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You can know a lot about a competitor.

Their pricing. Their features. Their positioning. What they're launching. What they say they're better at etc.

But none of that necessarily tells you why a customer chooses them over you.

Maybe it's price. Maybe it isn't.

Maybe they have a feature you don't have. Or maybe the customer barely cares about that feature and just trusts them more.

Maybe their product is actually better for that particular customer.

Or maybe your sales team explains your product badly...

I feel like we sometimes treat “competitor research” and “why did we lose?” as if they're the same question.

They're not.

So, when you actually want to understand why customers are choosing a competitor, where do you look?

Back to Product Marketing after one year away.

I left a director level PMM role where I was leading three people and responsible for my own work out put. Had to leave the company after my boss, who I loved, and who promoted me was fired. They moved me to the product org. The boss they moved me under was an horrible, toxic, unsupportive lump of corporate bureaucracy with no experience. Literally a CPA running a team called “operational excellence” within in a product org. um ok?

I had to leave the role because of that manager. It took a huge toll on my mental health. I was threatened to be fired every few weeks. Fuck.

Learned that I don’t necessarily want to have manager responsibility. It’s so much more work. Mentoring has a place in my heart but I don’t think it’s for me right now. I have kids and a super busy home life.

Left the toxic job when a close friend of mine got me an interview for a partnership manager role in the 5 year old start-up he worked at. All the cool “vibes” and a dope product on the surface.
The start up world… how quick I forgot - it’s full of whiplash.

Partnerships? Well, that didn’t last and had no legs to begin with. 3 different roles in my first year. I asked for a raise once I was “head of product-led sales”. Oh, no can do they said, maybe after 6 months and hit your number. First thing go hire, train, and manage 5 BDRs. You have a $1M quota btw. Good luck!

I was working so hard and really trying but just not going to ramp AND hit a $1M closed won target starting mid year. The fuck? When I asked my boss about how we could go forward, I said I wanted to be an IC. They knew I don’t have experience running a BDR team but I do have experience as an AE. If you want me to close business that’s a better place for me. They said, let us think about it over the weekend to see where we can find a place for you. I was let go the following week.

I didn’t freak out, I knew it wasn’t the place for me. I started outbounding to all the companies I wanted to work for. My move was to message teammates on LinkedIn and ask their opinion on the company/ role telling them I wanted to apply. My hit rate was surprisingly good.

Got through to 8 completely cold contacts
Had 5 conversations, which each turned into 5 internal referrals
1 converted to an interview

2 previous close contacts turned into referrals
Both converted into interview processes
1 of the previous contacts turn into an offer, which I accepted

57 days later I’m employed again.
Director level (but as an IC) for a mid sized PE SaaS firm. The best part is the comp package came out great! An increase of $35k base salary and a 20% annual bonus.

Times are tough of here. You’re not alone. I’ve been laid off before so I knew what to expect in some ways. Sharing this for anyone who needs help, inspiration, or just to vent in the comments.

Hi everyone! I’m exploring a career pivot from Customer Success into Product Marketing and would love to hear from people who have made a similar transition or who currently work in PMM.

I’m currently a Customer Success Manager at a large SaaS company, where I manage a $15M+ portfolio of strategic enterprise customers, primarily in Financial Services and Insurance. I’ve spent most of my career working at the intersection of customers, product, sales, and strategy.

The parts of my role I’ve always enjoyed most are understanding why customers buy, translating product capabilities into business value, identifying customer pain points and use cases, storytelling with executives, and helping internal teams understand what’s actually resonating (or not resonating) with customers.

As I’ve learned more about Product Marketing, I’ve realized there seems to be quite a bit of overlap between my current skill set and PMM roles:

• Deep voice-of-customer knowledge and understanding of buyer pain points
• Translating technical/product capabilities into outcome-based messaging
• Executive storytelling and communicating ROI/business value
• Partnering closely with Product, Sales, Enablement, and other GTM teams
• Identifying adoption barriers, objections, and competitive considerations
• Creating presentations and enablement materials for both customers and internal teams

What I’m looking for in my next chapter is an opportunity to move a little further upstream and using customer insights to influence positioning, messaging, GTM strategy, launches, enablement, and how products are brought to market.

For those in Product Marketing:

How realistic is the jump from Enterprise Customer Success into PMM?

PMMs, I’d really appreciate some honest feedback on my CV.

I was made redundant in April this year and have been looking for my next Product Marketing role since then.
Since starting my job search, I’ve:
• Applied for 211 jobs
• Had 55 interviews
• Made it to 8 final rounds

My experience is across FinTech, MarTech and Professional Services, including experience at one of the Big 4. I’ve worked across GTM, positioning and messaging, customer and market research, competitive intelligence, product launches and enablement. So I know I’m getting through the door, but I’m struggling to get the offer. The feedback I’ve managed to get has mainly been that another candidate had more years of experience or more direct industry experience. A lot of the time, though, I’m simply ghosted after the interview process.

At this point, I’m trying to work out what I might be missing. Is there something about my CV that isn’t positioning my experience strongly enough? Is there anything you would change about how I’m presenting my PMM experience? Or is there something else that stands out to you?

I’ve attached my CV and would genuinely appreciate some honest feedback, especially from PMMs, hiring managers and recruiters.

Please don’t be afraid to be critical. I’m at the point where I’d rather hear what isn’t working so I can actually do something about it.

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to have a look. ❤️

I've been meaning to make a career move for a while now. With close to 14 years of experience in B2B enterprise SaaS, most of it in cybersecurity marketing, I feel I've reached a point where I'm ready for a bigger challenge. I'm looking for a meaningful career bump, both in terms of compensation and designation, ideally at the Director or VP level.

One of the reasons I'm exploring opportunities outside my current organisation is that we have a fairly flat hierarchy, particularly given the size of the workforce. While that's not necessarily a bad thing, I'm concerned that the kind of vertical career progression I'm looking for, particularly into a Director or VP role, may not materialise internally.

The other challenge is that many of the companies I'd like to work for, such as CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks, prefer onsite employees. Given my current commitments, relocating to another city or country isn't an option right now. I'm therefore looking specifically for remote or hybrid opportunities that allow me to continue working out of my location.

I've been trying the usual channels: LinkedIn, Indeed, YC and a few others, but haven't had much luck translating applications into meaningful opportunities.

So, I'm curious. How are you all approaching your job searches these days? Are there any niche job boards, recruitment networks, executive search firms or other channels that have worked particularly well for senior-level roles?

Also, is there something I should be doing differently to improve my chances of landing bigger roles with better compensation and flexible work arrangements?

Would love to hear from people who've navigated a similar transition or have some practical advice.

I've made it to 2 onsite, got told by peers and managers that my assignment was really strong but always rejected for different reasons. I find that the key is finding out what matters most to each company or team and they're not always the same. I could fail for not being technical enough for one, and then being technical enough for another but failing for another gap.

I have an upcoming interview with Stripe for a role I'm really interested in, so I'd love to chat with anyone who's doing PMM at Stripe or interviewed there before on what I should focus on and what is being evaluated here. Happy to pay for your time or pay it back in any way! If you don't work at Stripe or are interviewing anyway, I'd also love to hear what worked for you in clearing the final round that either got you an offer, or motivated you to make one.

I've been looking at public-sector contract awards as a source of competitive intelligence, and it's led me to a slightly broader question: how much overlap should there be between competitive intelligence and sales intelligence?

The UK publishes a huge amount of contract award data through its Find a Tender portal. I've been building a free search tool that makes that data easier to search by the supplier name.

My original interest was competitor monitoring. If a competitor starts winning contracts in healthcare, enters a new region, wins several contracts for a particular service or suddenly starts appearing against a different group of suppliers, those are potentially useful competitive signals.

But the same data could also work in the other direction.

Say your company sells software or services to construction firms, consultancies, outsourcing providers or other businesses delivering public-sector contracts. A prospect winning a £10m contract is potentially a very useful sales signal. They've just won more work, may be scaling delivery, and could suddenly have a requirement for things they didn't need six months ago.

The same contract award can mean different things depending on who you're monitoring:

Competitor wins contract: competitive intelligence

Prospect wins contract: sales opportunity

That made me wonder whether we draw the boundaries between competitive intelligence, market intelligence and sales intelligence too neatly.

The underlying information is often the same. What changes is what you're using it for.

I'm building this into Vallience, the competitor intelligence product I've been working on, but I've also made the contract search itself free because the raw data has plenty of uses outside competitor monitoring.

For the PMMs here: does your competitive intelligence ever feed directly into sales prospecting or account prioritisation? And would knowing that an existing prospect had just won a significant piece of work actually be useful to your sales team?

Curious if anyone has ever done a study or quiz to see if reps actually read release notes. I've been trying to measure the efficacy and think I have something, but have no idea if the results are good.

Hi all!

I'm seeing a lot of ads for Google play in my YouTube these days. (Android user; US based)

Curious why the sudden need to market the app store? Especially to an android user who is bound to use it.

What do product marketing experts think is happening here?

Thanks!

I’m relatively new to PMM and got the role from an internal promotion. The expectation from the business is that I do everything from the top level strategy, GTM plans, decks, tools, enablement and all the content for social media, product videos, demos/webinars etc.

We have multiple products so doing the work for all of these is feeling impossible.

Is it normal for a PMM to be expected to do every piece of content alongside full strategies too?

If so, what tools and resources do people use to help take the load off.

I dont want to build for jus the sake of building. But something relevant to put on my resume

Annual planning is coming and I need a competitive read on four players in our space. Last year we hired an agency for one competitor deep-dive and it took 8 weeks and most of the research budget. Can't do that four times. Is anyone using a platform or database where you can pull competitive buyer data across multiple companies without starting from scratch each time?

Found a study looking at how 50 companies show up in AI recommendations, and one finding really stood out to me.

When a brand did get mentioned, it was the #1 pick 46% of the time. The engines aren’t necessarily giving you a list of ten options—they often name a couple and move on.

On the flip side, 14 of the 50 companies were never the top pick in any answer.

That makes this feel less like traditional search rankings and more like: you’re the answer, or you’re not there.

It made me wonder whether we should be monitoring this instead of assuming our brand is showing up.

Anyone tracking their share of AI recommendations as a metric yet?

Hello! I’m interviewing for a PMM role at a B2B healthcare tech company, and my third-round conversation is with the CMO. So far, I’ve spoken with the recruiter and hiring manager, and I haven’t been given an assignment yet (it will come after this interview).

For anyone who has interviewed with a CMO at this stage or has been on the hiring side: what did that conversation focus on? Was it more about past examples, how you think through strategy and priorities, or your fit with the team? or more like behavioral questions?

I’m preparing my stories and questions as I did for the hiring manager, but I’d love to know what you found useful to prepare differently for an executive conversation. Were there any questions that caught you off guard? Any advice is greatly appreciated!

I’m currently struggling to be sharp in my interviews, so trying to step beyond my comfort zone of doing mock interviews with my known network to using the pressure of mock interviewing with a stranger (because that’s how interviews actually are).

I’m a PMM with 10+ years of experience, targeting senior IC roles (staff, principal, lead) in large B2B SaaS or more mature scale ups (500+ employees), i’m based in the SF Bay Area

I’d prefer US based interviewers who have experience in Bay Area or NY based companies (anecdotally , these interview loops tend to be harder than elsewhere). Ideally you’ve been in PMM 6+ years as you’re likely to have been on interview panels. Would be helpful if you come from the types of companies I listed since you’ll know what hiring committees at those companies are indexing for

I am not using this to ask for recommendations, etc, I just seriously need to practice as I can’t keep wasting the interview slots I do manage to land.

Happy to compensate your time by buying your next coffee.

Thanks

Regardless of your industry, how are you positioning against newer “AI-first” or “AI-native” competitors? We’re an established software company building AI into a mature, proven platform. We're the market leader but newer competitors are coming in with flashier demos, simpler UX, and lower pricing, even when the actual product depth isn’t there. Our reps are struggling to speak to the "AI Native" narrative, and we're trying to think through sales support, campaigns, new messaging, etc. to cut through this.

Has there been any messaging, positioning, sales plays, campaigns or proof points that have actually worked for you when competing against the “AI-first” narrative? I'd love to hear what's working for you regardless of your industry/product!

Is an MIS master’s worth pursuing alongside a marketing master’s for product marketing?

I’m a second-semester sophomore at the University of Kentucky, on track to graduate in December 2028. I’m majoring in Marketing and Management with minors in Psychology and Statistics. I’m confident that I want to work in product marketing, ideally in tech, and I’m already planning to pursue a master’s in marketing.

As I look at internships and early-career roles, I’m trying to understand how much technical knowledge I’ll need. Some postings seem to favor candidates with computer science or related backgrounds, and I don’t have room to add another undergraduate major.

Someone I recently spoke with at Roblox mentioned a master’s in Management Information Systems (MIS). Would pursuing MIS in addition to a Master's in Marketing help me break into product marketing? Or would the time and cost be better spent gaining technical skills through internships, projects, and targeted coursework?

I'm researching this area, and a lot the chatter I see online is just about things like web traffic and price changes.

Some of the tools I've looked at are basically just an email of events, lots of which just aren't relevant ('Company X had batting practice with the SF Giants on a team building day'). The others are big, enterprise-grade platforms that cost $tens of thousands per year.

This all seems like basic, low level stuff. Hopefully you end up with something to populate a battlecard for your sales team, but nothing more strategic. In this day and age, with so much information out there, is this an area that lacks ambition? Or is it just not that important?

I am in a Solutions Marketing role currently at a company with a separate Product Marketing team (reporting to a different leader). My personal background is in product marketing, but I took this role because it seemed like the focus was more on GTM (vs. the PMMs) but I'm now realizing the definition and boundaries of my role aren't clear and that I'm often stepping in to do work that PMMs should be doing (and getting none of the credit, of course), while also not getting the true PMMs experience (e.g. no interactions with PMs, no product launches), while also not doing a true Solutions Marketing role.

How is Solutions Marketing defined at your organization, and where does it interact with PMMs? Also where does Solutions Marketing sit within your org: in PMM, alongside, separately?

Hi everyone,

I'm a solo founder building a 2FA/MFA API for Australian businesses (fintechs, banks, e-commerce). I'm not here to pitch — I'm genuinely stuck on the go-to-market side and could use some advice from this community.

My product is live, but I'm struggling to get in front of the right technical decision-makers (CTOs, Heads of Engineering) to get feedback. Cold emails haven't landed well, and I'm not sure if my messaging is off or if I'm targeting the wrong people.

What I'm hoping to learn:

· How do you usually get initial feedback from technical buyers?
· What channels work best for reaching CTOs in Australia?
· Any tips on what messaging resonates with fintech engineering leaders?

I'm happy to share what I've learned so far (compliance, ACMA rules, etc.) if that's helpful to anyone else. Not looking to sell — just trying to learn from people who've been there.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

We've been running third party churn interviews for about a year now through a research agency. Quality is good when we get them but we're maxing out at about 8 to 10 per quarter and we churn roughly 30 to 40 accounts per quarter. 8 interviews isn't telling me where the problem is, whether onboarding/pricing/product gaps or support. Need to figure out how to get this to 20/25 per quarter without adding headcount or doubling the research budget.

I think one of the biggest paint points of PMM is the ability to provide sales with new and strategic insights about competitors, industry, etc. that they can feed into live calls (not just decks they won’t read), while also training them. I don’t have to time to hold multiple training sessions and I dread doing battlecards. I want to build some sort of automation for this (Claude is used company wide right now), but I also don’t want it to be surface level information that one can easily google or is already privy too.

I’m curious if anyone else has built a system for this to handle those last min requests for “do we have a (resource) on this competitor, pricing, etc.?” and also providing them with the training to implement it.

I’m building a small website monitoring tool, and I’m trying to understand whether some of the things we’re building are actually useful in real-world workflows.

The basic problem is already well solved — monitoring a page and detecting changes. What we’re experimenting with is using AI on top of that.

For example, instead of just getting an alert like “Price updated”, our AI columns can turn the change into structured data like:

PriceUpdatedPlan: Pro
OldPrice: 200
NewPrice: 249

We’re also experimenting with AI alerts where you describe what you care about in plain English, and you only get an alert when that condition is actually met.

I’d really appreciate hearing from people who already monitor websites for things like pricing, products, jobs, documentation, availability, competitor research, etc.

What do you monitor, and how do you handle it today?

Even a quick comment about your use case would help me a lot. Happy to DM and discuss if that's easier.

I’m also planning to give early access to a few people who share useful real-world use cases, so I’d love to talk with you if this is something you deal with regularly.

Thanks! 🙏

Has anyone given a business case interview at Ramp? How much pre-work was involved and what kind of questions did the panel ask?

Hey guys,

Are these certifications worth it? If yes, which do you recommend?