Leadership

From articles to podcasts, we've included a wealth of resources to help you navigate the complex and ever-changing landscape of modern marketing and excel in your leadership role.

We’ll be covering:

  • What is product marketing leadership?
  • Key skills for product marketing leaders
  • Best practices for product marketing leaders
  • Essential resources for product marketing leaders

What is product marketing leadership?

The role of a product marketing leader is to bridge the gap between product development and marketing teams, ensuring that a product is launched successfully and achieves its maximum potential in the market.

A product marketing leader is responsible for understanding customer needs, developing messaging and positioning strategies, creating targeted marketing campaigns, and measuring the success of these efforts. They work closely with cross-functional teams, including product management, sales, and engineering, to ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals.

Product marketing leadership is crucial in today's market as it helps companies differentiate their products from competitors and connect with their target audience effectively. With the ever-increasing competition in the market, it's becoming more challenging for companies to launch successful products.

Key skills for product marketing leaders

As a product marketing leader, it’s crucial to have a diverse skill set that allows you to understand and connect with your target audience, create effective marketing strategies, and measure the success of your campaigns.

In the State of Product Marketing Leadership 2023 report, we asked our leaders what hard and soft skills they valued the most.

In terms of hard skills, we found that 83.1% of leaders agree that GTM strategy and execution are the most important, followed by messaging (75.4%), value proposition development (72.3%), and positioning (67.7%).

Pricing and packaging were low on the list, with knowledge of this area being the least valued trait leaders look for (13.8%).

For soft skills, the vast majority of our respondents agreed that the ability to drive good cross-functional relationships internally is the most important trait to have at 92.3%. This number has increased from last year by 13%.


Some respondents expanded and added their own soft skills:

  • Technically savvy
  • Accountability
  • Confidence
  • Ability/willingness to learn
  • Curiosity

Best practices for product marketing leadership

To excel in your role as a product marketing leader, it's essential to adopt best practices that help you create effective marketing strategies. You should create buyer personas and journey maps to understand your target audience's behavior, pain points, and preferences.

Conducting competitive analysis plays a fundamental role in identifying industry trends, understanding competitor positioning, and differentiating your product.

Leveraging customer feedback and reviews is also important to understand customer satisfaction levels, identify areas of improvement, and provide insights for product development.

You should craft compelling product messaging to communicate your product value and differentiation effectively. Finally, measuring and reporting on marketing performance is essential to monitor the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and make data-driven decisions.

By adopting these best practices, you can create marketing strategies that resonate with your target audience, differentiate your product from competitors, and drive growth for your company.

Essential resources for product marketing leaders

As a product marketing leader, you need access to a wide range of resources that help you stay up-to-date with industry trends, develop effective marketing strategies, and measure the success of your campaigns.

Fortunately, we have numerous resources, including articles, podcasts, webinars, and courses, that can help you hone your skills and stay ahead of the curve.

Whether you're looking for tips on crafting compelling product messaging or want to learn more about the latest marketing technologies, these resources can provide valuable insights and help you excel in your role as a product marketing leader.

Reports and eBooks

Articles

Stakeholder management

Building and managing teams

Skills and goals

Product launches as a leader

Career development

Company growth

Podcasts and individual episodes

OnDemand content

Masters of Product Marketing 2022 | Catch up with every session and hear from the likes of Microsoft, Google, LinkedIn, Recruitee, Uber, and more.

Courses

Product Marketing Certified: Leadership

Becoming an amazing product marketing leader doesn’t happen by chance. It happens by habit.

The importance of leadership simply cannot be disputed. Product Marketing Certified: Leadership has been built alongside the world’s best-known brands with one goal in mind: to deliver leadership training that’ll transform you into the best leader you can be.

Join pioneering product marketing leaders from elite organizations like LinkedIn, Hotjar, and Shopify and transform yourself into the best leader you can be.

Get Leadership Certified

Product Marketing Leadership Accelerator Program

The PMM Leadership Accelerator is an eight week program, which has been built in collaboration with Director and VP level product marketers from some of the world’s best-known brands - we’re talking Amazon Web Services, LinkedIn, G2, Uber, Unbounce, and more.

You’ll be able to tap directly into their tried and tested tactics, strategies, and methodologies and put all that intel into building your killer strategy.

Sign up and:

💪 Be more informed, confident, and impactful in every aspect of being a great product marketing leader.

🏅 Have all the knowledge, tools, and skills needed to build and scale a gold-standard product marketing team.

💡 Be equipped with endless leadership insights from the likes of LinkedIn, Shopify, Hotjar, Unbounce, and more.

Supercharge your career growth