How can you become a better leader in product marketing?

I suggest sitting with your engineers and just silently listening to them; that is the best way to learn about the product. This helps when someone asks you about the product, or you need to make critical decisions relevant to product marketing. Being in the field and seeing the action happening in person is the right way to grow your knowledge.

Confidence speaks volumes and it grabs attention. If you don’t know your product or offering thoroughly, it jeopardizes credibility. It can send a confused, distorted, or ineffective message and inadvertently turn your audience away and toward a competitor. Confidence is key. And ask for feedback from those who know more than you, but be sure that you genuinely want to hear it. It helps you learn, provides perspective you otherwise wouldn’t have had, and proves you’re willing to embrace the contributions and expertise of others in your organization.

My opinion: knowing your solution in and out is the starting point, being able to take that knowledge and translate it in a way that resonates with your target market is the important sauce. Articulate its value, what problems will it solve, what business value will it drive.. Solution knowledge is only powerful if the person that you are explaining it too understands!!

It is extremely important to understand your product inside and out. In my case I work with pharmaceutical brands, where understanding the data is extremely important, but in addition to that is understanding the differentiating factor that separates your brand from the competition. Once you have figured that out, making sure that your product meet needs of your customers is important. This will enables you to disseminate the right messages through the most appropriate channels for that customer.

Often we underestimate the importance of finer details that goes into the product development process. A thorough understanding of the product development can lead to communication which can differentiate the brand in a crowded market. A self analysis of the available facts and testing the hypothesis can help create a beautiful brand story which gets etched in the minds of the consumer.

Don’t expect others on your team to have the same work ethic as you. Appreciate each member for their ability and guide them towards adding their value to the team with their strengths

Based on my work, I strongly recommend that as a product marketing leader, collaboration and co-creation with local teams in all areas are crucial. Treating the product as your "child" and striving to make a difference and impact with it is important. Leading by example, especially internally, sets a great foundation. Additionally, actively listening to customers and incorporating their perspectives and experiences will enable you to effectively address their demands and challenges, ultimately building trust. As a product marketing leader, your reputation and the trust you establish are vital in creating successful products. You bear the ultimate responsibility for ensuring the product's success and positioning it as a star in the market.

Be the conduit between the Product/R&D & the Sales teams. Treat them as your customers to get the best outcome. Cross-functional team collaboration is crucial for being a successful PM leader or an individual contributor. Collaborating closely with other departments, such as R&D and Product, provides you with the insights you need to do your job right - truly understand the benefits of your product and its differentiator. Collaborating with sales and customer service - gives you much-needed customer insight - on how you can position your product so it can address certain market needs. It fosters a more integrated approach to product development and marketing, ensuring that products are not only technically sound but also market-ready.

For my entire marketing career, including my current role in product, strong relationships have been the catalyst for my success. Whether it's learning something new, collaboration on any facet of the product journey, meaningful feedback that leads to development or improvement. People are the catalyst for everything, and the better those relationships are, the better product marketer, you will be.

I believe that an important initiative of the Product Marketing leader is the investment in Sales Enablement, which provides guidelines on how to support the sales team in the correct positioning of the product. This support must consist of a set of practices that aim to improve and train sales professionals, from optimizing processes, defining guidelines to providing tools, training and inputs to improve sales routines and performance, to so companies stand out in such a competitive market.

I found a leadership has to come from a personality and to understand how you can impact individuals and as a group. As the leader you always have to think about what can be done better, is it by motivating the team or inspiring them by group initiatives and by setting an example. The product leader has to know and continue to learn all about the market in question, and to navigate the right decision making through the process. To set the right timeline and steps along the way and not wait for the end results. m Managing the process by putting actual dates on the calendar. Eventually if the right steps are reached the product will be able to launch successfully. Good luck

In my 15+ years of product marketing experience, I have learnt that knowing the products, and collaborating with cross functional teams are basic necessities. ☝️ I would recommend to work on the leadership skills, not just people management. In my view, it refers to leading the organization with a purpose, vision, and a clear strategic direction. 🎯As a product marketer, everyone looks upon you as voice of market, segments as customers. 💡 Defining this, will drive the organization towards innovation, cost leadership that will achieve the end goal of value creation. 💰 Finally, it also means to leadership in alignment of the vision and strategy to top-down and bottom-up. 🔗 Let me know your thoughts 💭

As a product marketer one needs to be able to connect wonderfully with both top management & ground force. As an effective leader you should be able to clearly understand the expectations of what sales team is expecting, merge it with management objectives & propose a strategy that people can relate to. Because if they relate to it, they will do anything to make it successful

Improving leadership skills requires continuous self-development through self-awareness, learning, and communication. Taking feedback with an open mindset to learn and improve. Adopt a growth mentality to view challenges as opportunities. Refine communication abilities for clarity and active listening. Lead by modeling desired values and work ethic.

Marketing is an inherently challenging function because inspite of all the technology available today, measuring ROI is difficult. One of the important aspects of being a good leader is being able to articulate to your executives and peers the "why" behind your big marketing initiatives. In some cases this could be data backed in other cases you'll need to build a convincing argument without it. You have to be a change maker and influencer inside your org. And that comes with building strong relationships across finance, product, sales, customer success, and of course your customers.

In addition to learning from fellow product marketers, you can also learn a lot from your cross functional stakeholders. Product marketing is inherently cross functional and you interact with sales, product, customer success teams, and customers. The idea and inspiration for your next new initiative could come from any of these. So make sure you develop good listening skills and stay open to feedback. And if you do develop one of their suggestions into a program, then give them credit, appreciate their contribution. That can not only help you build strong relationships but also make sure that people continue to come to you with their best ideas!

Seek mentorship from experienced leaders, attend industry events, and devour relevant resources. Stay curious, open to new ideas, and constantly improve your skillset. The best leaders are lifelong learners, continuously evolving and adapting to the ever-changing marketing landscape.

Embrace a growth mindset and actively seek opportunities for learning and development from peers, mentors, and industry experts. Engage in knowledge-sharing sessions, workshops, and industry conferences to stay updated on the latest trends and best practices in product marketing. For example, participate in webinars hosted by industry thought leaders, join professional networking groups, and attend virtual meetups to exchange insights and experiences with fellow product marketers. Cultivate a culture of continuous learning within your team, encouraging knowledge sharing and collaboration.

Continuous learning is a hallmark to being a better leader. While it is not beneficial to always be the smartest or most knowledgeable one in the room, the ability to foster heightened awareness of new ways to approach work, or to save time, or to become more effective in your role as a product marketing leader is essential. Stagnation or contentment will result in a loss of productivity and credibility among team members. The value of diversity is that others you work with are going to bring different perspectives and ways to accomplish work. As a leader it is beneficial to learn about those perspectives and approaches so that you can both recognize the strengths of others as well as become empowered to look at problem solving differently.

Needless to say, the importance of feedback of internal stakeholders , it helps to understand the challenges at different stages and hence designing a proactive solution for that. Say, product needs to be psoitined among low income category people, so its important to understand brand story which you are using for product, is easily understood and appreciated by your office-staff say gatekeeper and peons.

You have to be willing to take risks. There will be new challenges that are outside your comfort zone. Embrace the unknown and be ready to roll up your sleeves as needed.

I'm a huge believer in the principle of the continuous learning curve resulting from a humility to allow yourself to be wrong, check your assumptions, listen to feedback, check your ego at the door when you walk into the meeting and be open to learn new things to do better going forward.

Finishing this comment, you will find the most contradictory insight based on what I've learned by doing at $MELI, R2 (Series A) and Betterfly (Unicorn): 1️⃣ Embrace the Unknown: Innovation thrives in uncharted territory. Push boundaries. 2️⃣ Fail Fast and Cheap, Learn Faster: Extract valuable insights from every experiment. Not every outcome is desired, but each provides valuable learnings. 3️⃣ Data is Your Guide: Base experiments on data-driven hypotheses. Let data be your compass in decision-making. 4️⃣but also Trust Your Gut: Blend expertise with experimentation for faster improvements. Specially for small audiences. Always validate with data for long-term success. Share your thoughts on experimentation! 🚀💼 #ProductMarketing

I have always loved Simon Sinek's idea that the best leaders make you feel safe - so that you can try new things. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't and sometimes you have a runaway hit! Either way, it's important to understand why - what were the drivers to success or key factors that made it fall flat? If you can take the lesson learned here and socialize it with the team, that effort will have been worthwhile. Most teams don't take the time to document post-mortem insights which is a shame because then the only way to tap into these insights is to talk to someone who knows. It's like resorting to an oral-tribal culture.

Nothing is perfect in the world ,and so is the product , in current dynamic scenarios, one should be agile to change the product construct in rapid pace as soon as its journey looks getting compromised and not meeting required sales as envisaged initially. So, test on small group, test the hypothesis ,increase the size, re test and change as per feedback and re test and then again re launch.

Product Marketers can also help everyone at the company be better storytellers. The Sales teams that close big deals should easily weave those anecdotes into subsequent discussions with prospects. And company leaders probably have their own favorite "win" stories. But what about the rest of the company? Product Marketers can collect and summarize these stories into compelling, bite-sized anecdotes that tell your company's story effectively and succinctly. Be sure to include business outcomes, and hide customer names if needed. And provide those snippets to SDRs, Demand Gen, PR, AR, and even HR/recruiters. They are "selling" your story to their audiences; real stories are more memorable than generic marketing copy.

In order to become a better leader for product marketing you should have a passion for talking with 'real' customers of your particular product or service. Then carefully listen and then be able to clearly articulate the business value as, hopefully a referenceable case study, or at the last a use case scenario. Be able to tell the story of decision-making and persona of the decision maker. Explain the process that was involved, how the engagement process went and then ultimately the result. Lastly, don't tell a fake story and provide areas of improvement because, after all, nothing is 100% perfect and people appreciate transparency.

Be the avatar of your customers! Product marketers need to be maniacal about understanding and representing the viewpoint of the customer. You really can't spend enough time with them and learning about their operations, pains, needs and attitudes. Then you need to bring that understanding into the business, all departments, all the time to build not just customer understanding but empathy and a potent desire to help.

Effective communication through storytelling is key in product marketing leadership. Enhancing this skill is vital for conveying the impact of your work. As a leader, it's important to share data-driven insights, achievements, and learnings not just within your team but across the organization and industry. Craft compelling, authentic stories that underline your product's value and impact. Remember to include narratives about challenges and successes, as these elements resonate and illustrate the real-world journey of your product. This approach not only strengthens your leadership but also reinforces the significance of your product in the market.

In launching a new product, consider the know, like trust principle. In that, your existing customers, whom you have already built trust with, could be a great source to consider taking your product to, not to "sell them," but to seek their opinion, validating the problem/challenge and the product as a potential solution. Listen intently, not just to validate, but with discernment.

One thing I consider fundamental for MedTech product managers is customer obsession. Especially in new product development, the role of the PM is to keep the team focused on the customers.

So much of being a good product marketer is listening to your buyers and users and boiling that all down for other stakeholders in the business. Hone those qualitative interview skills. Marry that with the data you have about buyer behavior, user behavior. Tell the story of your customers back to your product counterparts, sales counterparts, demand marketers. Be the customer's voice.

The number 1 team member you really need to listen to is your customer/client. I have gotten so caught up in the perspectives of my internal team members that I totally missed the voice of the customer, was way off target in that regard, and subsequently was way off target on the goal for the product.

Understanding market problems / customer challenges is paramount. That helps not only with the actual product definition but also go-to-market strategy, value prop etc. Another aspect of GTM strategy is Sales Enablement. Unfortunately, this sometimes is an after thought. Sales organization is an important internal customer of product marketing/product management. The easier we make it for them to sell the product (battle cards, value prop, product pitch decks, demos, etc.) the more they tend to sell your product.

- know your customer - know your market - know your product There are sub-themes under each of the above that every product leader needs to master. You cannot rest on your laurels for a moment.