Technical Aptitude of a Product Marketer
How technical should a Product Marketer be?
I’ve worked in the technology sector for most of my career as a Product Marketers. I’ve done Product Marketing spanning semiconductors and chipsets, computers, servers, cloud services, colocation and managed hosting and cybersecurity. The ability to grasp technology and technical concepts is very important. However, you’re not expected to be the resident expert on a given technology and if that’s all you were, you wouldn’t be successful as a Product Marketer. Success requires other elements which I’ll talk about later.
A Product Marketer does need to know the products, services or solutions they represent to quite a great extent. However, you’re not the Product Manager and you’re not an Engineer or Developer. If I was to give you a sense of where I think a Product Marketer needs to be in terms of understanding the technical aspects of a solution, here’s how I would frame that up on a scale of 1-10. I’ve added the Product Manager and an Engineer for relative context. If you were to also place other marketing colleagues outside of the Product Marketing function, I would place them somewhere from 2-4.
Of course, knowing where you would place on the scale isn’t always easy. So, use this as a barometer to always push yourself to know more about how your product/service/solution works. Again, technical mastery isn’t the goal here for a Product Marketer.
As a Product Marketer, David has successfully launched products, services, solutions and platforms across a number of disciplines in the technology industry. David’s passion for Product Marketing and his eye for seeing how Product Marketing can lead to even stronger business outcomes led him to bring his expertise and knowledge to Shoot the Curl Marketing.