What do you look for in a product marketer?

What do you look for in a product marketer?

I was asked this question twice this week. People liked what I had to say, so I decided to turn this into a Substack post.

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It is a weird question for me to answer to be honest because I am myself new to product marketing. In fact, I just finished a this book (see below) by Lucas Weber to learn more about this role. Highly recommend this book if you want to read what a day in the life of a product marketer looks like.

But as I have gotten deeper into the role, understood what’s at the heart of this role, and met more PMMs at work and outside, I have realized that PMMs come with very diverse experiences.

Safe PMM hire

Ideally, you would be looking for someone scoring high on one of the following dimensions.

1. Hard PMM experience : They have a track record of “been there, done that” in a product of similar scale. Even better if the products are largely in the same category (i.e. Saas – Productivity or SaaS – HRTech for example).
2. Customer/Industry understanding : They know the customers, their needs, even their language very well, from their past roles. Account Management, Customer Success and Product Management experience falls squarely in this category.

These are typically safe bets, though my one gripe with this approach is that they bias you towards the candidate’s history. (That’s a blog for another day.)

Go wider

You can also go slightly wider, and get people from similar marketing roles before – marketing, sales enablement, pre-sales, solutions design – all of these roles where your success depended on convincing customers using written material (think decks, playbooks, case studies, blogs, whitepapers). But it’s not just a glorified content role.

You are aiming to optimize for the following –

1. Analytical – They are rigorous problem solvers and can think through things like GTM. What do we need to build? Who is it for? Why will they buy? How do we reach them? You are counting on them to provide the thinking muscle as you figure out your positioning, narrative etc.
2. Communication – Structured, persuasive, great listener. This goes for both internal and external communication, and written and verbal.
3. Collaboration – This is really a standard requirement in most roles these days, but even more so for a PMM because of the number of stakeholders directly impacting their work. Product, Tech, Marketing (including regional marketing teams), Sales and Account Management, Customer Success… You get the point.

But the most underrated dimension that you should optimize for is resourcefulness and curiosity.

We are often guilty of biasing towards people with past experience who already know the answers. The really good PMMs come with diverse experiences and therefore diverse strengths. Some aspects come to them easier than others. But if they can quickly learn or pick up things like marketing/growth ops, principles of design, best practices and templates, you have pretty much a winner on your hands.

A PMM’s biggest value is in finding out the answers – whether it’s the customer pain points, the most resounding value props, or the best design or content style. In fact, these things always evolve with time.

The best PMMs are curious, have little ego (about knowing everything), and listen well and ask great questions. They write and speak well. And that’s pretty much the heart of the role.