Does your company have a current, published career ladder for product marketing managers (PMMs)? For anyone unfamiliar, a career ladder documents the shifting scope of responsibilities and skills required as a role progresses over time.
Btw, I understand that career ladders are a bit old-school vertical career progressions, while a more modern approach is a more personalized career lattice or ‘climbing wall.’ These approaches also identify adjacent cross-functional paths that many pursue in their careers to build diverse skill sets. But very few organizations even capture ladders for most roles, much less a complex lattice, hence my walk-before-we-run focus here.
In my experience, HR teams in large or scaling B2B tech firms often have ladders for sales reps, product managers, and maybe familiar marketing disciplines like demand gen and field marketing. But PMM tends to get shoehorned into somebody else’s. Yes, I’ve heard more than once, “It’s close enough to product management, let’s just use that one.”
As I discussed in my article, “The {Insert Everything} product marketing job description,” no two B2B product marketing teams are alike. Some orgs may ask PMMs to focus primarily on product launches, others on enablement, while others on messaging and copy. But what’s most common for a PMM org is the ‘do anything and everything’ that’s falling between the cracks of product, marketing, and enablement. That makes it difficult for an early, aspiring product marketer to understand the skills and experiences they need to build to get to the next level – and it’s hard for those experienced individual contributors to know where to focus to grow into management and leadership roles.
AI is making this more urgent, not less
Every PMM I talk to feels pressure to prove AI fluency, and every hiring manager seems to have an AI BINGO card, waiting for the candidate to name-drop the trendiest tool. (I wrote a whole piece on this: “Experience Is the AI Edge You’re Overlooking.”)
AI usage is skyrocketing, and token costs are climbing fast, but results are still uneven. Even the executives pushing hardest for AI transformation are landing on the same realization: the people who deliver the most value are the ones who can feed the machine with real experience and judgment.
For product marketers navigating their careers, that means gaining those reps in positioning, launches, enablement, and so on so they learn what good looks like. So the job of every PMM leader is to build the roadmap that helps their PMMs gain that hard-won experience at the right stage of their careers. And that needs a shared definition of what the job requires as it grows, which is why a career ladder is so valuable.
Build it with your PMMs, and in collaboration with HR
A PMM career ladder is one of the most underrated leadership tools you have. It’s how you help your product marketers navigate a confusing career path and show them you’re invested in their growth, not just their productivity.
You also don’t have to build it alone. This is a partnership. Your People and HR team owns the leveling frameworks, comp bands, and promotion mechanics for every other role in the company, and they want PMM held to the same rigor. Your job as the PMM or marketing leader is to bring the substance: what the craft is, and how it scales from a supporting role to running the whole function.
I most recently built one when I led product marketing at Precisely. No PMM ladder existed, so I went to our CHRO for guidance. She was very supportive of the effort and shared some other ladders for reference. I took a first pass on my own, drawing on years of building and leveling these teams. Then I brought it to the leader who ran the team day to day, my closest partner on this, to challenge and sharpen the draft before anyone else saw it. Together we took it to the rest of the PMM team and asked them to pick it apart. What was missing? What didn’t match their day-to-day? What mattered to their career that I overlooked? We refined it together, and only then did we finalize and publish it as the corporate standard. The people expected to climb the ladder helped build it, and as a result they trusted it.
The payoff is a team that can self-manage their own trajectory. Instead of “how do I get promoted?” the conversation with their manager becomes “here is the competency I need to develop next, what opportunities can you provide that will help me gain relevant experience?” That’s a healthier and more constructive career conversation.
The competencies a PMM ladder should cover
Whatever format you land on, a PMM ladder has to define the competencies that make up the job, then describe how each one deepens at every level. When I built mine, I landed on eleven core competencies. Here is the short version of what each one covers (and where relevant, links to articles where I deep dive on those competencies):
- Positioning and storytelling. The category you play in, the buyer problem you lead with, the value you deliver, and the differentiators that survive scrutiny. Aka, why anyone should listen to you.
- Content creation. The assets that carry positioning across the funnel, from top-of-funnel thought leadership to bottom-of-funnel differentiation and demos.
- Cross-functional collaboration. Aligning marketing, sales, and product on one GTM story, and earning a real voice on the roadmap (emphasis on earning).
- Market research and analysis. Competitive intelligence, category and customer insight, and informing pricing and packaging.
- Project management. Running launches and complex GTM initiatives (pricing and packaging changes, partnerships, acquisitions) across functions and on time.
- Field enablement. Equipping everyone who touches a customer, including sales, presales, partners, and support, to tell the right story and win.
- Go-to-market strategy. Who to sell to, with what message, with which solutions, and how to measure whether it worked.
- Customer, analyst, and partner engagement. Backing the advocacy, analyst relations, and partner teams with the proof and messaging they need to succeed.
- Interpersonal, organizational, and prioritization skills. Influence without authority, and yes, my beloved 80/20 rule applied to an always-overloaded plate.
- AI and technology. Fearless use of the AI and RevTech/MarTech stack, used responsibly and verified against reality. Expert enough to excel in the role, not to moonlight as a data scientist.
- Business impact. The results you own and the scope they span, from a single feature or persona up to company revenue and category leadership.
Underneath those, the ladder sets the practical targets for each level: years of experience (a guide, not a gate), education, whether the role manages people, and the background that tends to prepare someone for the jump.
One personal opinion I hold strongly, but I know is not universally accepted: hire for proven breadth across these competencies over category or product domain expertise. I can teach a strong PMM your market. The reverse takes a lot longer.
Take mine as a starting point
I have published the full ladder as a free resource here! It is yours to use and adapt. Where it should live depends on where PMM reports: under the CMO, under a CPO in product, or at earlier-stage companies, often the founder or CEO. Wherever it sits, pull your HR partner into the room early since it must align with your organization’s defined grade levels and promotion paths.
Then do for me what my team did: tell me what is missing or wrong. Which competency does not match your world? Which level feels off? I want the redlines. This resource gets sharper every time a practitioner pushes back on it.
Your product marketers are navigating their careers whether or not you hand them a map. So hand them the map!
You can also access the ladder assets directly here:
Spreadsheet download: B2B Product Marketing Career Ladder
PDF download: B2B Product Marketing Career Ladder