How to get a break in a career in  Product Marketing?

Steve is the expert on the topic but I want to offer my opiion as well as someone who is desperately trying to hire product marketting talent.   Product marketers come from different backgrounds, yet, they need to demonstrate three core skills (not in order): Understand the technology (or the product) - because product marketing needs to match technology with business problems and often explain the value to an audience that is very familiar with the category Marketing experience: working with analysts, doing press releases, sales enablement, public speaking, messaging, marketing strategy, etc. Business mindset: understand P&L and revenue forecasting but also thinking like a business owner and an having the initiative, accountability/ownership, drive and creativity of an entrepreneur. Yet, the single most powerful thing a product marketer brings to a company, is a deep understanding of the customer: the market, the type of customers, the business problems they are trying to solve and the competitive landscape. This knowledge is put to good use using the three skills above.   In terms of training, pragmatic marketing is probably the de-facto standard in the industry, I highly recommend it.   Best of luck,   Gerardo

Observe the world. Come up with a product idea that you're really passionate about. Even if it's small. Build it. Release it into the wild and observe. Talk to everybody about it. Consume, digest and distill as much feedback as you can get. Create a hypothesis about how to make it better, more relevant or stickier. Test the hypothesis. Leverage your gained insight from the test by adding or deleting features. Go to number 4. This gets you real Product Management AND Product Marketing experience -- and if your product is valuable you might have people asking you for a job!

One of the best ways for a new grad to get into the space is to take a 1st level sales job or inside sales job. After a year of talking to customers, hearing objections, seeing what works and what doesn't you can dominate an interview for an entry level product marketing or product management job in a way that someone coming right from school cannot. When I hire product marketers at the most basic level I look for product, marketing and market experience. If you don't have all three then I need to look for over-indexed skills in another area and a belief that you have the ability to quickly learn a new market or product.   Based on your question and no marketing experience this is a path that you could follow as there are 10x more sales jobs than marketing jobs out there.  When you join and start delivering on the sales job start to expand your network in the company. When you see trends and customer driven insights find a way to share those with the product and marketing teams. Over time, your insights will open the door.

I agree with Steve. You "just do it". I still remember how difficult it was to start for me a few years ago. The best place to start is Steve's free e-book available here: http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/strategic-role-of-product-management.aspx This short e-book will point you into the right direction. You'll learn more through experience. If you want to transition into product management or marketing, I'd suggest finding something that could be improved in an existing product and do a presentation for the stakeholder. I work with a guy who did this when he was a technical writer (writing user guides, how exciting) and will now manage marketing automation. He's a school dropout, too :)

Here's more advice from Seth Godin similar to Steve Johnson's "Do the job to get the job." The Best way to Learn Marketing: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/09/the-best-way-to-learn-marketing.html