How to transition from Marketing to Product Management
In the Product Management Festival study on product trends, the transition from Marketing to Product Management was one taken by 6% of all those in product management roles. How can marketing professionals maximise their skills, focus on skills gaps, and get their dream job?
What skills do marketing teams bring to product management?
There are two main reasons that there are considerable numbers of marketing professionals who make the transition into product management:
Proximity to product roles
Shared skills
When it comes to shared skills across roles, the following are perhaps most relevant:
Understanding user experience
Knowing the brand and market strategy
Product marketing
Understanding the customer and their desires and wants
What skills gaps might a marketing person have?
Of course, being in a different type of role doesn’t expose you to the full range of skills that are required when you’re in an alternative position, and the following are the most typical skills gaps for people from a marketing background:
Understanding system interactions
Workload and feature prioritization
Gathering user requirements and writing up these requirements
Stakeholder management
How to fill a skills gap
When it comes to findings ways to fill skills gaps, there are a few areas in which marketing professionals can work to gather the necessary expertise, including:
Taking on the role of scrum master — which will assist with understanding more of the technical challenges and interactions
Work alongside a product manager — which will expose them to decision-making and more strategic thinking
Manage your marketing backlog like a product backlog — which will provide experience in writing user stories, prioritization, and decision making
For many of these steps, the important thing is to speak to others in the business and find opportunities to help them and gain the experience needed to fill the gap.
Talk to the existing product management team and, of course, your line manager, to find the moments to pick up new skills that will count towards your future product role.