The promotion email arrived on a Friday afternoon. "Congratulations! We're excited to promote you to Director of Product Marketing, effective immediately."
Six years as a senior PMM. Eleven successful product launches. Sales enablement programs that reduced ramp time by 40%. Competitive intelligence that won us deals against market leaders. Positioning work that the CEO quoted in board meetings.
I'd earned this.
Monday morning, I walked into the office with a new title on Slack, a new email signature, and absolutely no idea that I was about to lose all the credibility I'd spent six years building.
The First Meeting That Should Have Been a Warning
My first Monday as Director, I scheduled a one-on-one with each member of my new team. Four PMMs who'd been my peers three days earlier. One PMM who'd been at the company longer than I had and was visibly disappointed that I got the promotion instead of her.
I went into the first meeting prepared. I had a document: "My Leadership Philosophy and Our Team Vision for the Next 12 Months." It outlined how I planned to operate as a leader (collaborative, data-driven, focused on high-impact work) and what I wanted us to accomplish together (better launch processes, stronger competitive positioning, more strategic influence with product and sales).
Twenty minutes into explaining my vision, the PMM—someone I'd worked alongside for three years—interrupted me.
"This all sounds great. But what I actually need to know is: are you going to fight for our headcount request? The last three times we asked for a junior PMM, it got denied. Will you get us a yes?"
I froze. I had no idea if I could get us a yes. I'd never been in a headcount planning meeting. I didn't know how budget decisions got made or what levers I could pull.
"I'll look into it and get back to you," I said.
She nodded, but her expression said it all: You don't know what you're doing yet, do you?
By the fourth one-on-one, I'd abandoned my leadership philosophy document. Instead, I asked each person: "What do you need from me as your manager?"
The answers were brutally practical:
"I need you to get my work visible to the executive team so they know what I'm doing."
"I need you to push back when sales asks us to drop everything for one-off requests."
"I need you to make product actually listen to our market research instead of dismissing it."
"I need you to tell me what our priorities are because right now I'm getting conflicting direction from three different stakeholders."
These weren't aspirational leadership questions. They were operational survival questions. And I didn't have good answers to any of them.
The Skills That Got Me Promoted Were Useless
As a senior IC, I was successful because I could execute flawlessly:
- Give me a product launch, I'd build the GTM plan, coordinate cross-functional teams, deliver all assets on time, and measure the results.
- Give me a competitive threat, I'd research it thoroughly, build battle cards, train sales, and track win rates.
- Give me a positioning problem, I'd run customer research, synthesize insights, develop messaging, and test it with the market.
Execution. Tactical excellence. Delivering high-quality work on deadline.
That's what got me promoted.
And none of it mattered as a Director.
My new job wasn't to execute launches. It was to decide which launches were worth doing in the first place and which we should deprioritize or kill.
My job wasn't to build battle cards. It was to determine our competitive strategy and allocate team resources accordingly.
My job wasn't to fix positioning problems when they emerged. It was to prevent them from emerging by ensuring product, marketing, and sales were aligned on market strategy from the beginning.
I had zero experience with any of this. And because I had a track record of excellent execution, everyone assumed I knew how to do the strategic parts too.
The Moment I Lost My Credibility
Six weeks into the Director role, the CEO called an emergency GTM leadership meeting. Our largest competitor had just announced a product that directly threatened our core differentiator. They were aggressively undercutting us on price and already winning deals we'd been favored to close.
The CEO went around the table. VP of Sales: gave a detailed breakdown of the deals we'd lost and the objection handling that wasn't working. VP of Product: outlined potential product response options and timelines. CMO: proposed an aggressive campaign to reframe the conversation.
Then he turned to me. "What's your competitive strategy? How does PMM plan to respond?"
This was my moment. The competitive intelligence expertise I'd built over six years. My chance to show strategic leadership value.
I opened my mouth and said: "We need to update our battle cards with messaging that addresses their new capabilities. I can have that done by end of week."
The CEO looked at me for a long moment. "I'm not asking about battle cards. I'm asking about strategy. Should we reposition against them directly or differentiate on a completely different axis? Should we match their pricing or defend our premium position? Should we focus on retaining existing customers or aggressively pursue their install base? What's our strategic response?"
I had no answer.
As an IC, I would have researched the competitor, built comprehensive battle cards, and trained sales on how to handle the threat. I would have executed brilliantly on the tactical response.
But strategic competitive response—deciding which battles to fight and how to position the entire company for maximum advantage—that wasn't a skill I'd developed. And everyone in that room suddenly realized it.
The CEO assigned the competitive strategy question to the CMO. "Work with the Director of PMM to execute once we have the strategy figured out."
Execute. Not lead. Not decide. Execute.
I'd just been demoted in front of the executive team without losing my title.
What Nobody Tells You About the Transition
The IC-to-leader transition in product marketing exposes a brutal truth that nobody talks about during the promotion conversation:
The skills that make you promotable are different from the skills that make you successful after the promotion.
As an IC, you're judged on:
- Quality of execution
- Speed of delivery
- Tactical expertise
- Ability to manage ambiguity and get things done
As a leader, you're judged on:
- Strategic decision-making
- Resource allocation and prioritization
- Business impact and revenue influence
- Ability to prove PMM's value to the organization
These are completely different skill sets. And most companies promote ICs to leadership based on the first set of skills, then evaluate them on the second set.
The transition breaks people who don't realize this fast enough.
The Three Skills I Wish I'd Developed as an IC
Looking back, there were three skills I should have been developing while I was still an IC. Skills that would have made the leadership transition survivable instead of humiliating.
Skill 1: Owning Outcomes Instead of Deliverables
As an IC, I measured success by deliverables:
- Launched 11 products (all on time)
- Created 47 battle cards
- Trained 63 sales reps
- Reduced sales ramp time by 40%
These were all outputs. Things I did. Activities I completed.
As a Director, nobody cared about outputs. They cared about outcomes:
- Did the launches generate pipeline?
- Did the battle cards improve win rates?
- Did the sales training reduce time-to-first-deal?
- Did faster ramp time improve sales productivity and reduce turnover?
The uncomfortable truth: I didn't know the answers to most of those questions. I'd been so focused on delivering high-quality work that I'd never systematically measured whether the work actually created business value.
When the CFO asked me to justify the PMM team's headcount request, I showed him our output metrics. He looked at the spreadsheet and said, "I can see you're busy. I can't see why you matter."
That's when I realized: proving you're busy is not the same as proving you create value.
Skill 2: Speaking the Language of Revenue
As an IC, I spoke the language of marketing:
- Brand awareness
- Message pull-through
- Content engagement
- Campaign performance
These metrics made sense to my PMM peers and to marketing leadership.
But when I was in executive meetings, nobody cared about message pull-through. They cared about revenue.
I'd come into pipeline reviews with data on how many people downloaded our latest positioning deck or how well our new messaging tested in A/B tests. The VP of Sales would look at me like I was speaking a different language.
"That's great. But did it help us close deals? Did it increase ASP? Did it reduce sales cycle length?"
I'd shrug. "That's not really what we measure in PMM."
Fatal mistake.
As a leader, my job was to translate PMM work into business outcomes that revenue leaders cared about. But I'd never learned to think in those terms, let alone measure and report in them.
Skill 3: Political Navigation and Stakeholder Management
As an IC, I avoided politics. I focused on doing great work and assumed that quality would speak for itself.
This worked fine when my manager was navigating the politics for me. She was shielding me from budget fights, priority conflicts, and competing stakeholder demands. She was positioning our team's work strategically with executives. She was building relationships with peer functions that I could leverage for collaboration.
As a Director, I had to do all of that myself.
And I had no idea how.
When product and sales disagreed on launch priorities, I tried to stay neutral and "let the data decide." Both sides saw me as weak.
When the VP of Sales demanded that we drop everything to create custom materials for his largest deal, I said yes because I didn't know how to say no without damaging the relationship. My team saw me as a pushover.
When the CMO proposed reallocating budget from PMM programs to demand gen, I made a logical case for why our programs were valuable. She ignored me and reallocated the budget anyway. I didn't understand why logic didn't win the argument.
Politics isn't about being manipulative. It's about understanding how decisions actually get made, building relationships with decision-makers, and positioning your work in terms that stakeholders care about.
I thought I could skip this part and succeed purely on merit. I was wrong.
The Conversation That Changed Everything
Three months into my struggling Director tenure, my former manager—now a VP at a different company—took me to coffee.
"I've heard you're having a rough transition," she said.
I admitted everything. The credibility loss. The skill gaps. The feeling that I'd been set up to fail.
She nodded. "You're going through what everyone goes through. The question is whether you're going to figure it out or flame out."
"How do I figure it out?"
"Stop trying to be the best executor on your team. You're not an IC anymore. Your job is to make your team more effective, not to do their work for them."
She drew a diagram on a napkin:
IC Success = Your individual output × Your execution quality
Leader Success = Your team's output × Your strategic direction × Your organizational influence
"You've been optimizing for personal execution quality. That's why you're failing. You need to optimize for team leverage and strategic impact."
She gave me three concrete directives:
1. Stop doing IC work. Every time I jumped in to write battle cards or fix positioning because I could do it faster and better than anyone else, I was robbing my team of development opportunities and robbing myself of time to do actual leadership work.
2. Start tracking business outcomes. For every major program the team ran, I needed to define success in terms the business cared about (pipeline, win rate, deal size, sales cycle length) and measure whether we achieved it.
3. Build executive relationships. I needed to have regular one-on-ones with the CEO, VP of Sales, and VP of Product. Not to report status. To understand their priorities, learn how they made decisions, and position PMM work as critical to their success.
None of this felt natural. It all felt like I was neglecting "real work" to focus on politics and metrics.
But I was desperate. So I tried it.
What Actually Changed
The first thing I did was stop doing IC work. When a launch came up, instead of building the GTM plan myself, I assigned it to a senior PMM and coached them through it.
It was excruciating. Their first draft was maybe 70% as good as what I would have produced. Every instinct told me to just rewrite it myself.
Instead, I gave detailed feedback and had them revise it. The second draft was 85% as good. The third draft was 95%.
The launch went fine. Not perfect, but fine. And the PMM had learned ten times more than if I'd just done it for them.
Six months later, that PMM was producing launch plans better than I ever had—because they'd built the skill through practice rather than watching me do it.
The second thing I did was implement outcome tracking. For our next major launch, I defined success metrics before we started:
- Generate $500K in qualified pipeline within 90 days
- Achieve 20%+ win rate on opportunities from the launch
- Get top 3 messaging points into 80%+ of sales pitches
Three months post-launch, we'd generated $680K in pipeline, closed 22% of opportunities, and sales was using our messaging in 85% of pitches.
When the CFO asked about the PMM team's impact, I showed him those numbers. He approved our headcount request without pushback.
The third thing I did was build executive relationships. I set up monthly one-on-ones with the CEO, VP of Sales, and VP of Product. Not to report on PMM work, but to ask questions:
- What are your top three priorities for the quarter?
- Where are you seeing obstacles or bottlenecks?
- How can PMM help you achieve your goals faster?
This did two things: First, it gave me the context I needed to prioritize our team's work strategically. Second, it positioned PMM as partners in executives' success rather than order-takers executing tasks.
When the next competitive crisis hit, the CEO called me before the GTM meeting to ask my opinion on strategic response options. I didn't have perfect answers, but I had a framework for thinking through the tradeoffs.
And this time, I framed it in terms he cared about: "We could reposition directly against them, which would be faster to execute but might commoditize our category. Or we could differentiate on a new axis, which takes longer but protects our premium pricing. Which matters more right now—time to market or preserving margins?"
That's a strategic conversation. That's leadership.
The Brutal Reality Nobody Admits
Here's what I wish someone had told me before I took the promotion:
Your first year as a PMM leader will be the hardest professional year of your career. You will feel incompetent at something you used to be great at. You will lose credibility with people who used to respect you. You will question whether you deserve the role.
This is normal. Every PMM leader goes through it.
The ones who succeed are the ones who:
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Accept that they need to develop new skills. Leadership skills are not "soft skills" you can pick up casually. They're hard skills that require deliberate practice.
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Stop doing IC work. You were promoted to lead, not to be the best executor on the team. Your value is in making your team more effective, not in doing their work for them.
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Learn to prove business impact. Deliverables don't matter. Outcomes matter. If you can't connect your team's work to revenue growth, reduced costs, or improved efficiency, you won't survive as a leader.
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Build executive relationships. Politics is not optional. Understanding how decisions get made and positioning your work strategically is table stakes for leadership.
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Get comfortable with imperfection. As an IC, you could control quality by doing the work yourself. As a leader, you have to trust your team to do good-enough work and coach them to improve over time.
For PMM leaders trying to prove their team's strategic impact and connect tactical work to business outcomes, platforms like Segment8 help track how positioning changes, competitive intelligence, and messaging updates actually affect win rates and pipeline—the business metrics that determine whether you keep your leadership role or get quietly pushed back to IC work.
The Question You Should Ask Before Taking the Promotion
If I could go back to that Friday afternoon when I got the promotion email, I'd ask myself one question:
Am I willing to be bad at my job for a year in order to develop the skills to be good at a different job?
Because that's what the IC-to-leader transition actually is. You're not getting promoted to do your current job at a higher level. You're moving to a completely different job that requires completely different skills.
If you're expecting the transition to feel like validation of your existing expertise, you're going to be devastated when it feels like starting over as a beginner.
But if you're willing to accept a year of discomfort, incompetence, and credibility loss in service of developing new skills, you might actually make it.
Two years after that brutal first year, I'm still Director of Product Marketing. The team has grown from four people to nine. We're tracking business outcomes for every major program. Executives quote our competitive strategy in board meetings. The CEO asks my opinion on GTM decisions before making them.
I'm not a better executor than I was as an IC. I'm actually much worse—my team executes better than I ever did.
But I'm finally doing the job I was promoted to do: making strategic decisions, proving business impact, and building PMM's influence across the organization.
Just wish someone had warned me that getting here would require losing all my credibility first.