I’ve often been asked how I go about the task of building and managing a product marketing team. And, while this question is relevant to almost any business function, the job of building and managing a successful product marketing team requires a different lens than other marketing functions.
Building a high-performance product marketing team starts long before building personas or messaging frameworks. It begins with choosing the right people. As I discussed in a previous article, product marketing can take on forms that differ depending on company size, product portfolio, and reporting relationship. However, the core product marketing disciplines and traits allow top-performing PPMs to succeed in any environment.
Seek a Mix of Backgrounds
In my experience, there are two primary archetypes of product marketers:
1. Career marketers who deeply understand messaging, personas, value props, and go-to-market motions but may need time to learn the industry or technology. Most often, these are people hired from outside the company.
2. Subject-matter experts who understand the space, the customer, and the problems inside out, but are still developing their marketing craft. These people often move into a PMM role from SME roles within the company or industry.
Neither background is inherently better. I’ve seen people of both pedigrees succeed and fail. However, when you build a team with different strengths, different perspectives, and different instincts, they can help each other in ways that a homogenous group cannot. Not only will an SME provide insights that the career marketer may miss, but there is less chance of an ego-based objection to the input because it’s assumed the SME will have the deepest knowledge of the customer. Conversely, if the SME struggles to adapt their knowledge to a workable format, the career marketer can be a valuable and non-threatening voice.
When these backgrounds blend, you get a team that can think strategically, execute effectively, and speak credibly to product, sales, and customers. They can also make each other better if the team is managed so that they measure themselves against goals rather than against one another.
While the ideal candidate for a specific role may be a highly-skilled career marketer or a sales engineer who wants to apply their expertise in a new way, having a mix of these backgrounds can help the team stretch to meet the workload and speed required to support a high-growth company.
Comparing Apples and Oranges
With that consideration in mind, how does a manager find the right candidates when the top candidates’ backgrounds are not easy to compare? For me, the best way to compare those varied candidates is to discuss the three foundational abilities that underlie nearly all product marketing work: Expertise, Evangelization, and Collaboration.
Rather than ask about these abilities directly, I like to discuss the role and the candidate’s experience generally and look for these themes to emerge. If they highlight experiences that relied on these attributes, that’s a good sign. If they discuss these attributes and intentionally tie their work to them, that’s a great sign.
Here’s how I go about surfacing candidates’ aptitude in the three pillars of product marketing:
Expertise: A Natural Curiosity and Desire to Learn
Product marketers don’t need to be the smartest people in the room; they need to be the most curious. I look for signs that someone enjoys digging into problems, following threads, researching endlessly, and asking the “why behind the why.” The best PMMs constantly build expertise on customers, markets, competitors, and product use cases. Among the questions I’ll ask:
- How do you stay current with trends that impact your customers and products?
- Do they prioritize learning and driving the market, or are they reactive?
- Tell me about the most unexpected learning you’ve had that turned out to be valuable.
- Do they think about putting new information into context, or are they unlikely to use it?
Learning: Does this candidate make time to stay ahead of the market, or do they wait to gather information until the need is urgent, which is usually too late to profit from it?
Evangelization: The Impulse to Share What They Know
Great PMMs don’t hoard information; they spread it. I look for people who naturally love to explain, teach, and tell stories. Evangelization shows up in cross-functional conversations, in how they discuss technology outside of work, and in how excited they got describing their previous company’s mission. A PMM’s ability to share knowledge and narrative is what powers sales enablement, product alignment, and demand generation. Sample questions include:
- What is the most interesting aspect of the customers you served in a previous job?
- Do they tell this story as if they are interested or as if they are reading from a script?
- Tell me about a product you’ve championed that wasn’t getting traction. What made you keep pushing?
- Are they self-motivated? Are they natural advocates?
Learning: Does this person relish the opportunity to share information, and are they passionate about informing and persuading people?
Collaboration: Low-Ego, High-Trust Teammates
Product marketing can’t succeed in isolation. PMMs collaborate with sales, product, demand gen, customer success, and leadership teams daily. I’m looking for someone who can balance confidence with humility and who doesn’t need to “own the room” to influence it. The best PMMs assume positive intent, ask good questions, and build trust quickly.
- If you are the key contributor to a cross-functional team, but the whole team gets equal credit, how do you react to that?
- Do they need the credit, or is the win enough?
- Tell me how you prioritize replying to teammates when they have questions?
- Do they focus on the value of the communication to the company, or do they focus on what’s best for them?
Learning: Will this candidate elevate communication within our team and between functional areas to accelerate our work, or will they create friction that slows us down?
Look for People Who Can Adapt to Shifting Priorities
Every PMM leader knows that priorities change, often very quickly. And, because product marketing is an “ingredient brand,” it is likely to be forced to adapt to changes in the product or sales strategy from time to time, while the reverse will rarely (if ever) happen. So I always look for candidates who can re-prioritize without losing momentum or morale. People who thrive in ambiguity and see change as an opportunity rather than a setback are essential. People who can be reassigned from a product to a vertical market and are excited by the new challenge. Flexibility is a must in any product marketing team.
With these insights into team development, the next step is to develop a management framework for this unique discipline.
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