An important consideration when laying out content is figuring out the topics and in which order they will be posted. Easier said than done. There are so many topics to discuss and it’s hard to rank them based on importance. Depending on what Cyber PMMs are focused on these topics will vary in interest.
This is why your feedback is going to be instrumental to the process. One reason why I’m publishing this content as a series of blog posts instead of a long-form book format is because I want to iterate on what I publish after I collect comments and input from other SMEs and adjust my conclusions based on your feedback. So please don’t hesitate to disagree or provide examples of what has worked for you.
So what is the plan here? What topics will I be discussing? After some thought, I’ve come up with the following shortlist of topics that I think are worthy of attention:
- Cybersecurity Industry Dynamics: Visualizing a lay of the land in cyber, understanding buyer dynamics, assessing the vendor landscape, and how to perform under varying market situations.
- Your Core Functions as a Cyber PMM: Delivering effective messaging, aligning with product management and engineering, executing on product launches, building a buyer’s journey map, being the voice of the customer, mastering content production, navigating politics, and more.
- Cyber PMM Productivity: Measuring effectiveness, setting OKR’s and sharing plans, understanding the law of duplicity, managing fire drills, mastering meetings/calls, utilizing AI tools, and getting things done.
- Cyber PMM Survival Tips: Managing chaos and change, building emotional intelligence, asking for help and collaborating, understanding generational differences, and more.
- Cross-Functional Marketing Interlocks: Leading without authority, campaigns team, content marketing, solutions marketing, technical marketing, competitive intelligence, regional marketing, analyst relations, growth marketing and other teams.
- Leading Without Authority as a Cyber PMM: How to do the impossible and influence and execute when you have no budget and no direct reports.
- Cyber PMM Training & Education: Pragmatic Marketing, Forrester, Product Marketing Alliance, Podcasts, and Key Influencers.
- Other Areas: Navigating the key analyst firms, working with consultancies and agencies, understanding the key industry events, job hunting and employer relations.
- The Future of Being a Cyber PMM: Building a co-pilot with new AI tools, listing the most in demand skills of the future, designing new team structures, and applying task automation.
My logic above is to start with the basics and get progressively nerdier or more scientific. I’m a fan of “back to the basics” and this list starts with the fundamentals and progresses into “the future”. We have to first understand what good looks like, and then we can apply more science to apply new tech like AI and automation to execute on those established processes. In a weird way, my goal here is to automate us all out of a job but that will take years.
Hopefully this is enough to chew on for now. What else should be on this list? What would you like to learn about? Let me know what you think.
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