Breaking into Product Marketing as a Political Science Major (by an Ex-Google PMM)

Hi my name is henry and in this video i'll share about how i went from a political science degree to becoming a product marketing manager but before we get started please make sure to smash the like button to help with the youtube algorithm also make sure to check out the product marketing resources in the description below so how did i go from a.

Political science degree to becoming a product marketing manager and to be honest i definitely did not see that coming either to give you a little bit of background i went to school at uc irvine i studied political science with the hopes of becoming a lawyer down the road i graduated uci moved to new york city worked in city.

Government as part of the nyc urban fellows program realized that government was way too slow for me too much red tape i left city government after about a year then i joined a law firm to see if i want to be a lawyer and around that time i was also studying for the lsats working at the law firm made me realize that being a lawyer isn't all that.

Glamorous like they make it out to be in the tv shows i realized i don't want to go down this path i got into a few law schools but it was really expensive so that's when i thought okay i need to pivot and i picked up two books one on management consulting one on investment banking studied it interviewed at deloitte goldman and then out of the.

Blue google also reached out for an interview specifically in a policy division thankfully i was able to get that job at google so when i joined google i was working in policy and my role was mainly focused on user privacy so making sure that anytime we get a request from the government or a third party for user data my job is to.

Safeguard user data and say no you can't have that data and if they fight back i would loop in outside counsel i knew that policy was not the end game for me i felt that it was very reactive so i wanted to do something more creative and that's when i started looking around at google's internal job sites and specifically for 20 project and the 20.

Project is basically a side project that you can take on in addition to your full-time job that is unpaid but it gives you exposure and experience well i looked up 20 projects and i saw sales i saw product and then i saw project marketing sales didn't have much of an interest there so i didn't do that product i did.

Not have a cs background or a technical background to do it but when i saw product marketing it seemed that they only wanted two things being able to communicate well and being able to manage projects so i thought that would be a good fit i applied to a 20 project specifically with admob met the manager his name is michael he's the guy i.

Interviewed on my product marketing 101 video he ended up giving me an opportunity to work with him on admob and i still remember the first assignment he gave me was basically write a short outreach email to potential customers about participating in a thought leadership piece and i remember agonizing for maybe two or.

Three hours to write a paragraph for this email and mike looked at it and he said well this can just be like two sentences and that's when i realized i need to shift my thinking away from being verbose to being very concise that was my first assignment the second assignment was come up with interview questions and eventually these.

Assignments got bigger and bigger to the point where i was managing a hundred thousand dollar budget to kick off a student app building competition globally so that was a really cool experience kind of just doing the 20 project on the side i did it for about a year and a half at google while i was working in policy and i remember just.

Being way more interested in product marketing than my actual job eventually mike suggested that i just transitioned full-time to product marketing and that's where i started doing internal interviews the first time i interviewed i actually didn't get the job that was about a year in but then after a year and a half and i interviewed.

Again this time i learned a lot from my first round of interviews and i got the job so that's when i officially made the switch from policy into product marketing and i hope this story shows you that you don't need to have a marketing or business background to break into product marketing you can take a very non-traditional route like.

Myself to get into product marketing all it takes is really grit and the willingness to learn and i think the best teacher is by doing so you can read all you want but until you actually start doing product marketing things then that's when you actually learn to think and act like a product marketing manager i hope you enjoy this video if.

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