The skills every PMM needs after a promotion

Congratulations on your promotion! You have a new title and a broader scope, whether that means managing people or simply carrying a greater amount of responsibility. Either way, every marketer reaches a point where execution alone is no longer the differentiator.

Most PMMs think success in a bigger role means doing more of what already worked: better launches, stronger messaging, more programs.

Execution still matters, but as your scope grows, you get valued for something different. How you:

1. Create focus. 
2. Build alignment. 
3. Help the org make better decisions.

1. Create focus

When I joined Zoom to lead partner marketing for the App Marketplace, I walked into a lot of complexity. Thousands of partner apps, partners wanting visibility, sales wanting support, and product teams launching constantly, all at once, with everything feeling urgent and important.

The problem wasn’t capacity. It was the absence of a strategic lens.

Here’s how I found it. I asked three questions:

• Does this support Zoom’s strategic priorities?
• Does it solve a meaningful customer pain point?
• Does this partner strengthen the overall customer solution?

Good questions give us clarity, but clarity alone doesn’t create change. What changed how we worked was a deliberate strategic choice, rooted in the customer. We looked at where customers felt the most friction and where Zoom’s fastest-growing products had feature gaps, since the right partners could fill those gaps and extend the value customers were already getting.

That became our lens: a principled way to invest, a principled way to say no, and a shared framework the whole team could rally around.

As your role expands, it starts with prioritization, deciding what you work on. As you continue to grow, it becomes about helping the organization understand what deserves investment, and what doesn’t.

2. Build alignment

A promotion changes your scope. It doesn’t change the need to influence.

What actually moves people is when they understand why something matters and feel like they have a real stake in it. That’s when they don’t just go along, they support it, and may even advocate around it!

At Zoom, product marketing for the core platform and product marketing for partners operated separately, and so did the product teams. I wasn’t going to change or impact the org structure. What I could influence was alignment.

Instead of focusing on reporting lines, I focused on the customer: where they were getting stuck, what problems Zoom was actually solving, and where partners could extend that value.

Those questions changed how we thought about the App Marketplace, not as a pile of integrations, but as part of the whole customer experience. Internally, teams aligned around how apps contributed to go-to-market, and externally, customers got a more connected product.

Here’s what that looks like when it’s not working yet. One of my clients, a senior PMM, had just taken on a cross-functional initiative. He had the title and the mandate, but he kept hitting walls, and every meeting felt like pushing against people who wouldn’t budge, which was frustrating given that on paper, he had the authority.

Turns out he was leading with his position instead of his perspective, telling people what needed to happen instead of helping them see why it mattered to them. 

So we changed how he opened conversations. Instead of showing up with a plan that needed buy-in, he showed up with questions: 

• What are you working on? 
• Where are you stuck? 
• Where do our priorities overlap? 

That shift changed everything, and people stopped feeling managed and started feeling like collaborators.

Influence doesn’t come with the promotion. It comes from helping people align around a shared goal, even when you don’t control every decision.

3. Drive decisions

I was in strategic conversations early in my career, so thinking this way came naturally to me. It was never really about reporting what I knew; it was about helping leadership decide what to do.  This is where a lot of newly promoted PMMs get stuck.

Leadership expects recommendations, grounded in customer insight and business context, with a clear point of view, not just launch plans and status updates. That’s a real shift for most people: instead of reporting what happened, you have to focus on what it meant and what should happen next.

I see this pattern a lot. One marketer I coached had just taken on more scope. She was thorough, organized, and always prepared, and every quarter she walked into leadership reviews with detailed updates. But, each time, she would walk out feeling like nothing had changed. She still felt like she didn’t have a seat at the table.

Here’s what I noticed. She was answering questions nobody was asking. Leadership didn’t need more data; they needed someone to tell them what to do with it. The gap wasn’t her skills; it was executive presence: she had the scope, but hadn’t made the shift in how she showed up. 

So instead of opening with what happened, she started opening with what she recommended and why, presenting a point of view on where the business should invest next instead of just presenting results.

Uncomfortable at first, walking in with a recommendation nobody asked for felt presumptuous, but that discomfort was exactly the signal she was operating at a new level.

What earns you a seat at the table isn’t your data, it’s your point of view informed by the data.

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These shifts don’t happen overnight, and they don’t all happen at once. But if you’re sitting in a bigger role, wondering why it feels different from what you expected, this is usually where the answer lives.

Recognizing the shift is the hardest part. You’ve already started.

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