I had many conversations over the past couple of weeks trying to explain what it is that I do these days at Microsoft as a Product Marketing Manager. And you know what? It's hard to explain as it was for my manager when I asked him to explain what a typical PMM day looks like. The best way I can put it is that it's very different from a developer role but these developer skills are invaluable in doing what we do. My goal is to more or less work with the engineering teams, PMs and other marketing teams to help promote the excellent work that we do to our developer and non developer audience. Then I need to take the feedback and the data from these efforts and feed them back. Many times, our marketing experiments highlight faults in our strategy and having a data-driven approach helps realign and focus our efforts in promoting our products.
Some things that are totally new to me is have a very data-driven process. I tend to get easily excited by new ideas and promotional efforts which could focus on the wrong things. It's great to have such an amazing team and to guide me in my early days in marketing.