Topic 10 — Landing the job

Goal: Turn your skills into a portfolio, resume, and interview that get you hired.

Lesson 10.1 — You already have the raw material

Before her first day at Verdana, Imogen kept circling the same worry: she'd never had a job with "marketing" in the title. Ten years of local radio and a podcast she built from nothing, but no campaigns, no funnels, nothing that looked like the job descriptions she was reading.

Then Hollis, her new boss, asked in the interview how she'd grown the podcast. Imogen talked for ten minutes — who actually listened, the cold-open she tested to stop people skipping, the newsletter she used to pull lapsed listeners back. Hollis just nodded: "You realize that's the whole job, right?"

Product marketing and growth reward a specific bundle: writing, communication, understanding people, creativity, and — more every year — comfort with data. These are transferable skills, strengths you carry in from another field that map straight onto this work. If you've ever written to persuade, read an audience, grown something, or measured whether it worked, you have done a version of this job already.

Some backgrounds carry over especially cleanly:

• Marketing / communications — you know messaging and channels; you're adding product depth and growth thinking.
• Sales — you understand customers and persuasion in your bones, which makes sales enablement (Topic 6) feel like home.
• Content, writing, journalism — content marketing and messaging sit squarely in your wheelhouse. (Imogen's exact lane.)
• Analytical roles — the data side of growth fits you; pair it with the messaging craft and you're rare.

The hard part is rarely acquiring the skills. It's learning to see the ones you have through a marketing lens.

Lesson 10.2 — Translate your past into the work

Imogen's old resume said: "Hosted a weekly podcast that reached 8,000 monthly listeners." True, but it sounded like a hobby.

Hollis taught her to read it back through the funnel she'd just learned (Topic 7). Finding new listeners? That's acquisition. The cold-open test that cut her skip rate? Activation and conversion. The newsletter that revived lapsed fans? Retention. She hadn't "had a podcast." She had quietly run an acquisition-and-retention engine for three years.

Any time you communicated value, understood an audience, grew something, or measured a result — that is the work. Your job is to name it in the field's own words.

This reframing is the move every career-changer has to make. The experience is real; the vocabulary is what's missing. Take what you did, find the marketing concept underneath it, and rewrite the line in that language.

A few translations Imogen made:

• "Wrote show descriptions that got clicks" → tested messaging and value propositions to lift click-through.
• "Picked guests listeners loved" → used audience research to drive content decisions.
• "Grew the email list" → built a retention and owned-audience channel.

Same facts. The second version belongs in a product-marketing interview.

Lesson 10.3 — Show, don't just tell

Here's the trap Imogen almost fell into: spending a month polishing the claims on her resume. "Skilled communicator." "Data-driven." "Creative problem-solver." Every applicant writes those, and they prove nothing.

Marketing is a show-don't-tell field. The work is making things — copy, plans, analyses — so the most convincing thing you can hand someone is a thing you made. And you don't need a marketing job to make it. You need a product, a few hours, and the concepts from this course.

That's what a marketing portfolio is: a small set of work samples that demonstrate the craft directly, instead of asserting you have it. Two or three short write-ups will make you far more credible than a flawless resume on its own, because they let the hiring manager watch you think.

Devesh, Verdana's PM, put it bluntly when Imogen asked what made a candidate stand out: "Resumes tell me what you say you can do. A teardown tells me what you actually do." He'd hired a junior marketer the year before largely off one sharp positioning rewrite she'd posted publicly.

You can build all of this before anyone hires you. That's the point.

Lesson 10.4 — Four portfolio pieces you can build this week

Pick a product you actually use — Imogen, naturally, picked a competitor of Verdana's, a booking app she'd seen Brigid's studio struggle with. Then build one or more of these:

1. A positioning / messaging teardown. Analyze a real product's positioning and messaging (Topic 4), then rewrite its value proposition, landing-page copy, or a launch plan. This shows the core product-marketing craft more directly than anything else.
2. A content piece. Write one strong blog post or guide — say, "How a small studio should price class packs." It proves you can do content marketing (Topic 6): pick an audience, teach something useful, write it well.
3. A growth / funnel analysis. Take a product's funnel (Topic 7), find the leaky stage, and propose specific experiments to fix it with your reasoning. "Their sign-up asks for a credit card before showing value; I'd test moving the card prompt to after the first booking, because the activation aha is the first class booked." That sentence does more work than a paragraph of adjectives.
4. Real side-project results, with numbers. Grew a social account, ran a small campaign, built a newsletter? Write up what you did and what moved. Imogen's podcast growth, told as a case study with real figures, became her strongest piece.

Keep each one short — a page or two, or a simple slide deck. Polish matters: this is your work sample, so a typo here is the same as a typo in a client deliverable.

Lesson 10.5 — Resume, then interviews

The resume. Lead with the field's vocabulary so a recruiter scanning for ten seconds sees a match: positioning, messaging, go-to-market, content marketing, SEO, A/B testing, funnel and conversion optimization, analytics. Then quantify — write results as numbers, in a project-action-result shape:

• "Grew a podcast newsletter to 5,000 subscribers in 14 months."
• "Tested three episode intros; the winner cut the 30-second skip rate by 22%."

Because marketing is communication, sloppy copy in your own resume is disqualifying — it's the most visible writing sample you'll ever submit. Proofread it like a launch email. And link your portfolio at the top, near your name.

The interviews. Three kinds show up, and you can rehearse all three:

• Strategic / case questions. "How would you launch this product?" or "How would you improve sign-ups for this app?" These reward structure, not a clever one-liner. Walk through audience → positioning → channels → experiments → metrics (Topics 3–8), tied to a real customer and a number you'd move. Often these come as a take-home exercise modeled on a real challenge the company faces, with a few days to write a short go-to-market doc — treat it like a portfolio piece on a deadline.
• Writing / practical exercises. They may ask you to write a value proposition, draft a piece of copy, or critique existing messaging on the spot. This is the craft tested live, so practice it before you're in the room.
• Behavioral questions. "Tell me about a campaign you ran." "A time you used data to make a decision." Answer with a real story and a real result, not a principle.

When Wren, Verdana's AE, was on a hiring panel, the answer he remembered wasn't the most polished — it was the candidate who said "I'd ask three studio owners why they churned before I touched the messaging." Customer-first thinking, shown in a sentence.

Worked example — Imogen's job hunt, run as an experiment

Six months before Verdana, Imogen was getting nowhere. She'd sent forty near-identical applications and heard back from two. So she did the thing this whole course had trained her to do: she ran her job hunt as a growth experiment.

She treated the funnel as her own. Applications → replies → first calls → offers. Replies were her conversion rate, and at two in forty — 5% — that was the leaky stage.

She formed a hypothesis: her resume buried the marketing vocabulary under radio job titles, so recruiters didn't see a fit. So she rewrote it — led with positioning, content marketing, audience growth, A/B testing, reframed the podcast as an acquisition-and-retention story with numbers, and linked a portfolio with two pieces: a positioning teardown of a booking app and a funnel analysis proposing three sign-up experiments.

Then she measured. The next twenty applications got six replies — 30%, up from 5%. The portfolio link, she could see, was getting clicked before the calls. One of those calls was Verdana.

In the interview, Hollis gave her a case: "How would you get more independent studios to try us?" Imogen didn't reach for a tactic. She walked the audience (owners like Brigid, time-starved, burned by clunky software), the positioning ("close the front desk an hour earlier"), the channels (yoga-teacher training programs, where owners gather), a first experiment (a free "switch your billing in a weekend" offer), and the metric she'd watch (trials reaching a first booked class — the activation aha). It wasn't a guess. It was the course, applied.

She got the job. Not because she'd done marketing before, but because she'd shown she could — on paper, in a portfolio, and out loud.