Be a product marketing manager

[naomi_kramer]

Define your responsibilities
Set short and long term marketing goals
Put together a marketing team
Lead your marketing team harnessing people management, team motivation, and conflict resolution skills
Build your own skills by wearing many hats

@naomik

1. Define your responsibilities.

A product marketing manager is responsible for leading a team of product marketers, establishing a go-to-market strategy, conducting customer research, and defining messaging and positioning for the product.

Summarize this info in the step itself. At the moment the step is just a heading.

@naomik

2. Set short and long term marketing goals.

You will work closely with the product manager to understand the future and direction of new product developments, and tailor their marketing strategy to its evolution. This aspect of the PMM’s job description is fairly research-heavy, covering areas such as:

• The target customer. What are the primary customer needs? What challenges do they face? Where can they be found? How do they use our product?
• Product naming. Based on an understanding of the target audience, and typically developed using focus group research.
• Product positioning. What category does the product fall into? Who is the product for? What benefits does the product offer, and how do they contribute to customer success?

The PMM is also responsible for clearly communicating their product marketing strategy motivations to their product marketing team.

The ideal way to do this is to involve your team in building the vision itself. When everyone in your team has contributed to the product marketing strategy, and owns specific duties (e.g., social media research, framing messaging, etc.), they’re more committed to the goal you’ve defined.

You got all the relevant info - good! Now you need to massage it into the format we use for playbooks. Look through this passage for short- and long-term goals, and include them in the step. Along these lines:

Set long-term marketing goals, like your product positioning and vision, with your team. Set short-term marketing goals, like your target customer, product naming, and messaging, with the product manager.

Remember that everything is action-focused and reader-focused in a playbook. Don’t say The PMM is also responsible for clearly communicating their product marketing strategy motivations to their product marketing team — instead say Clearly communicate your product marketing strategy motivations to your team. Talk directly to the reader.

@naomik

3. Put together a marketing team.

Look for gaps in your own skill set by performing an honest assessment of yourself as a marketer, and rank your ability in each discipline. Then fill those gaps with complementary hires with strengths in other disciplines.

When building a marketing team consider important skills like:

• Market research.
• Copywriting.
• Problem-solving.
• Email marketing.

The step itself needs more information. Assume that the reader won’t check the step explanation. Pick out the key points from the explanation that the reader needs to know – add those points to the step. In this case, the key points are:

• range of skills
• especially ones that you’re lacking in.

@naomik

4. Lead your marketing team harnessing people management, team motivation, and conflict resolution skills.

This is all the important info - good! Just flip it to make it more actionable - Lead your team is very vague, but something like Develop your people management, team motivation, and conflict resolution skills to help you lead your team effectively gives immediate options for people to follow up.

@naomik

New leaders should consider Harvard’s 6 styles of leadership, to understand which persona they most strongly embody.

Remember the whole ‘playbooks are action-focused, reader-focused’ thing.

@naomik

5. Build your own skills by wearing many hats.

This isn’t actionable (unless taken literally). What is the reader supposed to do here? You need to find a way to usefully summarize the information in this section of the blog post. Hint: A PMM needs to learn a lot about the product, its customers, competitors, market conditions, and how to track performance.