How to Hire Exceptional(TM) Product Marketers

Founders always ask me how to hire Product Marketers. But not all product marketers are created equal. Good product marketers do the job: create messaging, sales enablement materials, build content. Great product marketers get involved in cross functional projects, translate product strategy for the GTM side of the business. They understand the product and its unique place in the market landscape, as well as the landscape’s place in the macro climate, too.

Exceptional product marketers, according to Sam, are future C-suite execs (like two of my friends, Leo Zheng, CMO at Fireworks.ai and Graham Neray, founder and CEO of Oso). They identify opportunities, drive cross functional projects, define the GTM strategy according to the market, and are powerful allies to the leadership team. In this post, we’re going to define the rubric for identifying this caliber of product marketers.

As my guest today shares, the most talented product marketers are pillars of the organization. Clarke Patterson has led Product Marketing teams at dbt Labs and Snowflake where he’s worked on product strategy, messaging, brand, campaigns, sales enablement and pricing. I worked with him at dbt Labs and can attest he attracts incredible talent, recruiting some of the best technical leaders over to marketing and bringing in great external hires.

During our conversation I walked away with one lesson: Clarke focuses on hiring leaders regardless of role or their span of control in the organization. He’s hiring people who innately take on a strategic role in their organizations. He also admits that this helps him build a strong bench of talent to elevate when there’s an opportunity. To quote him: “Great leaders aren’t afraid to hire themselves out of a job. They build teams where there’s an obvious succession plan.”⁠

From our conversation, I walked away with stronger rubric for hiring strategic PMMs.

• Scrappiness

• Passengers vs. Drivers

• Locus of Influence

Naturally, it’s ideal to bring in candidates who are familiar with your domain. Those who understand the product and the go-to-market motion could integrate more easily into the organization and get ramped more quickly. Regardless of domain knowledge, you need to look for folks who are proactively educating themselves to become more of an expert. Exceptional product marketers will always be learning and bringing themselves closer to the customer’s perspective.

“More often than not, you’re not going to get the person who already has perfect domain knowledge. So the question becomes: how do you spot the people who are just scrappy learners?”

This is important not just for learning about the product, but also for figuring out those key opportunities for driving and leading. “The best hires don’t sit still. They’re constantly looking around corners for how they can expand, grow, and have more influence.”

As you progress the candidate through the interview process, notice if they ask more questions, push themselves to learn and do their homework to show up as more of an expert each time.

Give your candidates a type of take-home exercise that is intentionally vague and see how they thrive in the response. These days take-home exercises have lost their lustre because of the prevalence of AI tools that can help you build content, identify patterns and generate insights at rapid speed. I still find them useful if you ask someone to reference their own experience, and especially if you pair it with a live presentation.

“You can’t hire someone who is just a passenger along the way. You need someone who takes the bull by the horns and becomes a driver.”⁠

⁠Are you taking us to our destination or are you along for the ride? I think this dynamic is currently en vogue under a different designation: High or Low agency. I personally prefer the visualization of the Driver metaphor, and I think it is easier to describe the environment where two different personality types can thrive.

Exceptional Product Marketers will proactively steer the organizational strategy. These folks have a point of view, make it known, and then go out to build the solution. This is often referred to by my friend Graham Neray as a “heat seeking missile”. Drivers look for the opportunities, get involved, demand a seat at the decision-making table and make an impact.

Identify a problem with the product messaging, talk to the right people about it, circulate your ideas for feedback, get qualitative and quantitative data to back it up, the answers you need and implement the solution.

Passengers need direction in order to make moves, but will offer feedback along the way. This leaves everyone else needing to be a driver.

Hear about a problem with the product messaging, talk to Product about it, bring it up in your team meeting and suggest someone fixes it.

Pay attention to how candidates show up in every interview. Are they waiting for you to ask the questions, or are they proactively showing you how they’re learning and thinking?

Watch for “I” vs. “we” language. “We” often signals the manager or their entire team owned it, not the candidate. To interrogate a level deeper, ask what their specific role was in a particular project end-to-end.

If you are consistently driving, you’ll likely get closer and closer to more strategic company problems to solve. “There are a lot of directors of product marketing in the world. But there are also a lot of very mediocre directors of product marketing in the world. The thing that separates the good ones is that they actually have a seat at the table from a corporate strategy standpoint.”⁠

Exceptional product marketers build trust and are brought into these conversations. It may start with getting pulled into a project where executives need inputs for a board meeting. They do a great job there and impress, and eventually, they are pulled into those conversations all the time and become a key to the company strategy.

Does the candidate put themselves in a position where they are shaping the strategy, or are they taking the strategy from someone else? “Some PMMs build the slides once the strategy is done. The stronger ones are sitting down with the founder or CEO and shaping what they’re going to say on the main stage.”

Ask “What’s the most strategic, high-impact corporate-level thing you’ve personally delivered?” Evaluate whether it meets the bar. Also ask them about failures in the chain of this project, to see how they handle the challenges that they encounter with these higher-profile projects.

All three of those traits, Driver, Locus of Influence and Scrappiness, all build towards one another like a loop. If you are scrappy, you find opportunities to drive, and that gets you closer to the Locus of Influence.

All of this is underpinned by Humility, the ability to hold a strong point of view while remaining open to feedback. Product Marketers have to capture input from their accountability partners, often Sales and Customers, without a defensive posture

“Product marketing has this interesting dynamic where you kind of have to be the smartest person in the room, but you never really are,”⁠ says Clarke. “You can’t come into it with arrogance and say, ‘I built this message and everyone is going to line up behind it.’ You have to be humble enough to accept that maybe you got it wrong.”⁠

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The people you hire are a direct reflection of your leadership. My former CEO, Dev Ittycheria used to say at MongoDB, “A’s hire A’s, B’s hire C’s, and C’s hire D’s.” Excellent people want to work for excellent people! And excellent people have high standards, make them known and understand how to get the best work out of others. I hope this gives you a solid framework of how to identify excellent product marketers onto your team!

What are some tips you would add to this framework? Or – taking a lesson of humility from our “excellent” product marketers – how would you change it? Let us know in the comments!