Product Marketer Role Skill Set

The following set of skills, listed in alphabetical order, is essential to the Product Marketer role:

• • Abstraction Skills—ability to comprehend and summarize conceptual ideas and notions that apply to the different stages of the product’s marketing life cycle.
• • Analytical Skills—ability to perform a risk-adjusted, cost-benefit analysis, and evaluation of market opportunities.
• • Marketing Skills—ability to select and apply the right marketing tools to given market scenarios, and execute marketing techniques, processes, and tasks.
• • Planning Skills—ability to develop and implement a product marketing process that generates awareness, differentiation, and demand for the product.
• • Psycho-social Skills—ability to understand, factor-in, and consider the market’s relevant emotions, beliefs, and behaviors in the selection of marketing actions.

Product Marketer Role Overview Table

The product marketer role overview table (Table 16.2) provides the role’s general profile and a list of its key characteristics.

Table 16.2 Product Marketer Role Overview Table

This section describes the Product Architect role. The product architect has domain expertise in a particular technology or product type, from an engineering perspective. Product Architecturing is a discipline that is focused on the formation, structure, and design of a product.

The product architect is a tactical role that is owned by a product expert who creates a high-level design for the product. The product architect understands the market opportunity, interprets market requirements, and is well-versed in technology and development processes. The product architect’s main task is to devise a functional solution to the market problem according to the market requirements that are outlined in the 'Market Requirements Document (MRD).

The primary deliverable of the product architect is the Product Requirements Document (PRD), which is a high-level description of the functional solution, its intended use, and the set of features it provides that address the market problem and satisfy needs. Through the PRD, the product architect articulates the product’s architectural vision and structure, and specifies the product’s components and interfaces which create the features that the market requirements prescribe. The product architect contributes to other supporting documents including the product features matrix, roadmap, and technical specification documents.

The prime goal of the product architect role is to have satisfied product developers. This means that the product’s design and its architecture are compatible with the company’s current internal development processes and technologies. Consequently, the product’s design and its architecture conform to the development team’s competencies, schedule, and technical quality demands.

The product architect must be able to communicate well with both external and internal organizations. External to the company, the product architect communicates and works with contract development firms, technology partners, and customers. Internally, the product architect communicates and works with organizational functions such as engineering, product marketing, and product planning. The product architect also acts as a communication interface between the product planning team and the engineering team.