I started out in PM - mainly 3 years in the legacy infrastructure companies, then went to SaaS product marketing and then continued down the product marketing path in the integration, API, and analytics space. Rose to a Director level of PMM (with 1 direct report) making $185K, $20K bonuses, etc (TC came to about $250K). So 8 yrs of PMM basically. And 2 years of engineering work well before I became a PM. I’m pretty technical (can talk about JSON, Spark, Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, databases) because my audience has been IT, but not so technical that I can understand code. Can I ever go back to being a PM? I don’t want to take a pay cut though. What level of PM could I get? Could I get a Director of PM position (as an individual contributor)?
What's PMM??
PMM = product marketing manager. Focuses mainly on outbound marketing activities, product positioning, messaging, and sales enablement. Sometimes focuses on pricing as well. I can see by your question that you obviously don’t know much about product marketing, or don’t think too highly of it, or it’s not too important to you. This is part of the reason why am thinking of switching to PM.
Hmmm did not expect so much post mortem for a simple question! Good luck 👍 Seems like you answered your own question here!
Apply for roles internally or externally at your current level or downlevel yourself if you want to be IC. At a lot of companies, PM wears the PMM hat too, so your current role is still relevant. If not, there is so much bleed over of responsibilities between PM and PMM, company to company, that your current role is relevant regardless.
Ah but here’s the thing. I don’t think that PMM is relevant anymore in my field (analytics, BI, Big Data, Cloud Infrastructure). PM has taken pricing, Sales always has their own enablement team once they hit a certain size, demand generation claims credit for all the leads they bring in three webinars, and content marketing falls under PR/AR. So the role of a PMM is massively undercut and ignored. Whereas at least as a Pm. you are seen as the go to guy for a product. What’s left to do once all these roles take a bite out of PMM?
That’s not the case at every company, so if I were in your shoes I would play up my experience and just go find a different company that either valued PMM or had no idea I had been undercut to that extent at my past role and try to not let it happen again.
3 years of PM and 8 years of PMM will likely land you somewhere in the Sr PM and at best Principal PM. Why not switch internal? May be able to make a lateral move
I left to do my own consulting. Some of the clients I work for I collect use cases for and prioritize, others I write technical blog posts. How much do you think I could make as a senior PM or principal PM? What’s the salary range like?