By Poornima Mohandas | 4 min read
The other day my long-time friend from journalism school asked me how she could move from PR to product marketing. I believe the best way to make a career shift like that is to do it laterally, once you are well established within a company. But the question got me thinking about all the things my friend didn’t seem to know about product marketing and what the role entails. This post is for her and for anyone who wants to shine in their next product marketing interview.
By the way, I’m also interviewing PMM candidates as I build out a team at Birdeye, a Palo Alto-based, experience marketing platform for multi-location businesses. So if you are interested, send me a LinkedIn invite with a personal note and we can chat.
Now that my plug is out of the way :), here are 14 questions I have encountered at multiple PMM interviews, either as an interviewer or as a candidate split into a few different buckets and advice on how to tackle them. Read on, I know you will find it useful!
About Product Marketing
- Definitions of PMM change from company to company. How do you define product marketing?
- Which facets of PMM are you the best at?
- Have you done any product positioning? Tell me how you went about it.
- How do you plan a product launch for product X in a specific market?
- How do you position against your competitors at your current company?
- Have you ever worked on a product launch. Tell me about it.
How to Prep for these: Be very familiar with what is product marketing and the different facets of it such as product positioning, GTM, sales enablement, analyst engagement, and supporting the demand generation function. Bring in real world examples of work you have done. Give specifics of positioning or product launches you have driven. Tell stories. Make it come alive.
About Tech in General
- Name a 1-2 tech companies that you look up to? What are they doing right?
- Name a good product that’s marketed poorly. What would you do differently?
How to Prep for these: Read tech news. Subscribe to tech blogs. Read about the latest and greatest success stories from Slack to Salesforce. Observe your competitive landscape. Look for great product marketing examples that you would like to emulate. Have inspiring stories at your fingertips ready to go.
Ability to Communicate Value
- Can you demo a product for me
- Let’s do some role play. I’m a beta customer of your newly launched product. Now interview me so you can figure out how to position the product.
How to Prep for these: If you are in PMM you should have a product demo environment that you spend time in. Before you jump in to show the demo, always set the stage. Use the tell, show, tell technique. Talk more about value rather than features. Now for the mock customer interview, always look for why the customer bought you and what value they are getting from the product. Ask open ended questions. And don’t be afraid to ask follow-on questions.
About the Company You Are Interviewing With
- We have an awareness problem about our category. Nobody knows about it. Nobody is searching for it. How do we solve that?
- We have multiple target buyers that we want to target? How should we deal with that?
- Take a look at our website and tell me your thoughts. How can we improve the messaging?
- What is the value that you can deliver to our company?
How to Prep for these: Ahead of any PMM interview, spend time on the company’s website, read the corporate blog, try to understand what category they are in, what is the value of the products they offer, who are the buyers, identify the competitors, research the background of the founders. Read customer case studies and relevant industry research reports. Look for news articles on the company. Be sure to check out Youtube for interviews of the CEO, product demos, and the latest webinars. As you do all this research, make some notes on what you would do better. Come up with some talking points.
Conclusion
I hope some of those questions got your mind thinking, made you want to prep more, and make some notes. The most important thing is to always keep reading. Quote from well-recognized business books. Do your homework on the company you are interviewing with. This will not just make you better prepared with answers, it will also show your level of engagement, which is a prerequisite to take things to the next level. In my next post, I will talk about what it takes to make a great PMM. Watch this space!
