13 Navigating today’s product marketing landscape So, what are the essential skills for a PMM? We asked PMMs which skills they view as most important, and their answers fell into three buckets: 1. Communication and collaboration come out on top. This is unsurprising, given the unique cross- functional nature of the role. 2. Strategic planning, business skills, and problem-solving occupy the middle ground, but surprisingly… 3. Basic functional skills such as research and analytics, content creation and copywriting, and persuasive skills and negotiation – in other words, the foundational skills that get the job done – are not seen as high priorities. These skills shortages, whether on the employee side or the company side, have a direct impact on your business. Essential product marketing skills 82.2% 77.9% 66.3% 61.9% Strong Collaborating Strategic planning Problem-solving communication with coworkers and business skills 54.6% 54.6% 39.3% 32.5% 0.6% Empathy Research and Content creation Persuasive skills Other analytical skills and copywriting and negotiation Your effectiveness is impacted by the skills shortage, but so is your ability to retain employees. Most PMMs want to move up the ladder, and they’re looking to you to provide training (more on this later!) Here are a few more key stats for you to mull over: • 94% of employees say they’d stay at a company longer if it invested in their L&D, according to LinkedIn’s 2019 Workforce Learning Report. • 99% of L&D professionals agree that if skills gaps aren’t closed, their organizations will be negatively impacted in the upcoming years, according to LinkedIn’s 2020 report. Quite simply, the cost of not training your employees is far greater than the cost of training them. Source: State of Product Marketing Report 2022