We’ve talked about the fact that defining product marketing is hard, which mean it isn’t a job for just anyone (see what is product marketing). There are specific skills necessary to navigate a role that spans across many teams within a business in order to solve for the customer. Whether you’re looking to hire a top product marketer, or are interested in exploring the role, read through these six traits and skills product marketers need to be successful.
They’re passionate about solving for the customer
A good product marketer needs to have a deep empathy for customer pain and be passionate about solving them. Understanding a customer and the market isn’t enough. They need to be take a feature and translate it into benefits that meet customers’ needs.
They can lead cross functionally
Product marketing works at the intersection of sales, marketing and product. In this position, excellent communication skills are vital. Product marketers need to know how to work with and align these teams and be able lead each group toward the same goals.
They’re technical
In order to lead cross functionally, product marketers need the technical skills to effectively communicate and plan projects with design and product teams. They also need to understand the technical elements of a product in order to communicate how they work and what benefits they bring to the customer.
They’re great writers
Great products with great features are awesome, but only if the customer understands them. Product marketers need to be able to communicate the benefits of complex features and updates and make them easy for customers to get started with. Adoption and demand for a product rely heavily on great writing.
They thrive in ambiguity
Since product marketing as a whole is hard to define, the day-to-day of a PMM can be, too. Being able to navigate an unstructured environment is a must in order to find and act on opportunities to improve the customer’s experience. They need to determine which teams within the company they need to start a dialogue with and start working with them without any instruction.
They’re creative problem solvers
Drawing solutions from input across multiple teams requires some creativity. A good PMM needs both creative and analytical skills to connect data points from a number of sources and come up with out-of-the-box solutions that customers need and respond to.
Get to know other seasoned product marketers in the Product Marketing Slack Channel.