What do you see as the most important hard/soft skills to be a successful product marketing professional?

Required Hard (Functional) Skills:

• Analytical — both quantitative and qualitative. From financial modeling to behavioral analysis to awareness campaign tracking to focus group findings, you’re going to need to be able to dissect data, interpret it, and figure out what the implications are.
• Strong communicator — can clearly explain rationale for decisions as well as tell stories to persuade
• Able to influence — can shift mindsets in peers as well as senior leadership. This includes peers and leaders in all types of cross-functional teams, including product management, design, operations, sales, business analysis, and more.
• Strategic — can see the big picture amidst changing company, customer, and competitive dynamics and make choices about where, when, and how to focus to succeed
• Curious — wants to understand the business, competition and customer and develop better solutions based on new information

Required Soft Skills:

• Resilient — able to push through barriers and just keep going, in spite of ambiguity and power dynamics
• Resourceful and solutions-oriented — able to think creatively to identify alternative people and methods to reach your objectives.
• Able to develop relationships — relationships are currency. Make friends so you’ll have an inside track to getting things done
• Flexible — able to roll with the punches. Conditions will change, and your leadership will drop in requests that you didn’t anticipate; you will be respected for keeping a positive attitude and being willing to change course as needs arise.
• Able to act amidst ambiguity — there is often no defined path for the projects you are undertaking. You need to be able to structure the opportunity, chart the path, and then move the organization towards the goal.

The level of importance of each of these skills may vary depending on the particular company and the growth stage you’re in. For instance, being able to influence may be more important in a large company (vs a startup) because you’ll be working with many more groups and stakeholders. Being able to influence is important in either case, but the level of intensity is likely greater in a bigger company.