Julie Towns

First, here is how I'd define the scope and complexity of a Director level PMM role: * At a director level, your work will be highly strategic in nature. For example, you should be identifying and devising strategies to solve company-wide issues with longer term implications (18-24 months out). Your proposed solutions will go beyond the boundaries of the product or marketing orgs and likely shape how other functions think about the problem space and influence VP+ leaders to help secure the right resources to make progress. Effective PMM directors do not only look at the scope of PMM resource needs but other functions required for a successful company-level GTM approach (e.g. customer operations, technical sales, technical writing, co-marketing budgets etc.). Here are the skills required to move to this leadership level: 1. Product Expertise & Decision Quality - A Director-level PMM will be advising the executive team, using their deep product expertise on emerging industry trends or technologies and then advocate for how the company should respond. They may develop principles or frameworks to scale the future approach across the company, and/or share more broadly to set new industry standards. 2. Communication - A Director-level PMM will be required to effectively and regularly communicate with a company's most senior leaders. To do this well, you'll need to lead with succinct, structured insights or clear points to land, and know when and how to step into a conversation to get towards a desired outcome. Before speaking up, always ask yourself: what do I want the leadership team to take away, and will it help advance the conversation and/or goals of the meeting? Director-level PMMs also anticipate communication breakdowns in product, sales or GTM planning and proactively mitigate this by summarizing key issues and seek clarity in meetings or stakeholder forums. 3. Influence & Stakeholder Management - At a Director-level, PMMs should be advising the executive team and deciding on company priorities for the PMM organization, alongside PMM leadership. They may create cross-organizational teams to address company-wide gaps and lead trade-off decisions across company priorities. They will know when and how to effectively escalate the most sensitive business-impacting issues and align outcomes with leadership. For example, you may align different leaders across product, sales, and marketing on whether to focus on customer segment A vs. customer segment B during yearly planning. Your ability to influence leaders towards an aligned goal is critical.

A strong product marketer should have skills across both the inbound and outbound components of the role. * Inbound = inputs into product to define the roadmap and build the right features to achieve product market fit for customers. * Outbound = owning the product message, positioning, and GTM strategy outwards to the market and customers. I believe that product marketers are at their best when they're influencing and helping to build the right product from the onset. Branding and marketing the product after that come much more naturally when there is a real customer need or problem the product is solving. So in short, it's more critical for a PMM to have analytical skills to influence the product strategy than brand marketing skills, in my opinion.

The highest quality PMM decisions are ones where the data and customer anecdotes align. Skilled PMMs often bring a strong perspective to a conversation, but are willing to be wrong and change their recommendations in light of new or better information. A strong POV can come from either data or your intuition, but one alone is never enough. You can state a hypothesis and then seek to validate this through both direct customer feedback and qualified data. You should always be suspicious when the data and customer anecdotes don't match up. When this happens, trust the anecdotes and your intuition and reinspect the data.

As you get more senior in your career in any role, but especially one as cross-functional in nature as PMM, soft skills become much more important than hard skills or product expertise, especially if you are a fast learner. You can learn the hard skills of a job, within reason. For example, if you're a PMM, taking a job in engineering will be stretch, but if you have a background in one industry you can absolutely take a PMM job in a completely different industry. What's important is your ability to ask great questions to learn quickly. As for soft skills, these are harder to coach and develop overnight and can take years to truly master and find your unique style. So I'd recommend focusing on: 1. Concise communication. For example, effectively communicating the complexities of a product to sales or being able to simplify your recommended GTM strategy to product is critical. 2. Building relationships and earning trust. Taking the time to get to know your partners, build a strong rapport and deliver on your promises when you need nothing from them will come in handy when eventually you need their help. 3. Understanding organizational dynamics and how to influence. PMM is a heavy influencing role where we don't always have the resourcing or authority to drive towards an outcome, so instead we need our partner teams in product, sales, marketing, research, comms etc. to take on work on our behalf. Understanding how to navigate an organization, who to influence and how is key to getting things done, scaling yourself and delivering results.