The Saassy guide to hiring your first product marketer 🦸♀️
Over the last month alone, I must have had about five conversations with start-up founders about hiring their first product marketer. What should we look for? Where do we start? What are the criteria that matter the most? How much budget do we need for this role?
These are the seven key tips and tricks for those who are trying to figure it out:
Tip #1: Don’t worry about industry experience
You won’t find the perfect candidate: someone with the right product marketing skills, experience, industry background, culture fit who is also looking for a new job when you need it.
If there’s one criteria to ignore to broaden your pool of candidates, it is the industry experience.
Your start-up is already full of industry experts that your new product marketer can lean on. It’s the product marketing skills that you are missing.
Tip #2: Go senior
You may not have found your product-market fit or done key research to understand the market yet. You may not have established key processes. You are still figuring out your pricing. You are starting from a blank page. You are looking for someone to answer these questions with a limited or no guidance.
Your first product marketing hire needs to have a lot of experience under their belt already. In fact, for many start-ups, the first hire is at a level of a product marketing director with 10-15 years of experience. While you don’t necessarily need to aim for this level of seniority, I wouldn’t go below seven years of experience.
Tip #3: Look for a collaborative & adaptive thinker
If I had to pick three qualities to look for in your first product marketer, it is strategic thinking, adaptability, and the ability to be effective cross-functionally.
Strategic thinking
Strategic thinking is important for any product marketer, but especially for your first one - given the blank piece of page they find themselves with.
The best way to test this is through a case study. Any task can test this skill - you want to see how the candidate thinks through and approaches the exercise. In fact, I would even suggest to create a case study which doesn’t explicitly mention analysis as a discreet step, so you can judge how natural that comes to a candidate.
I ran a case study along the following lines: « Our user community has thousands of members but imagine they are not very active. What would you do to engage them? » Many candidates started by listing creative solutions without trying to analyze the problem first. They didn’t pass. The candidates who started by analyzing why the community was not engaging and by user research showed the strategic and analytical thinking I was looking for.
Adaptability
Anyone at a start-up needs to adapt to the evolving nature of the business, but it rings even more true for product marketers.
Product marketing does many things - from developing positioning, pricing & packaging, to sales enablement to competitive intelligence. As your company grows, there will be a different focus on different areas. When you are starting out, the key focus areas will be positioning, packaging and pricing, and less so sales enablement. As your team grows, that may switch. You want to hire someone who is comfortable with this evolution.
I highly recommend the talk by Diana Smith describing how the role of product marketing changed as Segment scaled up.
Cross-functionality
At the Product Marketing Summit in London, a quote stuck with me. Rory Woodbridge was asked how he’d nickname the product marketing function. He said « the herding cats department ».
There are few roles as cross-functional as product marketing. I spend more time with people outside of my team than on my team - product managers, sales, customer success, user care, and other marketers.
Our task is to get everyone on the same page, to collaborate across the company, to lead and project manage cross-functional efforts without having a direct authority over anyone, to manage power dynamics between different departments. This is the below-the-iceberg part of the job that made the Titanic sink.
Tip #4: Don’t be afraid to hire from big enterprises
There can be resistance within start-ups to hire from behemoths. Will they be able to adapt to our fast, dynamic, flexible culture?
Product marketing teams at behemoths are well established, well structured, and senior. A Director or VP of Product Marketing is easily someone with 20+ years of experience - which is a lot of know-how they can pass onto their team. It is a great school for product marketers as they learn all the different aspects of the trade, the different processes, they understand what the ideal product marketing team looks like, what the role of product marketing is. I wouldn’t be scared of product marketers from larger companies - on the contrary.
Tip #5: Be remote-friendly but stay within your region
Typically, product marketers aggregate in tech hubs (San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Berlin, ..) because they are a cross-functional role that tends to be based out of the company’s headquarters. But Covid and talent scarcity have played their role, and more and more product marketers are remote.
I am a huge fan of remote work and digital nomading - but I would constrain that to the region of your solution. Let’s say you sell a utility software in the US, then you should hire anywhere in the North America. Or, you sell a healthcare software in Europe, then you should hire remote but within Europe.
This is for two key reasons. Firstly, you want your product marketers to be able to talk to your customers within your territory. Secondly, the regional differences in utilities, healthcare, and pretty much any other vertical are huge - so you want to make sure the product marketer lives and breathes the local context, and speaks the language of the market.
Tip #6: There is no one background to look for
Us product marketers say that we sort of fall into the role. It is not a job that we know about at university. In my case, I found out about it 4 years after I finished my degree.
Most typically, people switch to product marketing from management consulting or another marketing discipline, but honestly, no background will surprise me (I studied law and worked in public affairs before switching).
This means that there is no specific background you need to search for.
Tip #7: You want to splash out a bit
As you’ve been reading this blog, you have probably thought « Shoot, this product marketer is going to require a bigger budget. » You won’t be wrong. Firstly, you are looking for a senior profile. Experience and value cost. Secondly, there is a lot of demand but a limited supply, so product marketers are the choosers in this market.
To get an idea of how much budget you should prepare, I highly recommend the Product Marketing Alliance’s annual salary benchmark (together with Glassdoor). It provides a salary overview per region, role, industry, and other criteria.
Some of the key findings of the report are:
The average salary is US$120k with big differences across the regions - from US$50k in Asia to mid-US$80k in Europe to high-US$130k in the USA;
The salary has seen a significant growth in 2021 over 2020, and my bet is this will continue in 2022;
There’s an average US$13k bonus on top;
The salary ranges according to seniority too - from US$65k for an associate PMM all the way up to US$190k for a VP.
This is just to give you an idea. Company culture, the wider net of benefits, the opportunity of a career progression, and the possibility of working on something exciting are other important aspects of any offer.
(Cover photo by Linda Eller-Shein)