WRITTEN BY SHARI DIAMOND, PRINCIPAL CONSULTANT
As we’ve been actively growing our team of elite product marketing consultants at Fluvio, I’ve been thinking a lot about hiring. I’ve recently had numerous friends, former colleagues and recruiters reach out to me questioning why it’s such a struggle to find solid product marketing talent. This has me questioning two things - 1) why are there so many product marketing roles open right now, and 2) why are people finding it so hard to fill them?
Why product marketing, and why now?
The concept of product marketing is by no means new. In fact, I’d argue that product marketing essentials - such as positioning, value proposition and messaging - are the foundation of any successful marketing campaign (and exercises that many skip all too often!). Before you try to market your product, you must ask WHY does this product exist and for WHOM?
And yet, product marketing in its current form is seen as a new and emerging discipline. Perhaps the foundations aren’t new, but the presence and applications of a product marketing team have evolved in recent years as we’ve seen 1) growth in technology and SaaS product acceleration within an already crowded market, alongside 2) a long overdue shift to customer-first product development. Positioning around a customer-centric value proposition always mattered - but now it REALLY matters, as customers have more options to choose from, not to mention more places to complain when products don’t work for them.
Because of this, we’ve seen the increased focus on establishing and growing product marketing teams, and with that the complexity of the question ‘why is it so hard to staff product marketing roles!?’
Hiring for the product marketing function is hard - and here’s why!
Product marketers have been around all along - but they’ve been honing their skill sets in other areas, and often disguised as other types of marketers. Traditionally, what we now know as solid product marketing responsibilities - defining positioning, crafting messaging, supporting GTM plans, assessing TAM / SAM / SOM, understanding market opportunity, competitive analysis and customer needs (and much, much more) - fell under a variety of different teams, such as Brand, Digital, Product, or Research. Oftentimes, product marketing efforts were hidden in a laundry list of other marketing tasks that any one marketer was assigned to do.
Personally, at one role, I led a Consumer Marketing team, owning the ‘soup to nuts’ to support my product’s success. From acquisition to retention, anything that it took to keep the product alive fell on my team, and while we were activating email campaigns and updating SEM keywords, we were also leading launches, creating sales enablement materials and conducting customer research. It wasn’t until I sat in a very similar role at another company with the actual title of ‘Product Marketing’ that I realized I had been doing product marketing work all along… I was a product marketer disguised as a ‘digital marketer’ - a product marketer hiding in plain sight.
All this is to say that, when hiring for a product marketer, it’s wise to read resumes carefully and look for specific product marketing keywords and skill sets to truly gauge product marketing experience. (Note to those applying for product marketing roles: get those keywords in your resume!) If you solely rely on finding those with ‘Product Marketer’ in their past titles, it may be one of the reasons you’re finding the search challenging.
It’s likely that the challenge to find and hire stellar product marketing talent will continue, but the great news is that the popularity of the discipline is growing - and the upside to so many companies building product marketing teams is that more marketers will gain skills, expertise and hands-on experience in this area. Here’s hoping that in a matter of years, the product marketing role will be one that’s much easier to fill.
What should you look out for?
So what are the skills that you should look for when aiming to hire a stellar product marketer? Focus on candidates who have experience in foundational product marketing skill sets, including:
Conducting qualitative or quantitative research or gathering insights about target audiences, market opportunity or competitors
Developing product positioning, value propositions and messaging
Creating materials that tell a product story, while enabling internal partners with value-based narratives
Collaboration with a variety of different teams, including Sales, Product, and Research
Strong writing, communication, presentation and delivery skills
And finally - don’t give up! As the field grows, so will those experienced and skilled in the specialty, and in due time hopefully the number of roles and qualified candidates looking for them will meet in the middle and continue to grow and refine product marketing as an emerging discipline.