Career Transitions: Product Management vs. Product Marketing

Even the best solution in the world is useless if the people who need it can’t find it.

Continuing on sharing career advice from recent conversations making switches to and from product management, today I’ll go over product marketing.

Product Marketers -> Product Management

0-1 is about going from ideation to launch, but bringing it from 1-2 (or 1-scale) is something you’ll need to start pondering over.

Making a jump from marketing to management of a product is going to need you to learn how to prioritize features/requirements, collect/analyze user feedback, and make decisions after weighing the pros and cons. The easiest way I can recommend to shift your mindset to this is to work with your existing product team with building out the roadmap and participating in backlog discussions.

Product Managers -> Product Marketing

It’s one thing for product managers to communicate what their solution’s vision and strategy is, but another to make sure it gets in front of the right people at the right time.

This transition’s main focus will revolve around your ability to position your product to your potential audience. You’ll need to get good at storytelling, familiar with customer segmentation and pricing, and, if you can, get hands-on with campaigning and launches with your existing marketing team.

A past colleague of mine shares a great tip here if you’re looking to go from product management to marketing: people make decisions based on emotion, not logic. If you want to market something successfully, you need to be able to help your audience feel the pain they suffer from and associate the relief your solution provides in a way that resonates with them. Keep it simple, too; no one cares that your product has the latest in X, Y, Z technology. What they do care about is that it’ll help save them time that they can reinvest into doing the things they want to do.

If you’re considering a switch from product marketing to management, or product management to marketing, reach out if you have any questions! I’ve been at this for well over a decade and am happy to help and share what I’ve seen help and not help.