#94: Product Marketing and Career Coaching with Yi Lin Pei

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts. Everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup and we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op so you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike, and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more.

Hey, if you work in B2B marketing.

And need to give your branded events and webinars a boost, I want to take a minute to tell you about Kaltura.

They help marketers like you and me.

Run impactful branded events and webinars that look great, are easy to create and manage and keep audiences glued to their screens so you can improve your attendance rate, get better leads, and maximize your roi. Whether you're looking to host a flagship customer conference for tens of thousands of attendees like AWS did, an interactive customer education program like Google did, a worldwide product launch like WIX did, or a webinar series like Adobe did, Kaltura's webinar and event platform is the surefire way to engage your audience and deliver results. The tech giants I just mentioned are a handful of the global brands that are already using Kaltura's unique platform capabilities like instant landing page and mini site creation, first party data, advanced engagement and real time analytics. Seamless integration with your favorite marketing automation and CRM, Automatic session recording and video on demand publishing that allows you to keep collecting leads forever and a fully branded virtual room for your sessions. Plus, Kaltura's new AI Assistant will help you create session descriptions, thumbnails and repurpose content assets in minutes while monitoring attendee participation and suggesting on the spot engagement boosting actions. Say goodbye to snoozinars and hello to interactive sessions that offer live reactions, emojis, quizzes, leaderboards, certifications, announcements and more. Tools that will help you let your viewers take part in the conversation. You can start all of this completely free. You can Get a free 3 month trial right now and experience the magic of Kaltura's webinar platform firsthand. Go and visit corp.kaltura.com exit5 that's corp c o r-p.kaltura.com exit 5 Kaltura where digital experiences become impactful lead generating machines.

1, 2, 34 exit.

Exit.

All right, so Elin is here. We were just catching up off the record offline and we were talking about just doing this podcast getting, getting set up, our children, my dog barking and now we're here. And Elin, you now you work for yourself, right?

Yep, I do.

And your previous before this, before you left. So I want to just maybe we can start with this to give people some background. So tell me about you going out and working for yourself, what you do starting a business. Cause I actually know there's a lot of to the bosses out there. We don't want to help your employees quit their jobs. But we're also all people and so we want to there's a lot of heads of marketing or marketing people that I think just personally would want to hear your story about building your business. And then also I want to spend some time talking about your thoughts and philosophies on product marketing, your role at Teachable and some of the other places you've been. But maybe let's first just talk about like what's your business today? How'd you end up working for yourself?

For sure. Yeah. Hi everyone, my name is Ilene. Super excited to be here. I am a career coach specifically for product marketers and marketers and also no code tech roles. And specifically I focus on three key things in my coaching business. First is helping people get jobs that they really want. Second is to help them grow in their role especially when they're in the early stages of their role, for instance, as a product marketer or marketer, and the last least to help them get to the leadership positions they really want to get into. So I kind of call it the land grow and thrive model of my business. And the other part of the question you asked is, how do I get into this role? And how do I become a coach? I guess I can take a step back into, like, my career as a whole, if that's okay. Just to give you a little bit more background of how it all came about.

Yeah, do that. Cause I want to come back to the. I already have questions about this idea of being a career coach for product marketers that I want to come back to. But I think, yeah, if you tell the full story, it'll give us a better picture before we go there.

Absolutely. So I actually started off my career as a civil engineering consultant, specifically focused on transportation. So I went to school in my bachelor's and my master's as a civil engineer. I thought I was going to change the world, you know, by making beautiful roads and transportation systems. So I joined a consulting company, you know, after graduating from my master's in that worked there for six years. And I just felt like something was missing from my life. Like, I was working with a ton of clients, like. But it just, like, I was feeling stuck, and there was part of my. Just what I wanted to do was missing.

Right.

So I decided to go back to business school. And first class I took was marketing. And immediately after, literally the first lecture, I remember it was like, light bulb moment in my head. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is exactly what I want to do. It's that perfect combination of the art and the science.

Right.

That I've been yearning for. And at that moment, I was like, I need to pivot into marketing, but I have absolutely no clue how to do that. So, you know, I basically tried everything I possibly can and keep getting rejected from all the jobs. Actually, nobody wanted to talk to me because it was like, who the heck are you?

Right.

But basically, I realized I need to focus on what I'm really good at and my competitive advantage. And so I went after Autodesk, which was one of the companies that, with software I've used before, it was AutoCAD, which was sold to civil engineers. And that's how I was able to convince them. I went above and beyond in the interview process, spoke the language they were speaking, and got hired. I had my first break in marketing, basically for tech.

Oh, I love that. I was actually while you were talking about that, I was on your LinkedIn and I saw that your first real marketing job was Autodesk. And my mind went to, I don't know exactly like the CAD world. I just know roughly of that. And I was like, oh, I wonder if you went there because you had this like your way into that company. How did you get into B2B SaaS? You went after an industry that you knew. And that's amazing, right? Because now you become this product marketer. The best product marketers have deep knowledge of an industry or you can be better if you have deep knowledge of an industry. So I bet that that was a really a good fit. Was that a part of like your pitch and talking through that job in the interview process?

100%. That's how I was able to get in. So first of all, I'll say how I even got in because I told you I was sending out my applications everywhere and nobody was even giving me a chance to interview like all the Googles, like none of them, right? They were paying attention to me. So I was like, I can't keep doing this. So for Autodesk, I actually reach out to a friend of mine, like a third degree connection who happened to have worked at Autodesk for 15 years. So he referred me into the hiring manager. That's how I was able to even get the interview. And then from there onwards, right? Like I really try to understand how do I position myself better. And I remember in the final round process, I actually developed a good relationship with the recruiter. She was like, you know, by the way, there's another candidate we're also interviewing with. This person has like tons of content marketing experience. And I was like, how the heck do I stand out? So I decided to really double down on my civil engineering experience. And then second is by closing gaps, my experience, right? Because they were convinced I don't know content marketing. So I said, okay, what do you want me to do if I join the company? They were like, I need you to make customer videos. Because that was a video focused position, was like multimedia content marketing. I was like, great. So then over the weekend I actually went out and hired a bunch of my friends. I literally recorded the video, a fake customer video. I made a script over it. I learned how to do like video editing Monday, actually send it in, like, here's the customer video example I could do. And I got an offer like a few days later.

That's so good. I love that. And it's like when you, when you have that opportunity. Like, you just must have known that this was the right. You wanted to make this change. This is the right company, the right opportunity. Sometimes people are like, well, you know, they ask, like in the Exit 5 community, they're like, hey, I'm interviewing for this role. They want me to do a project like, I should be paid for this work. And I'm not mocking in that tone. I do feel like sometimes you should be paid. But oftentimes it's like, when you know it's the right opportunity, you don't even care if you get paid or not because you're like, I want this job. This is the right point in time in my life. And so you go and you spend the weekend doing this video as opposed to being like, I just made this video. Why didn't you pay? Why didn't you pay me for it? You know what?

I'm getting it 100% agree. And to me, it was like I was learning, like, a lot. I was having so much fun making the video, right? I was like, holy crap, I could learn how to do this in like a weekend. That's amazing, right? So it also helped me understand that's what I want to do. And to your exact point, those skills I gained from my own failures and experiences and turnaround is kind of what helped me become a career coach later on to help people do the same. And literally, this is very similar techniques that my clients use, which is really focused on showing versus telling.

Right.

To land the role. Especially if you're a career switcher.

This is awesome. Also, you have a really interesting. Like your story in going from non marketing to marketing is interesting. There's a whole separate pod. I'm not, I do this all the time, and I'm not going to do it today. But there's a whole separate podcast where I would love to know about your life as a civil engineer. That's a whole other world. That's fascinating to me for sure. But I got to use this time for marketing, I guess. And a lot of people will ask, like, hey, I'm, I want to get into marketing, but I'm in this other industry. And what you have is a cool playbook that could be like, okay, you went from civil engineering to, oh, how could I go and do marketing for a company that serves civil engineering? And so maybe right now you're in the, you know, you're in the restaurant business, but you want to get into marketing. Could you go find marketing roles at the companies that serve the restaurant industry? Because then you're already coming in with like a leg up, which is this expertise. I see you vigorously nodding, nodding your head. But like you come in with this expertise and then you can learn how to do marketing. I think where a lot of the marketing, especially with content and making new marketing hires, falls down is they don't know. You can't have someone who doesn't know how to do marketing and doesn't have the industry expertise. That's almost always a recipe for failure. If you have the industry expertise, then I bet we could probably teach you how to do some of this marketing stuff.

Absolutely. 100% true. And I think that's been true for all the jobs I've gotten as well. So, like basically making each move, right. It's kind of like finding the commonalities between the row I've just had with the. What's. How is this thing, this skill I gained in this role going to be a differentiator and connector to the next role?

Right.

And just keep connecting, Right. Like you're going to go for the role because there's some parts where you can add significant value based on what you already bring to the table and then other parts of the role is what's going to help you grow, right. These areas you don't know, right. Otherwise you just, if you just keep it going to roll, you always know you're not going to grow very much. So that's kind of been the sort of trajectory of my career as well.

How did you turn this content? So you're at Autodesk in a content marketing role, kind of specializing in customer marketing, videos.

Yep.

So that's a very specialized thing. And I'm painting this because I think that's a career path that a lot of people could follow. You do this very specialized thing, then eventually you get into product marketing. How did you make the jump from video making person on the marketing team to getting into product market?

Great question. So after I got into Autodesk, right. Even within like three months, I was like, this is cool. But I don't feel like I'm a content marketer, so you can probably guess where I'm going with this. And I just felt more and more drawn to like the product side of things because, you know, I still come from an engineering background. I like tech stuff. I like talking to engineers and all that. So I just naturally started gravitating towards that side and I was like, let me just form my own relationships. Like I would literally go sit with the engineers, I would have go on lunch with them. To figure out what do they do. I shadowed all the product managers and after shadowing them for like two months, I just asked the product manager, hey, do you have extra work? You just need somebody to help you with? And she's like, actually, yes, I need somebody to help me with user research. I have way too much research to do. Can you go talk to a whole bunch of customers, distill the insights that's going to help me shape my product roadmap? So I literally did that for her in my free time, like, after I've.

Done my own work, right.

And then started building out customer research stuff, like, on the side. And she was a huge advocate for me. And then I got a great opportunity. Another friend referred me to a role for startup that was hiring product marketers. And funnily, the startup is in real estate, so they don't directly work with Autodesk. But because you're in real estate, you do have to know a little bit of like, CAD and design software.

Right?

So I again leveraged that and my new skills, had learned from just doing shadowing work and research and positioned myself as a product marketer. And I basically was able to make the pivot in six months.

That's awesome. In both scenarios, you had this vision for something that you wanted and you did it on the side. Like in this role, it was like at the company. But I'm doing it as not part of my core job. And I think that happens if you have, if you do a little bit extra. That is the way to, like, get noticed and find your way. It's funny how you get luckier the more you do some of that stuff.

Right?

It's just like not be afraid of going outside and just do stuff, you know, and then taking the time, like, especially in early parts of your career, you will have to work hard, right? Like, it's not like the things are going to fall into your lap, like, here's a great opportunity. It's like, I have to learn the hard ways. Like, I have to create the opportunities for myself, basically.

All right, and then we'll actually do the career coach stuff after, because I think we're on a good clip talking about product marketing. Eventually you go to Teachable, which I think is a company that many listeners will have heard of. At Teachable, you were director of product marketing and there, I think we can use this as a way to explain your philosophies on product marketing, because here you go to that team. You built and grew the function of product marketing. So you go from Being the only person doing product marketing to building a team of five people, I'd love to hear like how Teachable saw product marketing. Who are those five people that you hire? What did you go there to do? What were the goals? People love getting into the nitty gritty when it comes to this kind of all encompassing role of product marketing. So I think we can spend some time there for sure.

So, you know, after having gone through a couple of startups, I really wanted to join Company who's who I'm, you know, very passionate about in terms of the mission. I've always wanted to join a net tech company. So that's one of the reasons why I was drawn to Teachable. I also was very heavily focused on B2B in the last few roles before Teachable. So I was like, I really want to work for a company that's going to allow me to get B2C experience as well.

Right.

And PLG experience. The company was trying to transition into PLG as well. So that's kind of how I ended up at Teachable. So one of the things I noticed when I first went to Teachable was that they had hired product marketer before. She was doing a great job. She left the company when I got there. But the product marketing was run very tactically, right? So basically they were only responsible for go to market, not even go to market, but just for product launches. Meaning the product managers would create something and they would say, hey, it's now time to launch, I need this live in the market in the next three weeks.

Right?

Can you just create a plan, write a blog, you know, something like that to push it out live? You know, I'm simplifying this, but that's essentially what's been happening. So it was very tactical. It doesn't have a sort of strategic importance. So it was not working, essentially was falling apart. Which is one of the reasons I was hired right into this role to kind of redesign what product marketing should really be. And the first thing I did was coming in, do a listening tour and talk to the key stakeholders within the company to really understand like what are the key challenges? What do they actually want to achieve, right? Like what is the one thing that they would want to solve right now that's going to drastically improve their lives, you know, in the job and things like that. And from there I create a gap analysis of, you know, these are the top areas, biggest concerns that everybody had. And these are areas we need to be focusing on right now, right. To address. And basically from there you Know, in the beginning, the biggest issue that was raised was creating a better go to market process to bridge the product development side and the marketing efforts.

Right?

So basically the product side, they were just rolling out features after features, but then the marketing side, they weren't even talking about those features or they were doing campaigns almost like in isolation in some ways. So there needs to be that connection. So I basically worked. I was like, okay, great, what is the next feature that's coming out? I work, just roll up my sleeves and I work directly with the product manager responsible. And we redesigned the entire process. We said, let's just do something that's better than right now. We're going to design this as we go. Created a plan, created the messaging for it, wrote it out, that process, create a dashboard to actually start tracking metrics and results for the launch.

Right?

Like early indicators and actually full success metrics after that. Worked really well, really smooth. And people are like, well actually this is a lot better, right? We're getting results, we're seeing results from this and then from there. Created a playbook to do this as a repeatable process. And I think it's only after like doing so for like three to six months, which is. That's when I started getting headcounts to be able to hire. So I'm just gonna pause here. I know I went down for a while. So we can dive into different bits and pieces of this.

No, it's great. So what I like about what you said specifically is you figured out how product marketing was gonna work by going and doing something.

Right.

I think that a lot of companies, product marketing fails early on or doesn't make as much progress as the team could is because they lack an identity sometimes and they just kind of like own all of the things in the product marketing toolkit. And a new product marketer joins the company and they're going to audit the website and audit the messaging and work on a new sales deck and do sales enablement and. But all this stuff takes time and so you can't get to all of it. Whereas I think the way you build trust and credibility inside of the team is you come in and you do something right away.

Exactly right away. And that's what I always tell people is like, people didn't pay me to just come in and learn for three months, right? I'm not going to be like first 90 days actually just onboarding and talking to a bunch of people. It's like, no, I want to roll out stuff right away. Even if it's not the best, it's better then I've demonstrated my value, right. And that buys me time to spend time doing the bigger projects.

Right.

So like after I've shown them results for this, I was able to get funding. Like I then invested in big Personas research project.

Right.

We paid extra outside vendors. We did that for a long period of time. We'd make sure it was good.

Right.

But I'm not gonna call me immediately, just ask, hey, I need you to give me a hundred thousand dollars so I can go do this right without having demonstrated anything. So I fully agree with you and.

Like you'll learn the other. You'll be better at learning the other stuff too when you've done something. And I think what you said is really important, which is it's gonna be better and that's why we're gonna go and do it. And so like yeah, we need to overhaul messaging and like we need to read tighten up our positioning a little bit. But I'm not going to let that exercise prevent me from doing this one launch and we'll fix that later. And let's start using something. You like the language better. Let's start using it now. I just so easy to. Product marketing for me as I've seen either is absolutely doing nothing or it's like the most important part of the company. I think it's very dangerous to float in that. The way you get in that absolutely doing nothing range is to just only do the positioning docs and only do the sales enablement materials. And like you got to build this relationship and now you have that product manager now who you've just worked with. She's going to go back to her team and be like like Elin's awesome to work with. Like we need to bring her in early in the next thing that we're doing. And now you're like the two of you are working on this together and like product wants to bring you in and then everything gets better for the company.

100%. Yeah. I think, you know, I always tell people it's about figuring out the center of influence in the company because at the end of the day like product marketing is a connector role, right? Like you don't have a whole lot of ownership yourself. So you need to get buy in and you need to get the support of other teams to basically that's how you establish your value. And in the PLG led company it's the product managers you want to get that support from. So you want to start there, right? And getting like do get value to their team. So more and more of them want to work with you.

So yeah, can you go into the. In the building of the team or just. I'd like to hear just what were the specific business goals that you had as director of product marketing and then what were the roles on the team and what were people responsible for?

Great question. So the way I like to think about goals is I try to ladder it up to the main goal of the company.

Right.

Like what is the objective of the company? And I do think teachable does that very well is to have very clear success metrics for the entire company. Generally I think of it as three growth levers. We focus on monetization, acquisition and retention.

Right.

Obviously you probably will work on quite a few of them at the same time. But for me it's more helpful to give my team a focus once a quarter. We're mostly focused on these kind of initiatives and then from there design projects that falls under each category that ladders up to one of those specific metrics essentially that obviously that's where the marketing team's goals also falls under. And then in terms of like then figuring out who to hire and how to hire for, it's just looking at again, going back to the goals.

Right.

That's most important and hiring for people who is going to help basically most successfully deliver on those goals. Specifically, just to dive into a little bit more detail on the hiring process, It's a little bit of a unique situation because I did inherit a couple of people on the team and then I hired my own as well. The people I did inherit are actually a little bit of a mix of product analysts as well as technical writers on my team because they were responsible really for creating a lot of the technical content on the help center and everything. Eventually after one year, I actually decided it wasn't the best fit for them to be in product marketing. We actually moved them out to report into a support. But in terms of the actual product marketers that I ended up hiring, it was really focused on ensuring the product marketers brought the skill sets that was needed. So the first person that we brought onto the team was really focused on go to market. Right. So one of the things as I mentioned earlier, was really rolling out and expanding and scaling the go to market process. So I looked for somebody who could really lead the go to market efforts. Have done this before.

Right.

And somebody who can really build relationships and have demonstrated their ability to build relationship with product and other teams. Like having that influence without authority.

Right.

That person was brought in, joined, did a great job and then six months later I brought in the second person. And now that we had a really good go to market process, we have to work on the foundations of positioning messaging starting from research. So then the second person I hired focused really strongly on research skills. So this person was brought in, you know, to do so. You know, former MBA person, right? Coming in with a lot of different.

Today's episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift at Privy and now we're using it at exit 5. But but over that time Ahrefs has evolved a lot and they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions in the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks, and you can even understand how much or your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traff that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24, 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place. With Ahrefs. It's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself, one of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand Radar tool, which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like ChatGPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics.

I love it.

We use it on our site. I've used it for Exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to Exit 5 from AI search. 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today. Go check them out.

Frameworks and ability to dive deep, ask great questions, coming up with research methods and creating that messaging and positioning to roll it out. So essentially, while both of them were doing full stack product marketing, one of them had a more outbound focus and the other one had a little bit more of an inbound focus.

How would you want to see the CEO or startup founder measure product marketing if you could? If a founder was listening to this and they're like, hey, we got product marketing. I hear what you're saying, but what should their goals and measures be?

That's a great question. Like for me, the easiest is literally asking, going around like other teams, right? And see how much value, like have them tell them, what is the value of product marketing? If you're hearing like every other team, be like, oh, you should ask the product marketing team. We asked the product marketing to do this. Product marketing helped on this, right? That is by far the best measure of success for product marketing. Because I think if you do that really well, if product marketing is done really well with the company, it should affect every single metric, right? From acquisition all the way to retention and monetization as well.

What are some of the mistakes that you see with marketing teams and bringing in product marketing? Or you talk to a lot of people in the role, what goes wrong and why doesn't it work inside of a company?

Definitely, number one, if you're an early stage startup, is hiring somebody who is just a doer, like just executing stuff, like for instance, creating collaterals, just tactically doing like launch assets without having the skills to think critically, like, what is the overall go to market, right? And questioning the readiness. So a lot of times when I coach people who are product marketers, they will be like, oh, the product manager told me to launch this, right? What should I do? Like, what are the channels I should be using? Do I write a blog post and stuff like that? I'm like, hold on a minute, that's not what you start with. First you have to understand the readiness of the launch. Did they actually do the research? Who are we selling to? What's the Competitive alternatives.

Right.

Why did we decide to build the product this way and not any other way? What's inside and outside the scope of this? How are we positioned against the market? What is the success metric? What is the goal of this?

Right.

What does good look like? And getting clear answers. And all of those will actually decide whether this is ready for launch to even begin with.

Right.

And you can push back as needed. I think a lot of product marketers, especially junior ones, they don't think they have the ability to do that.

Right.

But really, you're the other side of the coin in the process.

Right.

So you have to be able to strategically evaluate and push back as needed to ensure whatever you do, launch is going to be successful.

It's so true. Like, we don't get to just throw in. We don't get to. If you just told a product team, hey, here's a feature we want, they're not just going to say, great and go build it.

Right, Right, exactly.

They ask a million different questions and oftentimes don't even prioritize it. And so why don't we do the same thing as the marketing side of this? I love that.

Yeah.

Also, that just shows some strong misalignment of product and marketing in general. If your org works, just like product management is like, hey, marketing, FYI, we're done with that new thing. Let's go tell everybody about it. And your first reaction is like, like, wait, what thing? This is the first time I'm hearing about this. This is done. Now there's like a bunch of red flags that would go off there.

100. And I think, you know, I don't want to blame product managers as the sort of like the villain here, you know.

Oh, we can. No, they don't listen to this. You can say whatever you want about that.

I can say whatever I want.

Yeah.

I will say, you know, part of this, I think a role of a product marketer in this case is also education. Like, you have to educate and tell people.

Right.

This is the value can bring to you. Demonstrate a value.

Right.

And then you earn your seat at the table. So I think part of it is some product teams. I do agree they're very type A. They're like, oh, I just needed. I'm the CEO of the product. You do that.

Right.

But I also think they are a part of other product managers who just don't know. They have no clue, like, what a product marketer is supposed to help them on. So you got to tell them, like, I can help you with this, right? I'm your strategic partner, this is what I do here, how we can work together, et cetera.

Right.

So then especially true for founding PMMs and solo PMMs who don't have anybody else like that. The company never had exposure to that. It's even more important.

It's just like in this doc that you had, you spent rule of thumb to follow for a first time founding PMN. Spend 30% of your time evangelizing the function and educating others on what product marketing is. Most people don't know. And it's not just about doing. Don't try to do everything at once. Focus your activities on what's important for the company at the given time. Adopt crawl, walk, run approach. This is really good. The key to being a great PMM in general is to be a great connector and know how to influence without authority. Understand that influence will equal value and recognition. And then the first 90 days as a product marketer, you recommend implementing three streams of activities. Number one, what do you need to deliver? Number two, what do you need to learn? And number three, who do you need to network with? These are great. I just wanted to say those as context to the or background to the stories that you just told. I think this is really good advice.

Of course. Thank you.

All right, let's shift in a little bit and talk about career coaching for product marketers. I think this is a super interesting. I didn't really know this about you before, but I've often thought like myself, negotiating. Why don't people in their careers have like an agent? Right. If you were a movie star or an athlete or whoever are creating a book, like, I don't know how to negotiate. I'm not a shrewd negotiator. I don't know what my salary should be. And so if I'm, you know, 26 years old and they tell me that, hey, the salary for this role is $64,000 a year, I'm like, sounds great. Can I have 66? And they're like, yes. And then it's over. And I've always thought like just outside of the career coaching you mentioned, and I'm bringing this up now because you mentioned like helping people with landing jobs. I think this is super interesting. Just as a business, like somebody with expertise, you have a super niche that you're after, which is I'm coaching product marketers to be an outside resource that can help somebody with landing a job interviewing. You could basically be with somebody for the lifetime of their career. This is really cool.

Oh, thank you. Yeah, I like to think that.

So what do you do? I'd love to hear. I'm a product marketer who wants to work with you. Like what does that actually look like and what do you do?

Yeah. So the first thing is do you want a job right now, you want to change your job or are you laid off?

Right.

Looking for a new opportunity. That's usually the first sort of probably right now given just the economy.

Right.

That's like one of the biggest things people come to me for is just to find their next role and then from there onwards is like getting them set up in the first role. So I actually offer like a specific 90 days sort of program to help people get onboarded and really starting off with a bank in their new job and then from there onwards it's really more kind of ongoing leadership coaching to help them become a strong product marketing leader, rise up, take the promotion and stuff like that. So happy to jump into any one of these areas if you're interested.

Cool. Okay. Well first, just overall from an entrepreneurial standpoint, I think this is interesting, right? Anybody that's listening that is thinking about one day I want to start my own business or work for myself. Like there's a model here which is like you could do this for demand gen, content marketing, marketing, leadership sales. You know, there's an interesting business here because there's so much value in the things that you've learned. I wanted to ask you about the question about finding, like where do you start in the process of finding a job? Is this like you have a network of companies, you know where to look? Because I sometimes I find that the really good jobs, they come up kind of randomly. They don't come up because you googled, you know, who's hiring for product marketing. And it's a, there can be a little bit of a, of an art to this. So I'm curious to hear your approach.

Yeah, I would say the first question I ask you is what's your timeline for finding your next role?

Right.

Are you interested in finding the oasap? Like you need the money right now and you need to get out of whatever you're doing right now or do you have a longer time horizon, like maybe nine months down the line to find the perfect, like the one that's best suited for you?

Right.

Because I think that's important. And then from there I can have a, kind of help you customize the approach. Let's say you are really looking for a job right now.

Right.

Like I do need to get a role pretty quickly down the line. Then the first thing for us to figure out is your targeting strategy, like what kind of jobs you want to be going after. And these are jobs that are on the market, right. That you can actually see because you know if it's not there, right. You can't apply for it, basically. But then we want to create a really strong targeting strategy. In fact, my approach is very much like a product marketing approach, is figuring out your targeting that where you have a competitive advantage, right. Similar to my own Autodesk story. And then from there creating a really strong positioning for yourself, which is your personal story that's going to highlight your competitive advantage to the right companies. And then using a series of techniques, basically referrals, right, to get yourself in the door and bypass the entire sort of online application process where you have to wait in the queue with several hundred other people. So then once you do that, you know, tap into your network and get that referral, the rest of the process is really helping you with honing you our examples.

Right.

So as a coach, I'm not here to feed you answers, right. Or like to like do actual work in that sense for you. I'm here to ask the right questions, help you to think in different ways so that you provide the best answers right yourself. So it's kind of like teaching you how to fish instead of feeding you a fish kind of approach. Generally when I work with people, they have great experiences, right. It's not like they come in with like terrible experiences, like nothing like that. It's more about how they articulate the experience. So the examples they chose are relevant, memorable.

Right.

And ultimately kind of differentiates themselves from other people. So I provide that hiring manager perspective to like, this is the role. These are the type of things the hiring manager would want to know from you, right? This is the type of example you need to be choosing. This is how you frame an example to stand out.

Right.

Et cetera. So that's sort of like the highlights of my approach.

Do you notice that people have to do, like, when getting a product marketing job, do most of the people that you have to work with, are they. What does the interview process look like on the flip side of this, are they asking product marketers to like present some type of update or strategy? I'm curious to hear what the companies, if we can maybe like reverse engineer that to give people advice on hiring marketers. What does the interview process typically look like these days for a product marketing role?

So great question. So interview process generally Consists of four stages. So you have the recruiter screening, just, you know, basically recruiter checks. You have basic requirements, you know, like you're a fit for the role. Second is hiring manager interview.

Right.

You do have a longer conversation with the hiring manager where they're testing your competency, you're fit for the job, and then you go into around this is interchangeable. The next stage could be either the assignment stage or the loop. You know, basically the, the stakeholder interviews round. So let's say it is a stakeholder interview round. You basically have the opportunity to interview with different stakeholders you would likely be working with. Like I recommend if you're trying to hire.

Right.

You definitely want to have the stakeholders who are the closest to counterparts to product marketing. So definitely product managers, Salespeople, right. In B2B. Other marketers on the team.

Right.

Those are like the basics and maybe even demand gen marketers. Then once you have that, the final stage is the assignment stage. So generally the type of assignments that people give fall into several categories, the most common of which is a go to market strategy. So they would say here's a hypothetical product or feature, you have to launch it.

Right.

Here's some information about it. What is your go to market strategy? What kind of messaging would you use for this?

Right.

What is a channel strategy? How would you launch this timeline, et cetera. So that's like the most common. And then there's other ones that are like writing assignments. Maybe you have to write a blog post. You know, there are some that are like a little bit like a pitch deck style. So you have to pitch a product. Like here's almost like a sales deck, essentially.

Right.

Those would be the sort of more common types of assignments.

Great, thank you.

Yeah. Of course.

One of the reasons the assignment I think is great is because I think forces the team to have a better view and definition on of what they want product marketing to do at the company.

Yep, absolutely.

And I think a lot of times we're like, hey, I want to hire a product marketer.

Yeah.

And you're like, great, well why? And you're like, well, we just have some stuff like I don't know, there's just like a bunch of stuff that we're not getting to. Okay. You know, like keep going. And I think that a lot of failures in hiring and I've made many mistakes here. It comes down to like almost like a creative brief. Like why are we like just like you'd have to submit work for a design request. Like why are we hiring this Role, Why are we hiring this? What are we looking for product marketing to do? And so I think on both sides of this equation, as the product marketer looking for a job, this is where you can push to really understand. And all of those are okay, maybe they have no vision, but you're going to come there and create it. Okay, great. I think there's a lot of digging you can do there. And then on the company side, if you're going to hire a product marketer like, you should be able to articulate what good looks like and what success looks like and how you're going to measure this person and they can push all those things. Sure. But if you can't articulate that, it's going to be very hard for you to find the right person for this role.

Oh, 100%. And I think you touch on a really important point which is a challenge I see in industry. Literally, I would not kid you. Like 10 to 20% of the roles that are post there either change definitions after a couple of months or they're completely revamped.

Right.

And I have people go through, come to me going through these processes, spending months interviewing and they'd be like, they just changed the role at the last minute. They upgraded the role, they downgraded the role.

Right.

Because the company have no clue who they're hiring for. And they go through the interview like, oh wait, this is not what we're looking for.

Right.

They're just like internal misalignment on the role, which is just bad for both sides.

Right.

And I think one of the things to your point about deciding who to hire for getting that agreement internally is also super important. Like first of all, you have to be convinced yourself, right. This person will add strategic importance and this is exactly how they're going to help out and then also share it with the other counterpart teams, making sure they had the buy in. Because this person ultimately be working with product sales and everybody, right. If they don't have buy in, they disagree with you and they find out afterwards you didn't even tell them. It's just a big no, no, you're not setting up this new person for success in the role.

Right.

Like I've had companies where they literally hired three product marketers without telling another team they join to start their first day. They go talk to sale. They're like, who are you? You know, like, I don't know.

Right.

Just not a great situation to be in.

I've heard a head of product marketing at a big like a ,undred million dollar plus company say that his measure for is my team doing a good job? Is does the sales team know the product marketing manager's name and what do they have to say about them? He just measures it on their feedback from the sales team.

That's really. Yeah, I totally have the same view. That's why, you know, when we talked about I was like, ask the other teams how we're doing. Basically.

Yeah.

All right. I'm just poking at the doc that you sent over, which is great and just picking a couple things to. To talk through. Before this you started it wasn't at teachable as the company before that, but you've started the DEI committee. Talk about what? Like the passion that you have for that. Obviously passion is like a weird word because it's such an important. It's important topic, but like to be the first person to come into a company and say we need this, we need to have this, we need to do a better job here. Like where did that stem from?

I think it's just my personal experience having worked at different companies and you know, like I both engineering as a consultant and also in tech. I've been a minority, right? So like I'm a Asian female who's an immigrant. I moved to the US by myself when I was 16. I don't have any family here or anything.

Right.

So basically kind of feeling like an outcast and isolated throughout experience of having worked in tech engineering, being like that sort of like 3% of people that you see.

Right.

I want to read this fun facts you put in your doc because this is why you're such a badass. Born in China, grew up in Zambia, raised by a single single mom. Came to the US for college alone at 16, lived in four different states, mom of a two year old. Like, how do you not hire this person if you want to get some shit done?

Yeah, I know, right? Just that's sort of like. Yeah, kind of having to overcome a lot of those challenges. You know, I remember like literally my first job in consulting. I was in Georgia, right. Atlanta, Georgia, where I first started working, right. I was in the room full of only white men and I was the only like non white men, you know, and they were all talking baseball and this was clients and all these people and I have no idea at all. I don't even know how to speak up because I can't even figure out how to interject into the conversation. And so part of this whole thing of me coaching, Even writing on LinkedIn and coaching people who are from this background is just speaking up, share and amplify voices.

Right.

And having people build confidence.

Right.

To do so and becoming hopefully, you know, that sort of. I don't want to role model. Sounds egotistical, but essentially.

Right.

Well, no, I think I'll say it. You can use that word. I think like in your story, you're like, I see this as an issue and I'm going to like, I'm comfortable enough, like stepping up and I'm going to do something about it. And I think that makes a difference, like for you being a leader and stepping up, there's lots of people, there's lots of people inside a company who will complain about how things are or like on Slack, secretly talk about whatever. But for you to step up and like, do it and be like, I'll lead this, let's do it is like, that's what it takes, right?

Well, yeah. And I will say the company. I wasn't the only one leading, like, was. We have a group of us, we had like little committee that were DEI committee, the founding committee. So I was one of the members. And but yeah, like, we just decided we need to do this because we have to do better.

Right.

And I, because there were actually people, people who are more junior than me, they actually came to me secretly just saying they just sharing some of their challenges at work. And I was helping them, but I was like, why isn't. Are we doing this as a company level?

Right?

We need to. So one of the first things I did to the company was I was like, we need to have a Women's History Month sort of event. And I said, we have women here. We have great women founders that we know. So I just like reach out to a whole bunch of women CEOs right. On LinkedIn and through connections. I was like, do you mind coming here and speak with us and Fireside Chat. Anybody from the company can ask you questions. And I just interviewed them, asked a whole bunch of questions. And like, people learned a whole lot. And what did we find out? Every single CEO had imposter syndrome.

Right?

Like, we found out they had the same exact struggles.

Right.

They had the same exact problems climbing up the ladder and all that stuff. So I think it's when you share those stories of people who have walked the path, had the same suffering as you do, you have your current experience, you just bring people together a lot better and you create a just a better environment.

That's great. Amen. I'm just laughing in my head about what you said about everybody on the team. Is the white. The white guys stand around talking about baseball.

Well, I mean, now, to be fair, like, a lot of them are great.

They're so true.

Yeah. Yeah. But they're very supportive. Yeah. And, like, I get. Now that I think I've become more aware of that, like, now that it's in my head, I get uncomfortable in those situations. I'm like, hey, I could talk baseball with you. But, like, this is clearly, like, who really knows about baseball or every CRO ever at sales kickoff, it's like all the analogies are like, either war or the NFL.

Right.

Exactly.

Right.

I mean, like, I like sports as well, but, like, you know, it's really hard.

Right.

And there are people whose background. They're from more disadvantaged background as well.

Right.

So, like, if I'm feeling like this.

Right.

Like, how would they feel? So I think it's just, you know, thinking a bit more.

Yeah.

Intentionally.

Okay. You're an amazing artist.

Thank you.

I'll put the link in the notes to this, but if you look up Elyn on LinkedIn, you can find her name and go to her website. You said you quit your tech job to be an artist. Was this recently, or is this, like, before you got started?

This is a couple of years back in my first product, after I did my first product marketing job. So that startup within real estate was great opportunity, great, amazing boss. I just got really burned out. You know, it was first time in startup land, and I was like, I just need to do something different. Decided to quit my job. And what happened was actually in the job, I was a little bit burned out. So I said, you know, I'm gonna watch YouTube videos and learn how to paint because I've always wanted to paint.

Wait, so you learned how to do this from watching YouTube videos? You're not, like, you didn't grow up paint. This is amazing.

Oh, thank you. I mean, I painted when I was, like, three years old, but it must.

Be inside you somewhere. You can't just watch YouTube and learn.

How to do this.

Like, you must have tapped into some, like, thing that you didn't. That's so cool.

Yeah.

I always know I can paint. And I did take a couple of, like, one art class in high school, but I just didn't do any of that.

Right.

And I was like, you know, I need to challenge myself to do better. So I just started watching YouTube videos, and I told my friends to hold me accountable that I was going to do one painting a day. So I posted on my Facebook page, one painting a day for 365 days nonstop. And after, like, 200 days, my friends were like, can I buy your painting? Because you're getting, like, so good. I want to buy it. And I was like, okay, that's great. Maybe I could do this. So I literally quit my job. My first job. Went full artist. I was trying to connect to galleries and all this stuff. Hustled for, like, six months, was able to get into, like, 10 plus galleries and everything.

Right.

But I think it's like, to your, you know, kind of going back to failures and all that is like, I truly learned the meaning of a starving artist because it's so hard to make any money. But, you know, it was a great hobby that I now have. Still do some commissions from time to time and taught me the meaning of how to hustle, basically.

Well, and now it's, like, less. It can be more of a passion thing. Like, if you're. You're not.

Luckily, you're not trying to pay your.

Bills by selling art.

Yeah, it's, like, hardest thing to do.

Yeah. And so what's cool is, like, you have a great business and, like, it must feel awesome when someone reaches out and wants to, like, Wants to buy a piece of art or wants to commission something.

Exactly. Yeah. It's just, like, a really nice little thing I get to do on the side.

The zebra one is amazing.

Oh, thank you.

I'm mad somebody bought it. All right. This is awesome. We could talk about everything forever. But thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. We got you on this podcast because a while ago, I think this discussion is a perfect example of why a while ago I wrote this thing, and I realized that the best conversations I'm having, like, for a while, I was kind of only doing, like, this podcast with, like, the CMO of some SaaS company you've heard of. And those stories are cool, but they get boring. And it's boring for me to just do them and ask the same questions about, where'd you go to, you know, where'd you get your job and what'd you do before this? And, oh, you did this and you went to college and you did this that. The better conversations are coming from, you know, people that I actually don't know, and I don't know somebody's story. And so I wrote this thing on LinkedIn, was saying, like, hey, and my friend Lachey was like, you should do this. She's like, I had her on my podcast, and she had awesome stuff to say, and we've built a relationship after that. Podcast. She's like, you need to have more people who just want to come on and are passionate about the thing that they do and want to talk. And you need to have a better representation of other people's voices on your podcast. And I was like, hell yes. So I wrote a post on LinkedIn and got a ton of interesting messages and just reached out to, like, 10 or 15 people that I thought were interesting, and you were on the list. But you sent me this amazing, like, doc. You sent me this amazing doc with, like, you know, 15, like, perfectly worded bullets and thoughts. And I was like, man, this is awesome. I got to have you on. And you did awesome. You delivered. I'm excited to stay in close contact with you moving forward. If you're listening to this, find Elyn on LinkedIn. I'll link to your LinkedIn profile, send her a message, connect with her, and be like, hey, I heard you on Exit 5. That was awesome. I'd love to connect, and that type of stuff makes my day. So thank you for doing this.

No, thank you for having me. It's a true pleasure. I'm so glad I get to meet with you, and I really appreciate what you're doing for the community.

And just in case you think I wasn't paying attention this whole time, every podcast I do, I'm, like, scribbling notes and things that I want to follow up on and learn, including your art.

That's amazing.

All right, enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com.

We've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates. Plus we have a community.

A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're dating in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see.

What people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time.

To grow your career and help grow your company, go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more. About B2B Marketing Outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch.

That's Hatch fm.

They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do.

And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses.

You can get unlimited podcast editing and.

On demand strategy for a low monthly cost.

All you gotta do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out.

It's Hatch fm.

Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's gonna be here. But let's be real. Most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next dollar. They use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer made for marketers. And right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year, planning forecast and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026.

It's not a sales pitch from them.

But this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter right now with the team at Paramark. But you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark.com office hours. That's paramark.com office hours.