I've had a lot of smart people reaching out to me recently about how to break into product marketing from another part of the marketing team. They've been interviewing and applying, but hiring managers are not willing to take a chance on them unless they have PMM experience.

This is tough. On the one hand, great marketers could likely be great product marketers. Every great marketer needs to understand personas, positioning, storytelling, and go-to-market strategy to succeed. In small companies, "product marketing" may not be a thing yet.

On the other hand, the market is flooded with overqualified PMM candidates due to recent layoffs. Hiring managers have their pick of applicants whose experience matches almost exactly to open roles, saving the manager time on coaching and training.

As a result, aspiring PMMs probably have a better shot of moving within a company where they are already excelling in a different part of marketing. People who know you and your work are more likely to take a leap of faith.

If that's not an option, aspiring PMMs should work on packaging their experiences to align with core PMM skillsets. You can even directly point out what you're doing to the recruiting team since packaging is a PMM competency.

You can also take on PMM related projects in a current role. Market analysis, customer research, competitive positioning, roadmap recommendations. There is likely something not getting done you can offer to do to build your PMM skillset.

For hiring managers and recruiters, we can do a better job of identifying roles where we can take chance on someone joining the field. We can do the extra work to understand if a person's skillset and potential is a match instead of just looking at job titles.

Anyone else have thoughts on how to break into product marketing? @chimishra @garciakevin @emilyarden @Marcus_Andrews @SharebirdInc @vanessathomps @kolencherry And if you're hiring for junior roles, let me know! I have some referrals.