Women in Marketing: Johanna Kimura, Senior Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn

This interview was conducted in early March before COVID-19 was widespread.

I’m back with another Women in Marketing blog post and feeling really thankful for everyone who has spoken with me so far. I know it takes a lot of time to answer these questions but each one of them has given great insight and advice about careers in marketing.

Johanna Kimura is a Product Marketing Manager at LinkedIn who attended the University of Oregon and the University of Hawaii at Manoa on Oahu. I reached out to her after seeing that she had an extensive background in sales before advancing her career in marketing, where she eventually became a Product Marketing Manager. One of my biggest takeaways was that something she considered a failure at the time became one of her proudest career achievements. Let’s get started!

After looking at job descriptions at different companies, I’ve found this is a job with varied responsibilities, so I asked if she could sum up her job description in a few sentences. Johanna says, “As a Product Marketer I help shape the product roadmap and push the LinkedIn brand forward through competitive insight, research, positioning, go-to-market strategies and execution of key product launches.” Since Product Marketing involves a lot of different collaborations and working with many areas in a company, I asked her if she could detail a typical workday, seen below:

• Night before: Check calendar to get prepared for the week.

• Early morning: Write down my pressing deliverables for the week along with due dates (can include everything from strategy decks to content for our marketing plans)

  • Review Slack, Teams, Email and LinkedIn to see what internal teams and customers are talking about.

  • Review key adoption metrics for my products so I can keep an eye on how we’re pacing to targets. Follow up if anything stands out.

  • Respond to any pressing questions from sales.

• Workday: 

  • Usually consists of a mix of meetings with the sales teams, marketing team, engineering, product, customers, and partners.

  • Find 1-2 hours to work on key deliverables. This week that includes finalizing the deck for an upcoming webinar, creating a strategy doc for an upcoming minor launch, getting copy to our engineering team for a new feature, recapping learnings (post-mortem) for a recent launch which will be presented to our PMM team, checking in on a customer case study...

• End of day:

  • On a busy day I’ll stay at work for dinner until around 7:30pm but on most days I’ll wrap up around 4:30pm in order to make it home before rush hour. From there I’ll usually do another check of email and finish up any final deliverables I need to get out before the end of the day. 

When asked what her proudest achievement was, she says it was a time 8 years ago when she felt very confident about a promotion at work. When she didn’t get it, she was crushed but worked through it. She says:

I wish I could say I immediately took the feedback and got better, but I didn’t. It took time for me to improve and to really take in the feedback that though I had the experience I wasn’t able to convey it effectively to the hiring committee. The process of truly absorbing feedback and figuring out how to improve was really hard for me at first. What I’m most proud of today though is that I can say that I was able to push beyond my hurt ego and put in the work to effectively interview which got me multiple job opportunities. I’ve also been able to coach others who have received job offers.

I personally believe that everyone needs to have some kind of “failure” in life to grow. When it happens, it probably won’t feel like that. If you think like Johanna and learn to see these as moments to grow, it will change your perspective. But as she experienced, it definitely takes time. It’s “not rejection, it’s redirection,” right? 

As mentioned earlier, the first part of Johanna’s career was in sales. I asked her if she thought it was important to transition from sales to marketing. She said no, but that it’s important to have empathy for sales, especially for Product Marketers because you need a “close knit relationship” with them. She says, “Having empathy for sales strengthens relationships and facilitates a sense of trust because the sales team knows you get what it’s like to be in their shoes.” While I’ve never been in sales, I have many friends who have been through the experience. Some are successful, some are not. Where I work our Account Executives are responsible for both, but at larger companies, this may be different. Johanna continues by saying: 

It can also help you better advocate for the customer -- because you understand the struggle when a customer pulls budget because a feature doesn’t work as expected or because the company loses a deal with a product [that] lacks a foundational feature that the customer needs.

That being said, I asked Johanna what work habits she thought everyone should adopt. Here are her three main habits:

Envision an outcome - I’ve used this so many times in my career. For example before going on stage for a talk I’ll envision one thing I want to come of it, perhaps it’s a packed house or an engaged audience who asks more questions than we have time to answer. This approach helps me focus on my delivery or the presentation and be as prepared and confident as possible.

Believe the best intentions - When someone says something or sends an email, we can interpret what they say in a variety of ways based on how we see that person. Yet often I find that most people have the best intentions so it’s best to just start off with the belief that whatever they do or say they do so with the best intentions.

Find ways to leverage your unique expertise - Whatever your strength, if you can find a way to use that to lift up the expertise in your organization and team you’re company and team will thank you and you’ll also feel like an indispensable member of that company/team.

While they may look easy in writing, some are more challenging than others. I know personally for me it’s difficult to envision a positive outcome when taking a risk in a situation that could go either way. But positive thinking can go a long way and confidence is key!

You may have noticed that I love speaking with people who come from different backgrounds, and Johanna is no exception. I love what she says about her and her husband’s career paths so far and I had to include everything she mentioned. Johanna says:

My husband and I both entered our roles from nontraditional backgrounds. When he was 21 he was working in a cell phone store earning minimum wage. He didn’t have a college degree. He was playing in a band just enjoying life. But through connections and family he ended up opening a business and later joining google. My background was similar, my first role out of college was in mortgage auditing loan files. I tell this story because you never know where life can take you. There is lots of advice out there and mine would be to find something that interests you, try it and be proactive in finding ways to leverage your experience to whatever you do next. Stay in touch with co-workers you meet along the way and learn as much as you can in any job but follow your curiosity and don’t compare yourself to others. I’ve meet people in their 40’s and 50’s who have had decades of experience and still aren’t sure what they want to do next. But that’s what keeps life fun, the idea that we aren’t limited in our options.

And finally, because I love the weight that this carries, the best piece of advice she’s gotten in her career is, “You teach people how to treat you.”

Thank you so much to Johanna for answering all of my questions! Johanna is full of advice and ambition and I absolutely love how the passion she has for her job is so evident. If you’d like to hear more from Johanna, she’s written a fantastic article on The Ultimately Dictionary of Product Marketing Terms.