What Product Marketers ACTUALLY Do in Tech Companies!

product marketing a field that has recently exploded in popularity with tech companies large and small fighting for the best product marketing managers but what exactly is it that we do yeah so i honestly didn't even know product marketing was a field apple only traditionally had product marketing managers why is it not just marketing why is it product marketing and that is what we're here to find out let's get started hi friends welcome back channel if you're new here my name is jeff and i've been a product marketing manager at one of the large tech companies for the past five years now and this is everything i know about being a pmm

first there are three types of products pmms and tech generally work on business to consumer b2c products that can be further broken down to software google search instagram notion and hardware the iphones chromebooks and oculus headsets then you have business to business b2b products such as google ads salesforce and workday and third business to developer b2d products like android and ios products like notion offer both b2c and b2b solutions android and ios reach us the consumers through the play and app stores while at the same time supporting developers and creating those apps as well since the needs of those target audiences consumers businesses developers are so different it's not uncommon to have different pmms working on separate campaigns for the same product for how we spend our time this

will obviously vary by company and product but in my experience only five to ten percent of our time goes into what i call the end result forty to forty five percent of our time is spent on communication and the remaining 40 to 45 is spent on what i call a loan work which is not as sad as it sounds let's take two very high profile tech events as examples google i o and apple's wwdc both events last for a maximum of one week and that's the part end users like developers and consumers actually get to see and experience right from the event landing page to the confirmation emails and of course the actual event itself those are the end result what we don't see are the months pmm spend communicating with internal stakeholders and external partners for example internally we work with all the speakers to align on a single narrative externally we make sure the creative agencies adhere to our brand guidelines and alone work it's not that sad at least to introverts like myself this could be where the pmm is creating slides to brief the project team building spreadsheets to track the number of signups and turning meeting notes from the communication phase into next steps and action items i actually have an entire video teaching you how to plan marketing events step by step so check that out afterwards to give a completely different example let's say you're a product marketer for a b2c digital product after a multiple rounds of feedback the product team finally rolls out with a feature update as a pmm you now get to decide how to communicate this change with the end user is an in-app notification enough should you email and send them a text message are you a pmm in china so wechat is the best channel to use and that's just for existing users how can you position this change and what channels should you use to acquire new users by the way if you're watching this and you're in product marketing would love to know your thoughts down below and let me know where they're hiring just kidding i love my job on that note let's talk about qualities

i've observed in strong pmms and this can be broken down to hard skills and soft skills i'd say hard skills are more relevant for b2b and b2d product marketing roles where the product is a bit more technical for example if you want to be a product marketing manager for tick-tock ads not tick-tock but tick-tock ads it helps if you're either an account manager at tick tock selling the product to businesses or if you used it yourself since you would literally know the strengths and shortcomings of the product moving over to soft skills i would say first you have to be really flexible even if you came up with the perfect idea and you're already executing on it real-time feedback from users and other teams may mean you need to quickly pivot into another direction so you can't really let your ego get in the way which is something i may or may not be still working on second sounds cliche but strong communication skills for example how can you boil down the dozens of awesome features into one memorable takeaway for your external audience on the internal side product marketing managers need to know how to manage expectations by over communicating my rule of thumb is i'd rather have the sales team tell me jeff please shut up you've said this so many times i get it instead of hang on you never told us that you also need to learn how to say no without burning bridges and this is where the third soft skill comes into play having an analytical mindset using data to make decisions really help pmms number one push back effectively against teams that raise a bunch of requests and number two find that message that really resonates with users for example recently my team was asked to spend marketing dollars on 10 media channels to drive more leads but our budget was limited so we looked at a similar campaign from last year and found that 5 of those channels drove 90 percent of qualified leads we shared this finding within the working group and everyone agreed it made more sense to focus on the top five channels and invest the remaining budget in other parts of the campaign now that you have

a general understanding of what product marketing managers actually do and the qualities companies look for you might be wondering should you be a pmm and the answer to that question largely depends on how mature the product is because your responsibility changes throughout the product life cycle and here i want to give a huge shout out to henry wang's interview with veteran google pmm michael shipper i'll link that video down below according to mike there are three stages pre-launch growth and mature if the product is in the pre-launch phase the pmm needs to do a lot of market research to determine what the audience needs and also helps decide what features are rolled out first in the growth stage the product is gaining traction and here the pmm really needs to number one gather feedback from the expanding user base and number two prioritize the changes that will make the most impact in the mature stage your product will face a lot more competition so the pmm has to figure out a way to stay top of mind for users when competitors are offering similar features for example i work on google ads it's a mature product and our friendly competitors include facebook ads amazon ads microsoft ads and tech talk ads so for one of my campaigns i brought other google products like play and cloud together to give our clients a more comprehensive solution facebook or meta doesn't have a cloud offering and back then amazon app store didn't exist so our message really stood out in that instance and in case you haven't noticed working at a large company doesn't automatically mean you're in the mature stage it depends on the product the iphones and macs are very established but apple ads is relatively new on a more personal note i have really enjoyed being product marketing for the past five years or so i love coming up with

and piloting new ideas and when you see that event or campaign come to life because of the efforts of you and your team it really does feel like you're able to create something from nothing if you have questions about being a pmm leave them down below if you are a pmm would love to hear your experiences see you on the next video in the meantime have a great one