WRITTEN BY Shari Diamond, SENIOR CONSULTANT
Hard vs. Soft Skills Necessary to Be a Stellar PMM
It’s no secret that product marketing is one of the hardest roles to hire for. It’s also the marketing role in highest demand, recently seeing a hiring increase of 300% YOY. Whether you’re a product marketing manager (PMM) looking to grow your career, or a hiring manager looking to fill a product marketing role, it’s critical to know what hard and soft skills are necessary to be a successful, and stellar product marketer.
Hard skills:
Let’s start with hard skills, as these are often more tangible. As a reminder, a hard skill is obtained through hands-on experience, and often requires more practice, ie: typing, computer programming, or learning a foreign language.
PMMs are responsible for so many facets of the GTM strategy - both inbound and outbound - so this list can be lengthy, but there are a few critical hard skills that make a product marketer stand out. Each of these skills are ones that are acquired through experience, strategic ‘big picture’ thinking and practice.
Strong writing skills: This skill is necessary in many disciplines, and especially in marketing. In product marketing specifically, strong writing skills are critical to build strong positioning, messaging frameworks and marketing copy that succinctly explains a product’s value, outcomes and supporting features in a way that customers can relate to and understand. Writing skills also come into play when communicating and building cross-functional relationships internally, as a product marketer is often responsible for owning a product’s story and needs state within the working team, and must do so efficiently to connect internal teams.
Go-to-market process: The product marketer is the conductor of the GTM process and must understand the full GTM spectrum - all that’s required to bring a product or feature to market and what teams should be involved at every step. They are then responsible for making sure that everyone internally is ‘playing the same music’ meaning that all teams are aligned on product positioning, everyone has access to important research and insights, and finalized messaging is shared across the board. This sort of understanding of GTM and gaining internal alignment is critical to a successful launch.
Data analysis and proof point collection: Oftentimes, product marketing output includes synthesizing data to tell a product’s story. This can include citing data points that prove a product solves customer pain points, or highlighting other proof points - such as testimonials or case studies - that bring a product to life. This skill often requires a product marketer to think ahead to answer the question “what proof point supports this outcome” and then search for the answer in a data or quote.
Storytelling: Product marketers are responsible for owning the product’s story, and how to tell it both externally and internally. Storytelling requires the stringing together all of the different facets of the product story, and answering the questions :
Why is this the best product for a customer in today's market?
What pain points does this product solve and how?
Why is this product the answer vs. competitors?
What are the important product features that support customer needs?
What are other customers saying about the product?
Soft skills:
Soft skills are personality traits that you have naturally developed throughout your life. These are more interpersonal than technical, and something you may find yourself naturally good at, without having to learn through education or training, ie: relationship-building, organization or time management.
While hard skills may be learned, soft skills are inherently part of a product marketer’s nature, which makes those that have them so good at their job. This also makes hiring difficult as soft skills are critical to the role, yet hard to suss out from just reading a resume.
Relationship building: If there is one soft skill that I would deem most critical for a product marketer, it would be this one. In fact, many of the other soft skills listed below ladder up to this important skill. Product marketing success is found in earning trust and support from those across the organization, including leaders and team members in product management, sales, research, legal and more. Without strong relationships, PMMs are often found swimming upstream, lacking the support of partnering teams and making it harder to get our job done.
On a personal note, I have found that relationship building has been the secret sauce in helping me get any launch or marketing initiative through the finish line, and earning respect in the meantime. In fact, I find it so important that I will always ask candidates in an interview to talk about how they approached earning trust and building relationships with stakeholders in their prior roles.
Listening & empathy: Part of building relationships is being able to listen and understand what is important to each stakeholder or team member, and what you can do to help them achieve their goals. I recommend making it a habit to ask about each team’s goals on a quarterly basis, and if possible, align all goals and objectives within an organization. With this skill you should ask the right questions to listen for how you may “help me help you” and then tailor future conversations and tasks with what you heard going forward.
Understanding & translating messages: Engineers may speak in code, marketers may speak in value propositions, and product teams may speak in roadmaps and release notes. All of these ‘languages’ are important to the end product and launch, and it is the job of the product marketer to do these two important things to get all teams on the same page, no matter what language they speak:
Decode messages across teams to structure the GTM plan
Translate all messages into one larger story that everyone can understand
Of course, the two skills above - strong relationships and listening to learn - will help make this process easier.
Problem solving: As a product marketer listens across teams and synthesizes the product marketing story, it’s natural that issues may arise that may affect goals, timelines and even revenue. A product marketer must be able to see the bird's eye view and identify solutions to any roadblocks or barriers in the way. This may include identifying additional research necessary, shifting marketing plans to align with new timelines, or changing approach based on client feedback.
A successful product marketer will have a combination of all of the hard and soft skills listed above in their tool box - and many are still working towards learning and gaining experience to perfect some of these skills. The chart below summarizes Hard vs. Soft skills necessary for PMM success, and is a great reference for PMMs as they build their skillset, and hiring managers looking to identify what skills might not be reflected on a resume.