How I interview product marketers

Grab any handful of product marketers and ask them to define their role and to explain what they do in a given week. Odds are they'll all be dramatically different.

This is what makes product marketing so difficult (and interesting!), which makes it equally as challenging to hire for.

Recently, I was fortunate to be invited to sit on interview panels for potential Product Marketing Manager candidates for our team. I've interviewed many marketers in the past, and I've coached dozens of students and people about successful landing marketing jobs, but all of those were in early-stage generalist roles, or some flavour of digital marketing.

Because product marketing is such a fuzzy, complicated role, especially compared to channel specialist marketing roles, I had to rethink my framework and approach to prepare for these interviews. This post is a summary of that preparation as I dug into resources, asked colleagues and peers for advice, and took a step back to bring forward what I value in the work and attitudes my teammates and myself have.

What I'm looking for in a product marketer

First, before diving into any interview questions, and before seeing writing samples, project plans, successful campaigns and their metrics, it's important to reflect on the fundamental values you want in an incoming candidate.

While all of these likely apply to any person in any role, marketing or not, these are the ones I find extremely important for product marketers given how strategic and upstream we often are

• Deeply passionate about learning and going as deep as possible on a wide variety of topics

• Ability to tell clear, compelling stories

• Galvanize people to understand, pursue and apply ideas

• Think about, and change, the systems of the business

Product marketing interview resources

Unsurprisingly, there aren't that many great resources out there for people conducting product marketing interviews. I found many for traditional marketing roles and for product managers - which are helpful - but not designed exactly for this purpose.

Fortunately, some of the best product marketing content producers do have helpful guides. Here they are:

• Must-ask product marketing job interview questions (Product Marketing Alliance)

• Product Marketing Interview Questions: 6 Questions You Need To Ask (Drift)

• Podcast: Interviewing for a PMM Role with Abdul Rastagar, Director at TalkDesk (The Product Marketing Experts)

Between those resources and some amazing tips from friends, peers and colleagues, here's my running list of great interview questions that I'll be returning to, and appending when I learn better ones.

My running list of product marketing interview questions

Launches and marketing fundamentals

Walk me through your current role. How do you define product marketing in your current role? What do you like doing? What don't you like?

Walk me through a product launch that you're proud of.

How do you define a successful product launch?

Tell me about an unsuccessful launch or project. How did you course correct or apply those learnings to a future project?

Take Example Product/Market/Model A and Example Product/Market/Model B. At a high-level, what implications do their differences have on their respective marketing mixes?

Messaging

How do you approach creating messaging for a new product or feature?

Describe a technical product or concept in these ways:

1. To a random person at a party who knows nothing about this

2. To a person with technical background who is part of your target audience, but might not be educated in your product or solution

3. To an expert in your product or solution

Tell me about another company whose product marketing you admire (can't be us) and explain why.

Working with others

Tell me about your working relationship with your Product Manager. How did you build that relationship? What value as a Product Marketer did you bring to them?

Tell me about a time you and a Product Manager or downstream team (like Marketing) didn't see eye-to-eye. How did you resolve that?

How do you generally prioritize what you work on?

How often do you talk to customers? How often do you demo or pitch the product(s) you work with?

How often do you talk to, or work with Sales teams? Tell me about a time where Sales heavily embraced something you worked on, and tell me why you think that was the case. Or, tell me about a time Sales rejected your ideas or material, and what you did to course correct.

Closing questions

Why this company, and/or why this role?

Now that you've learned more about this role, what has you most excited?

Any questions for me?