specific assets you owned/created. While the outputs of a launch are great, what's often more important in an interview is showing how you got there and how you navigated any challenges.

Over the past few years (and continuing), it's become more important that product marketers have technical depth in the areas they cover. Being able to go deep in your area will make your messaging better and will help you better identify what are the right topics and tactics necessary to land in the market. This will also make you a more valuable partner to PM, and can open doors to helping with betas and influencing roadmap. You also need to be able to understand data. This ranges from being able to work with data science and analytics teams and clearly communicate what questions you need to answer, to having the ability to dig into data yourself to identify trends and adjust queries.