Chanel Chambers

I've been hiring entry-level (and higher) PMMs for 8 years, and beyond the typical things that are in the job description, here are the differentiators that separate the great candidates from the so-so candidates: * Comfort with ambiguity: The problems we deal with in product marketing are inherently ambiguous. There's no "right" answer, but there are answers that are "better" than others. If you're looking for a role that has step-by-step instructions or a checklist, PMM is not your job. * Have a point of view: Your job as a marketer is to articulate a story. You can't articulate a story if you don't have a point of view. * Demonstrate Impact and Influence regardless of your role in the organization: Ultimately marketing is a persuasive endeavor. We may not have authority over our audience but we still must influence them. This goes for internal and external stakeholders: Can you influence a product team to make certain roadmap decisions, even though you are not their boss? Can you influence sales enablement? Can you influence customers? Fortunately, these skills are transferable: Even if you are an entry-level product marketing candidate, you can still provide examples to show you have these attributes.

There are definitely some transferable skills between a CPG Brand manager and a product marketing manager: * Customer research/insights/market research * Foundational marketing skills (market segmentation, targeting, positioning) * Cross-functional collaboration, influence without authority, communication, etc. However, the applicability of these skills to a product marketing manager role depends heavily on the type of company you are targeting. Product Marketing Manager roles are prevalent in tech companies, and especially abundant at B2B/enterprise tech companies. Tech companies live and die by innovation: they are constantly creating original categories, destroying old ones, and launching entirely new products. This keeps product marketers busy because each new product needs ICP definitions, buyer persona/journey work, positioning, messaging, etc. This also means that PMMs are constantly learning new things, and that some measure of subject matter expertise is necessary in most PMM roles. So if you're looking to break in to PMM from a CPG company, take some time to think about the areas you want to invest energy in to getting to a basic level of subject matter understanding: FinTech? EdTech? Cybersecurity? DevOps? Each of these areas will have audiences, concepts, language, and conventions that will make your job transition easier if you understand them. So, in summary, it is realistic to go from brand manager to PMM, you just need to focus your search and emphasize the transferable marketing skills you have and articulate them in the context of the space you're looking to enter.

When I'm taking over a PMM team, my first priority is to understand the individual people on the team, what drives them, what they are good at, and what they think is going well with the business and what is not. I meet with each member of the team and ask some variation on the following: * What's going well? * What's not? * How do you define your role, and what does a typical day look like? * How can I support you as your manager? What do you need from me to be successful? * Where would you like to take your career? I ask these questions in part to get to know the team, and in part to suss out: * Does this person understand the business? Are they plugged in to how the business makes money, what the high-level strategy is, and do they have a point of view of what could be changed and why? * Are they able to articulate a relationship between what they do and the business results? * Is this person being put in a position their best work? Are they in the right role? Is a career management discussion in order? * As I build the team, where would this person be the best fit based on their interest and aptitude? In the first team meeting, I discuss: 1. Summary/synthesis of what I heard from the team in my individual meetings 2. Big picture on where the team is in alignment with overall business strategy and how we can execute on the strategy 3. Discussion on how best to work together as a team 4. Concrete next steps on goal setting, priorities, and development of a business-focused PMM plan