Pretty excited about today’s post! This topic received the most votes in recent polls, so here’s one for all you content marketers transitioning!
I was a content marketer for a few years before I decided I wanted to move into product marketing. I know, it’s such a cliché.
I did it for the same reasons most content marketers do: to level up to something that was more strategic. Content marketing touches everything, but it rarely owns anything.
Product marketing felt like the place where all of that came together, with actual strategic accountability attached. You’re not just making the assets. You’re deciding what the product means, who it’s for, and why anyone should care.
Most importantly, I wanted to be closer to the product. But nobody told me how hard that transition would be. Product marketing operates like a private members’ club.
Product marketers have spent years being undervalued and lumped in with marketing generalists. They’ve fought hard to be taken seriously as strategic partners, and that fight left a mark. I understand that.
What I don’t understand and find frustrating is the snobbery. From my experience, the gatekeeping is aimed most directly at content marketers, who are often perceived as execution-focused rather than strategy-focused. This isn’t personal, they say. But it kind of is.
I connected with a product marketing leader and influencer whose work I admired a while ago for a free mentorship session. I was excited about the conversation. I left the conversation feeling like I’d just tried to get into a bar where the bouncer wasn’t going to let me in no matter what I said.
I often wonder if it would go differently if it was a paid mentorship session. He was off-putting. He made me feel like I wasn’t doing enough. He had me convinced I wasn’t cut out for product marketing and nothing I did would change that for a second. That it was out of my league as a content marketer.
At work, I faced similar pushback from product marketers. But I did not feel the same way.
I knew I was a content marketer with product marketing responsibilities. I was doing the work. Product-led content. Positioning and messaging. Customer interviews. Competitive battlecards. Pricing decisions like per-seat vs. usage. A tiered launch system I built from scratch. Yet, I was still quietly put in a role I had not agreed to before I was ever able to fully transition.
Mind you, this is after spending a few years paying membership fees to the Product Marketing Alliance (PMA), PMM Camp, and more. All the fees added up to at least USD 2,000/year.
I’m not going to lie, it was discouraging. I continued to face the same friction in interviews, but I wasn’t going to accept defeat. I decided to go after the goal anyway. Here’s what worked.
The first thing I did was document how I was already thinking about content like a product marketer. When I worked on content, I wasn’t just picking a topic and writing it. Thankfully, even as a content marketer, you don’t do that.
I was identifying an audience segment, mapping the competitive landscape, and defining what success would look like. Which, by the way, is also what most content marketers do.
More importantly, I started writing differently. More technical. More product-led. Less top-of-funnel. I began writing for an internal audience, too. I stopped thinking of writing as a means of producing publishable assets and started thinking of it as a means of reaching a decision or a shared understanding.
This is a huge part of product marketing: getting everyone on the same page.
What did this look like in practice? When we were preparing for a launch, I didn’t just write the blog post. I drafted what I thought our positioning should be, who I thought the primary buyer was, and what objections I expected sales to hit. I wrote use cases based on calls I’d listened in on and sent them to the product team to verify.
The audience for this writing was never search. It was internal stakeholders: product managers, sales reps, customer success, my manager.
If your portfolio is full of blog posts, you will be evaluated as a content marketer regardless of what you say in the interview. You should be thinking comparison pages, use cases, technical documentation, case studies, informal launch briefs, etc. These are proof that you think like a product marketer, demonstrate a deep understanding of product, and can get people on the same page.
If you want to build the muscle for that kind of writing, I recommend Google’s free technical writing courses. They’re worth the time.
I started taking on work that wasn’t in my job description. I led launches. I built sales enablement assets. I sat in on sales calls when I could. I tracked metrics that PMMs track. If you’re going to argue you’re already doing product marketing, you need to be able to show it.
When I started volunteering for launches, I didn’t just write the launch blog post. I built a launch tier system from scratch, a framework that categorized launches by size, scope, and required resources, and ended up being adopted across multiple business units. Nobody had formalized it before.
On top of that, I ran the launch meetings. I ran sales enablement sessions for the sales team to cross-sell or upsell. I checked in with product managers to make sure we were set to go on launch day. I had opinions about timing. I pushed back on messaging I thought was off, using evidence and data. None of this was in my job description.
I did it because the work was there and nobody else was picking it up. A clear opportunity to prove that I could do the work. I did all of this while I was a content marketer.
My transition took time, but I was loud about my intentions. In my very first interview with my manager — before I even had the job — I told him I was interested in eventually moving into product marketing. My honest answer to “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?”
He didn’t flinch. He thought it showed ambition and a clear sense of direction, which surprised me more than it surprised him. I didn’t think managers could take that sort of honesty, but he proved me wrong.
From there, I made sure the people around me knew what I was working toward, so that when product marketing opportunities came up internally, my name was already in the conversation. Visibility and intentionality came hand-in-hand.
Product marketing is not one job-fits-all.
At an early-stage startup, the PMM is doing everything: positioning, competitive research, sales enablement, customer interviews, launch strategy, analyst relations, sometimes product strategy. At a large company, PMMs can be highly specialized, owning a specific segment or part of the funnel.
To make things more complicated, PMM job descriptions vary significantly no matter where you are. It’s important to figure out where you want to fit in. Knowing what sparks joy early can save you from applying to roles you’d be unhappy in.
For content marketers specifically, education or content-heavy PMM roles are a natural fit, and it’s the direction I was recommended constantly. These are roles at companies with complex B2B products, long sales cycles, or highly technical audiences, where buyers do significant self-directed research before speaking with sales.
In these environments, a PMM who can build content programs that move pipeline, not just generate traffic, is valuable.
I joined the Product Marketing Alliance and completed both the core and advanced certifications. The most useful part was getting a structured vocabulary for work I was already doing informally and being able to walk into an interview and talk precisely about jobs-to-be-done research, win/loss analysis, and launch tiers.
The certifications won’t get you the job on their own, but they’re a sign that you’re invested, which is half the battle. Other resources I love include the PMM Camp newsletter by Tamara Grominsky! I religiously read her newsletter, and I just did her leadership bootcamp, which I highly recommend.
The elite club metaphor holds, but there’s always someone on the inside who’s been dying for a new member to show up and change things up. Find that person. Skip the influencer.
My direct manager was that person for me. He was a product marketer himself and had seen how much work I was putting in. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have made the transition entirely. He saw the value in the work I was doing and spoke about it in rooms I wasn’t in.
A champion isn’t someone who likes your work or tells you you’re doing great. Anyone can do that. Champions are willing to spend a little of their own credibility on you. They’re the ones to say “she should be in this conversation” or “she’s been doing this work already, let’s make it official.”
You find them by networking internally. Ideally, it’s your manager. That’s the easiest link. Sometimes, it’s also someone you work cross-functionally with but is a level above you. Peer support helps too.
Be open to working with different people and taking on projects that can help you build your skills in product marketing or provide evidence that you can do product marketing. Create the conditions for visibility and amplify it. This makes it easy for your champion to advocate for you. The easier you make that, the more likely they are to do it.
Most importantly, be your own champion. The whole transition took nearly 2 years.
Nobody could see my product marketing thinking except me. So I started championing my product marketing wins, especially in how I framed my work in team meetings. If you’re doing product marketing thinking inside a content role, you have to externalize it, or it doesn’t count.
Be loud (and respectful) about it, even when you’re uncomfortable. I’m not naturally someone who campaigns for themselves, but I had to learn to do so while being a strategic partner.
Switching from content marketing to product marketing isn’t as easy as it looks. Switching from anything rarely is.
The content-to-PMM path exists, but it’s not as lateral as it sounds. You have to make the case explicitly, repeatedly, and with evidence.
It seems like it should be easy because there’s no shortage of product marketing content, and PMMs are famously loud on LinkedIn. Learning about product marketing is accessible. Becoming one is a different thing entirely, in my experience.
Transitioning is hard, and hard things are worth doing. When it clicked for me, it felt like something I earned.
If you’ve made this transition or you’re in the middle of it, reply and tell me what worked, and if you know a content marketer quietly wondering if PMM is the move, send this to them. 🫶
am i... a marketer? is a newsletter about the weird experience of working in marketing right now. if this resonated, share it with someone who’s in the thick of it.
🤖 Tools I’m messing with this week here
🌉 Hosting a Design Founders’ Meetup pre-Config Commons on June 23! Here are also some events I’m going to over the next 2 weeks (I’ll be between Toronto, New York, and Vancouver!):
Proofed: A One-Day Growclass Marketing Summit (Jun 11th, online)
Genius GTM Tactics That Help Startups Win (Jun 17th, Vancouver)
Yo, Let’s Link! V2.0 - Filmmakers Event (Jun 20th, Vancouver)
Marketing Engineer Meetup (Jun 9th, New York)
Figma Field Days: NYC Demo Night with Clay & Ramp (Jun 11th, New York)
Rust Demo Night w/ PostHog and One (Jun 11th, New York)
Offline and unfiltered: a Config comedy night with Varun Rana (Jun 24th, SF)
Generating Cre(ai)tivity with AI Snack Club (Jun 16th, SF)
If you find this interesting, you can find me on LinkedIn! We don’t have to do that, though. You can also find me on X and Instagram.
🛜 See you on the internet! 🌐
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