Design your PMM path: Your guide to building a life you love

This article is based on Tamara Grominsky’s talk at the Product Marketing Summit in New York. As a PMA member, you can enjoy the full presentation here. For more exclusive content, head over to your membership dashboard.

Do you ever feel like you’re not in control of your career? Maybe you're just applying to whatever roles are open or waiting for your manager to promote you.

Or perhaps you’re just not sure what your options are, or you’re struggling to balance your career with everything you want from life. 

As a product marketing coach and the founder of PMM Camp, I hear these concerns all the time – whether I’m on calls with clients or mingling with my fellow product marketers at a Product Marketing Summit. 

So, in this article, we're going to discuss how you can build a career – and more importantly, a life – that you love. We’ll do this through the three steps to designing your own career path:

1. Dream of your ideal future
2. Identify your next best step
3. Position yourself for success

By following these steps, you'll be better equipped to take control of your career and make decisions that align with your personal goals and values. You'll learn what you can do to be successful and fill your own cup. 

Let’s get into it.

Step one: Dream of your ideal future

If you feel like your career is happening to you, not through you, it doesn't have to be that way. The future is yours to create.  However, this can only happen if you know what you want that future to be. You need to take ownership of deciding what you want your life to look like.

Let's do a little activity. I want you to think about what your dream workday would look like. Work-life integration is important, so this dream day can cover both your professional life and your personal life. As you picture this dream day, think about these questions:

1. Who are you working with? Product teams? Marketing teams? Many people or just a few?
2. What are you working on? What types of activities fill your day? Pricing projects? Content writing?
3. When are you working? Nine to five? In chunks throughout the day? At night?
4. Where are you working? In an office? From home? From a beach in Mexico?
5. Why are you working? Is there a bigger cause driving your work?

You might not have all the answers today, but these prompts will get you started.

Putting your career in context

It's crucial to remember that our careers don't exist in a vacuum. For some of us, it can feel like our career is our whole life or identity – but it's not. Your career is just one part of your life, so when designing your ideal career, make sure it fits within the other components of your life.

Every December, I do a fun activity called Year Compass. It's a reflection exercise where you look back at the past year and set intentions for the next. In this exercise, you’re encouraged to look at your life holistically, taking into account your personal life, family, career, hobbies, health, and more.

The key is to design your career within the context of the broader life you want to create.

Let me share a personal example. After years of deprioritizing my mental and physical health in an executive role, I felt burnt out. It was time for a change. 

However, I couldn’t just quit my job. Instead, I made a strategic move from my role as Chief Strategy Officer at Unbounce to become VP of Product Marketing at Kajabi. This freed up my schedule, allowing me to focus on the craft I love. It also allowed me to study how the world's best creators build and scale their businesses. 

After a year and a half at Kajabi, I had the confidence and knowledge to step out on my own. Now, I can go to spin class three afternoons a week – something I couldn't do in my executive career. I also get to travel to PMM summits and conferences, which my old schedule didn't allow for. I'm working on passion projects with people who energize me, without the pressure of them leading to something specific.

I'm not necessarily saying you should quit your job. Every person's path is different. The important thing is to think about what you want to fill your bucket with and what your career needs to look like to make those desires a reality.

Planning your future backwards

Once you know what you're optimizing for, you can use a fun activity called "Future Backwards" to plan your path. Here's how it works:

1. Envision your ideal future state (the dream day that you just imagined).
2. Consider your "anti-dream" – the worst possible future state.
3. Work backwards from both scenarios to today.

For the ideal future, ask yourself: what needs to happen to get from today to that end state? For the worst-case scenario, consider: how could I possibly end up in that awful state?

But don’t let this part get you down – this exercise isn't about fear-based planning; it's about recognizing signals that you might be moving in the wrong direction.

Step two: Identify your next best step