Marketing Skills for Product Managers

At the heart of what it means to be a product manager lies the ability to market your product. No matter if you are trying to get people inside of your company to provide you with the resources or funding that your product needs in order to get out the door or if it's customers that you are after, you've got to be able to paint a picture of your product that makes people want it.

Product managers are not perfect, and when it comes to marketing our product, we do make mistakes. However, the key is to learn from both our mistakes and the mistakes that other product managers have made in order to ensure that we won't be repeating them. Not making mistakes is even more important now that the Web 2.0 has arrived. Everything that we do in terms of marketing our product can now be instantly seen by the rest of the world.

When we meet with customers, we present out product in the best light possible. More often than not, we use either PowerPoint or Keynote slides to do this. However, have any of us ever gotten any training on how to make really good slides? If not, then we should seek it out in order to help our products. How our products look on those slides is key to getting a customer to want the product. This means that we need a basic understanding of the color wheel and how different colors either work together - or don't!