5 minute read
This guest article from Product Marketing Manager Dan Beal outlines his career path from marketing to product and back again. He shares tips to help aspiring Product Marketing Managers seek expert training and achieve their career goals.
Making the leap to product marketing from another field can be daunting. Do you have the right experience? Do your qualifications match? Our guest contributor Dan Beal shares his journey from marketing to product management and product marketing and highlights how a different professional background can be an asset for new product professionals.
Read on to learn how Dan became a product marketing manager. You can also skip to the section you’re most interested in:
- Moving from marketing to product marketing
- A day in the life of a Product Marketing Manager
- Reach your product marketing career goals with Pragmatic Institute training
- Advice for aspiring Product Marketing Managers
Transitioning from Marketing to Product Marketing
When I was younger, I didn’t know product management was even a career path.
I’ve always been slightly technical and even made my way through part of an engineering degree before I decided I wanted to do something more creative. So, I pursued a degree in journalism and advertising. My education and training made me a good fit for a technical writing job at a small company.
Eventually, I moved jobs and became a Marketing Manager, but throughout my career, I was always opinionated about products and wanted to be the voice of the customer. Finally, the founder of the company told me, “You should just be the product manager”. That’s how I started my career in product management and product marketing.
After a few career pivots, I’ve landed a role that lets me bridge the gap between product management and product marketing.
A Day in the Life of a Product Marketing Manager
My current company, Progress Telerik, is in a very technical industry, and our product managers have strong technical backgrounds. I support product marketing, which defines the product’s go-to-market strategy.
We work hard to understand the buyer persona, target the message, and communicate the product’s value. This includes internal marketing to other teams in my company and external marketing to prospects and customers. We also have a seat at the table for overall business and product planning.
Here are some of the responsibilities and tasks I have as a product marketing manager:
- Understand the audience
- Reporting back to the engineering team and telling them about the audience’s problems
- Communicating our plans and our value back to the market
- Instructing the marketing communication teams on what message needs to be delivered and to whom.
- Serving as evangelists of the product (in partnership with the developer relations team)
- Designing marketing themes for the portfolio of products and shaping those themes for individual product lines
- Creating quarterly and yearly go-to-market plans
I report to the Director of Product. Today, I’m a Senior Product Manager, and I don’t have any direct reports. Much like product managers and product marketing managers everywhere, I lead many cross-functional efforts. A typical day is 20% analytics, 20% writing, 20%, and 40% meetings.
How Pragmatic Institute Courses Helped Me Reach My Career Goals
I switched from marketing to product a long time ago. At first, I was self-taught. Over time, Pragmatic Institute’s product marketing training has helped me hone my skills and become a better product professional.
When I started, my biggest knowledge gap was understanding how products are built. Specifically, I didn’t know how product managers help create and prioritize unique solutions. Developers and engineers often build impressive products that don’t solve their customers’ problems.
The training I received from Pragmatic Institute helped me tremendously. Pragmatic Principles instill the need to create products that matter to customers, and the Pragmatic Framework gave me a structure to follow for consistent results.
I advise people in their early careers to consume all the resources they can and complete as many trainings and certifications as possible. I didn’t do any of that stuff until late in my career. When I finally completed them, they boosted my career because they provided actionable solutions to my problems and helped me solidify my processes. Having industry-recognized best practices also helps you stick to your product plans if you experience pushback from cross-functional teams or leadership.
When I worked at a legal software company, one of our leading products was a multi-function firm management system. This aging product was still the segment leader, but new market problems emerged and put the product at risk. To save our product, we needed to align the whole business to solve the most pervasive and impactful market problem.
After hundreds of conversations and analysis of support tickets, we had an “AHA” moment. Our users were legal admins, but our decision-makers were attorneys. These attorneys were most concerned with getting paid on time, so we focused on improving the product’s billing features. Our competitors’ marketing failed to speak to the buyers’ main problem. By using the Pragmatic Framework, we identified a key market problem and developed and marketed product features to solve that problem. Over time, we turned flat sales into growing sales and converted apathetic users into champions.
My Advice for Aspiring Product Marketing Managers
I’ve met people who are interested in transitioning to product but are afraid to make the career jump because they don’t have product experience. Here’s the truth: Businesses need well-rounded product teams with people who have backgrounds in customer support, sales, marketing, and engineering.
Customer support professionals have a keen understanding of user problems. Salespeople understand buyer persona. Marketers are strong communicators. Engineers understand the technical work that goes into product development. The list goes on.
So, don’t be discouraged from applying to a role just because you lack the exact skills or experience the role requires. Product team leaders often look for hires with potential or a particular mindset rather than specific product experience.
It’s hard to say what job titles make up an ideal product team because that will vary based on the size of the organization and the industry, but some functions make the work successful in my experience.
Each product team is different, so there is no set combination of roles and titles that creates a perfect time. In my opinion, a successful product team includes a Product Manager and a Product Marketing Manager. It’s also helpful to have cross-functional representation from sales, customer support, and engineering.
There’s no one way to become a product manager or product marketing manager. I’m lucky that my career path brought me to product and that I could leverage my marketing skills and learn product best practices with Pragmatic Institute training. If you’re considering making the leap to product, be confident in your skills and pursue training and certifications that will support your career goals.
