How to maintain a positive attitude while leading a Product Marketing team?

As a product marketing leader, your purpose drives everything. Understand why your product matters, its unique value, and how it aligns with your values and company goals. This clarity fuels passion and resilience. Measure success by impact, not just sales. A crucial aspect is team belief in the product. If team members aren’t using or believing in the product they’re building, consider letting them go early on. It ensures your team is fully aligned and committed, vital for overcoming challenges and achieving success.

Embracing a growth mindset is key in product marketing. See challenges as learning opportunities, not failures. This mindset encourages you to welcome feedback, innovate, and learn from mistakes. It’s about fostering a team culture that values risk-taking and experimentation. Encourage your team to try new things and share their experiences. With a growth mindset, you recognize potential in yourself and your team, celebrating progress and achievements. This approach not only drives positive change but also nurtures a dynamic, forward-thinking team environment.

If you’re starting a new role as a Product Marketing leader, one of the first things you should focus on is building relationships through building trust. This starts with hearing what your cross-functional partners need, especially with the challenges currently face due to a previous lack of Product Marketing. From there, look to build trust by solving for a few of these challenges to quickly establish your new value to the business.

Listen and get to know people. Don't just ask "who, what, and where", but focus on the "how" and the "why" for each person to understand their unique perspective, situation and challenges and piece together a coherent picture and show that you are interested and care. That builds a foundation of trust required to build enduring relationships that help you carry out your projects and mission while helping others with theirs.

Foster trust, respect, collaboration, and support with your team, peers, managers, and customers. These relationships create a sense of belonging and satisfaction at work. They enable you to leverage diverse strengths and insights, essential for a well-rounded strategy. Effective communication, active listening, showing appreciation, and resolving conflicts are key to these relationships. They don’t just enhance teamwork; they're the foundation for successful marketing initiatives and a thriving work environment.

As a product marketer at any level, 51%+ of your job is communication and relationship building. And, that goes up with seniority. I have found the best way to build relationships is to approach every conversation with humility and curiosity about their goals, and what is getting in their way. With that understanding, you can position yourself and your team to help. Because product marketing varies between organizations, you need to let people know exactly how you can be valuable to them.

Product Marketing can be a demanding role, especially as more of the organization becomes dependent of you and your team as a resource. It’s impossible to say yes to everything, but it also isn’t productive or best for your future relationship building to say no to everything. So what should you do? Ask “why?” By asking why, you can have deeper conversations to uncover challenges, as well as find overlaps to other needs across organizations. Also having that type of conversation sets a precedence to keep Product Marketing from being a request-taker to a collaborator.

This can sound silly, but there is evidence it works. The practice of gratitude is an element shown to elevate happiness overall in courses taught about happiness. When everything I going topsy-turvy, it's helpful to take a deep breath and consider everything that is going well or fine, both professionally and personally, and it helps you regain perspective and calm the part of your "reptilian" brain that has gone into panic mode and shut down your ability to step back and look at things objectively and calmly and formulate possible solutions and a plan.

Product Marketing can be a difficult thing to measure. Because of this, it can be challenging for your team to feel confident in their impact. It’s important to continuously remind your team of their positive contributions, as well as work with stakeholders to understand the impact their work has had on others. Additionally, there’s no need to get caught up on the perfect metric. Instead, focus on the results you can measure that give you confidence that things are working as intended. That should help your team feel a sense of accomplishment and drive further positivity in their work.