Robin was a Product Marketing Manager at Google and now a Product Manager at Google. He'll deep-dive on what a typical day as a Google Product Marketing Manager looks like.
I worked in Product Marketing at Google for 5 years across 3 different continents across consumer products like Google Search in the U.S to business products like Google My Business and Google Ads in India.
It's difficult, to sum up, a "typical" day as a Product Marketing Manager since every day genuinely feels quite different. Role, responsibilities, projects, and tasks of PMM vary so much depending on which product you're working on and its product life cycle.
The general day-to-day
As a PMM you sit at the intersection between the customers, sales teams, and the product team so you have to work very cross-functionally, working with PMs, design, Sales, Legal, Public Policy, and business development. You often have to spend a lot of time in meetings with cross-functional stakeholders, but also have bouts of deep work like building presentations and a marketing strategy plan.
As the Product Marketing Manager, you'll often be responsible for running meetings, preparing agendas, and taking track of open questions that the cross-functional team needs to resolve.
Generally the PMM's responsibilities communicating the Why, What, and When to the market and users. They're experts at building value propositions and choosing where these messages should be communicated whether it's through a presentation to a partner, a blog post, a social post, or a TV commercial.
For instance, at the beginning of a product life-cycle, PMMs are responsible for conducting market research to understand what exists currently and how it could be improved. As the team advances in product development and gets close to launching the product, PMMs play an integral role in the go-to-market process. They're involved in understanding how to price the product, what packaging or bundling could work. Product Marketing Managers are responsible for determining where the product can be distributed and how the product can be communicated to illustrate its features and benefits.
Sample calendar
Here's what my typical calendar looked like as a Google PMM. As you can see there's lots of meetings but I also blocked out a couple of hours each day to work on specific long-term projects.
7 am Commute
It's usually an early start for me since I have a long commute. Usually start the day with a few podcasts to get up to speed on the latest world and tech news.
830 - 10 am Email time!
Getting caught up on email is important especially as I work with several teams across the globe. Being on Pacific Time, it's important to understand while you've been sleeping, most of your colleagues have been toiling away and may need help answering questions.
10 - 11 am Product Marketing Team meeting
It's always really important to know what the rest of the Product Marketing team is working so you can help connect the dots across the whole organization. Given Product Marketing teams are often very lean, a typical PMM covers several PMs so when the Product Marketing team comes together, it's a time to take a step back and look at how your product fits within the larger picture. These meetings are great for expansive brainstorms and high-level strategy discussions
1130 - 12 pm Catch-up with PM on the GTM plan
We're a few months away from launching a new feature in Search so it's time to think about how we would go-to-market. It's important to meet with the Product Manager to understand all the intricacies of the new feature launch and how we could build out messaging that sets the new product apart and how it's on a core user need.
12 - 1 pm Lunch
It's always important to have a breather and food fuels the brain!
1 - 2 pm DNS- Think time for GTM
With a plethora of meetings during the day, it's really important to block out time for yourself during the day for thinking time. Based on the meeting I had with the Product Manager. I start putting together a Go-To-Market deck on Google Slides that talks through the product positioning, the key activities around the launch, and how we're planning on driving growth to the feature. This Go-To-Market plan will eventually get presented to senior executives across Product Management, Engineering, Business Development, and Marketing.
2 - 230 pm New project research plan with PM and UXR
Product Marketing Managers are often the drivers of surfacing user insights. The product team is thinking about building out a new feature in Search and want to test out some hypothesis. Product Marketing and User Experience Research often works together to get insights into user behavior of existing products so that they can identify opportunities and build out user personas through interviews, surveys, focus groups, and feedback data. This is a meeting to kick-off the initiative to understand the scope of the project.
330 - 415 pm DNS - work time on proposal
After the meeting with the Product Manager and User Experience Researcher, it's time to synthesize my thoughts down into a proposal doc and think through the main objectives of the research, the hypotheses we might be testing, and how we'll be able to prove them out. I'll share out a draft of the proposal to the PM and UXR in the coming week.
430 - 5 pm Catch-up on campaign plan with Brand marketing
The final meeting of the day! It's time to have a sync with our marketing colleagues in brand marketing. They're working on a big marketing campaign that highlights some of the features that I helped launch. We're going to discuss how the features are being shown in the campaign videos and other advertisements. We'll also touch upon how Product Marketing might work with the product team to enhance the marketing campaign by using in-product notifications and banners that relate to the campaign.
530 - 630 pm Commute
Time to head back home to relax after a productive day as a Product Marketing Manager!
And that's a wrap! If this sounds like an appealing day to you, being a Product Marketing Manager could be a great fit. Our upcoming PMM interview prep course might help you get to a good start.
Read more about Product Marketing Management from our blog:
- How To Break Into Product Marketing Management
- Product Marketing vs Product Management
- How To Write A Great Product Marketer Resume
- How to Write a Product Marketing Manager Cover Letter
- How to Become an Associate Product Marketing Manager (APMM)
- Five Essential Skills for Product Marketing Managers
We also recommend checking out our complete guide to nailing the Google behavioral interview to increases your chances of getting called back.
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